we have built a lot of gaming focused systems in our time
and a gaming pc can act as a very competent
video editing workstation but here's the thing
if you don't care about gaming there are ways that you can change your
configuration to both save money and improve performance and thanks to
viewsonic sponsoring this video and sending over one of their vp 2785 4k
professional displays we are going to be doing it in style
let's set aside our display for now though and talk instead about what
you're going to be viewing on it if you're a content creator these days
chances are you're not only shooting or capturing in 4k but you're editing in 4k
too and for good reason many productions master their content at
much higher resolutions than the intended delivery format because more
resolution provides a number of benefits including extra versatility for vfx and
the ability to reframe a shot in post without losing a significant amount of
quality hey editor actually can you show them how far you can zoom in on me thanks to
our 8k camera pretty cool right furthermore a higher
resolution original source let's say uh
one that said 5k or 6k reduces certain types of visual
artifacts and results in a greater amount of detail when the video is
eventually down scaled and compressed to be cheaply delivered over the internet
like on netflix or youtube that's a basic rule of compression garbage in
garbage out and vice versa anyone can benefit from high
resolution footage if they've got the hardware to work with it
but what exactly does that mean i mean
if you want to get technical about it just about any modern computer can edit
4k video so long as you've got enough patience
but if it's a smooth experience you're after then depending on the types of
formats that you shoot in and the types of effects you want to apply then the
hardware choices start to matter a great deal
and since smoove is kind of subjective
it gets really challenging to choose the right parts for a budget rig
fortunately we've got you guys
if you work with a lot of h.264 encoded media then chances are that you'll want
to take advantage of Intel's uhd graphics for better performance but
since our goal was to build an all-rounder machine that can handle a
mix of formats comfortably we've turned to team red with the ryzen 5 3600 this
six core 12 thread processor is a great value and as you can see from puget
systems excellent article on the subject it even trades blows with team blue's
eight core processors in some professional workloads thanks to zen's
architectural advantages in CPU encoding and decoding if you read their
methodology though you'll probably notice that they used ddr4 2666 for
testing not only is 3 200 megahertz RAM usually
just as cheap 3rd gen ryzen absolutely
loves fast RAM so after some load testing with our sample 4k footage we've
settled on 16 gigs of 3200 megahertz
memory as our baseline now obviously if you work with very complex timelines 16
gigs may not be enough for you so in that case you should grab a 32 gig kit
or even more as an added bonus you can usually get 3 600 megahertz for about
the same price as 3 200 megahertz at these capacities which should give you a
small performance boost now some of you may not actually like our choice of
motherboard but at the time of writing availability
is pretty poor for b450 chipset motherboards that have the combination
of features vrm capacity and the
out-of-the-box support for 3rd gen ryzen that we're after without needing AMD's
BIOS upgrade kit so we went with the b450a pro from MSI at 95
now once factory updated b450 boards are commonplace or a 500 series b chipset
comes along you might be able to save a further 20 or so if you play your cards
right speaking of which our graphics card
sadly for team red NVIDIA pulls off a pretty healthy lead in both the adobe
suite and in davinci resolve and while
you don't need a high-end graphics card for just straight video editing when it
comes to GPU accelerated encoding which you can do with third-party media
encoder plug-ins or real-time application of effects like lumetri
color vr denoising optical flow and
especially after effects mogarts you will definitely want a dedicated
graphics processor of some kind in your system even if you were running on team
blue after some experimentation we determined that the GPU load wasn't
particularly high on our rtx 2060 which
had been our first choice so we eventually settled on the NVIDIA gtx
1650 it will not handle 8k red footage
at full resolution like the 2060 will but the thing is that's not what we're
here for today so in it goes now let's talk storage if we
really needed to save a buck we would start with a reasonably priced boot
drive SSD like this NVMe 500 gig samsung
970 evo this will keep your operating system feeling nice and snappy while
also acting as a scratch disk for render effects nested clips and proxies
then for our bulk footage we'd go with
our hard drive packaging sucks well a pair of high-capacity commodity hard
drives that would come in a little piece of plastic like this we went with a
couple of seagate nas drives now the size of the drives you choose really
depends on how many projects you expect to have on the go at a time but here are
some general guidelines that we've put together for you for how much storage
you can expect your footage to take up now in a perfect world guys we would
store our raw footage on an external drive of some sort in fact we've got a
second installment in this series planned where we're going to build a safe affordable external network storage
box so make sure you're subscribed for that
finally there's the case in power supply even though we aren't likely to be
thermally constrained with these kinds of specs we're not looking for the
bottom of the barrel here either so fractal's focus g is today's case choice
it looks professional enough that you could bring a client around without it
being embarrassing and it's got decent ergonomics for when you're building and
decent airflow without breaking the bank other options here include the cougar
mx330 and the phanteks p300 the latter
of which includes a tempered glass side panel if you'd like a little bit more of that aesthetic in your life for our
power supply we're playing it safe with Corsair cxm 2015 edition it's 80 plus
bronze modular and is often on sale with good overall performance for its price
it is worth noting that if you wanted something a little better and potentially more reliable for an extra
thirty dollars you can grab the fsp hydro ptm that's rated in the ultra high
end in the psu tier list that's hosted on our forums and then if you wanted to
save twenty dollars for a shirt from lttstory.com you could also drop down to
a non-modular 450 watt Corsair cx 2017
and that's it that makes for a total system cost of
just over 925 dollars for a setup that can do real
work and that you can even get paid with of course we still need to actually
demonstrate all of that so let's get this thing fired up and see
how it runs we'll be using Windows's built-in
software raid 1 mirroring in order to ensure that in the event of a physical
drive failure we won't lose any of our project data but there are a couple of
things about this solution that i want to emphasize one i cannot condone storing anything
important on a single mechanical drive no matter how tight your budget is you
must have anything important in at least two places
and number two raid
is not a backup in the event of a ransomware infection
accidental deletion natural disaster that physically affects your computer or
software corruption that second drive could end up being exactly as
compromised as the first one and not do anything for you so this is our bare
minimum recommendation that also assumes that you will be very careful with your
setup okay then so with all that out of the way um dennis do you want to come in
and try out our amazing budget editing setup yes
so this is some footage shot on the blackmagic pocket 4k uh stay stay on the
purple one uh of brandon's dog basically i just want you to tell me about the
experience like does it meet your expectations for working with this 4k
footage okay i'm playing fall right now yep scrubbing through
pretty good oh my god wow brandon your dog got fat dude so we've got real time
color we've applied some effects and we're still not dropping any frames even
though we're playing back in full quality okay now you're dropping frames what did you do to my just what did you
do to my computer fast forward oh okay so now we're good so now to push things
we're firing up that same clip in after effects and we're
we're adding some wiggle to make the camera like more dramatic and we're
gonna put some fire particles no one wants to watch the born identity
starring brandon's dog oh look we're playing fall still is playing pretty
fast now she's in the middle of like a fire tornado and earthquake at the same
time wow so after effects is sucking back
about 40 of our CPU we are still pretty
comfortable in terms of memory usage though even with premiere open in the
background so so far what would you say of the editing experience on our machine
here to be honest like particle world usually take a lot of um RAM and
the a lot of power so far when i play back in full
still pretty good so that's great then so far our budget 4k editing station is
keeping up surprisingly well but i think
we can push it further so while dennis is playing around with some 8k red
footage over there i'm going to tell you guys about the viewsonic color pro
monitor that we're using here so it features 99 coverage of the adobe RGB
color gamut which is about 96 of dci p3
so it's great for video editing every unit gets its own calibration report and
is tested at the factory for a delta e of less than two which should be
indiscernible from completely accurate colors viewsonic worked with x-ray and
pantone to generate its internal color library which references a 14-bit 3d
lookup table of about 4.39 trillion colors and their color pro monitors can
use the x-rite i1 display pro calibrator to access the viewsonic's internal color
library which is better than using third-party calibration tools which can
only do software calibration it's got usb 3.1 for a single cable connection
that can charge your laptop at the same time along with a usb type-a hub so you
can plug all your peripherals in through your monitor and the three-sided
frameless design means less distraction while you're trying to focus on your work speaking of focusing on your work
dennis how's this going oh i'm putting a
lot what are you doing to it it's not even recognizable you say
pushing really hard you might want to play it at uh one quarter yeah
so you would consider this to be like meets expectations for the amount
of effects that you're applying here yeah because i actually put quite a lot
to generate uh effect because this effect is pretty heavy so if i just one
effect oh then that's easy that's real time playback this is a glitching effect
it's not real now we want turbulent displays
real time playback still not bad so to be clear we were running at one
quarter preview quality there but that was at 8k footage which as you guys
might remember is four times the pixel count of 4k
so can we dial it back now and do something a little bit more reasonable
okay so we a7s2 we have a7s2 4k footage
here so what dennis is doing right here is a
perfect example of why even if you're going to deliver finished 1080p footage
for web consumption it's still great to shoot in 4k because you can see he can
punch in and sort of reposition the frame however he
sees fit so playback of our a7s2 footage
even at full quality is fine but our timeline scrubbing performance is
not the greatest even at half quality so we want to have a look and see
how our other footage responds so we've gone ahead and loaded up a timeline with
all our different 4k footage now so the blue one is a7s yeah the purple one is
that's blackmagic blackmagic our green one is c200 so all of them are
actually better than the a7s and this is all at full quality yeah this is blah
magic 4k pretty good yeah that's really good actually 200 pretty good that's
actually very usable so we've done pretty well so far handling anything
from 4k even all the way up to 8k footage in a variety of formats but with
how popular sony's mirrorless cameras are anything that can't comfortably
handle footage coming off of them can't really be called a viable anything
goes 4k editing solution that is why we mentioned earlier that we
wouldn't go any lower than the processor that we chose with its six cores and
eight threads so what i'm doing in the background is actually something that
used to be a part of our workflow here at Linux media group back when we would
shoot on our a7 s2s quite frequently so i'm converting the mp4s that come
straight out of the camera to cineform yuv10bit and what we're going to find
out when we go ahead and throw these clips on our timeline is that they're going to perform quite a bit better i'm
just going to junk this last one and then we'll throw the rest of them on now
this process does add a little bit of time to your workflow but the good news
is that from our experience it has a negligible effect on the image quality
and as you can see it is a much much smoother editing experience
so because of software or codec limitations there's never going to be a
single machine no matter how high end you go that's going to work for every
workflow but by building something balanced or
a little bit stronger than you absolutely need in certain areas you can
make up for other deficiencies and make sure that you're getting your projects
done on time and on budget on the subject of getting video production done
on a budget it used to be that the monitor to go with your workstation that
costs you thousands and thousands of dollars also cost you thousands and
thousands of dollars but it's become much more accessible and our color pro
from viewsonic here has a couple of really cool features i haven't mentioned
yet so one is that with the plugin it'll actually automatically pivot if you're
the kind of person who frequently has to switch between landscape and portrait
like say if you're developing graphics for web or whatever
the case may be and it also has a built-in ambient light sensor and
because the luminosity and the chromaticity are different it won't
affect the color accuracy of the image if the lights in your office change and
this can help reduce eye strain during marathon editing sessions once again
huge shout out to viewsonic for sponsoring this video check out the links in the description below for more
info and where you can pick up a color pro display for yourself we've even got
a discount code if you pick one up by the way you should totally watch our
review of the blackmagic pocket 4k camera this is pretty much
the camera to get if you want to shoot cinematic type content and you're on a
tight budget so it fits in pretty darn well with the video we shot today
so thanks for watching guys see ya
um
you