SSD Hard drive and Premiere?

[lou4uandme]

Hi all,

I am building a new pc ( after 7 years..yippy! ) and i need to know some facts about adobe.

I can only afford to buy 2 SSD hard drives, (240 gig each)

To get MAX performance, i was planning to use 1 drive for my 5D & Red footage

and the other SSD drive for adobe cache disk.

My concern is, does Premiere need to be operating on an SSD also?

For example, my c drive. If I made that a SSD, would premiere work better or is it the drives that the footage is on that counts?

2nd, MEMORY & CUDA

I plan to use 16 gigs of ram and a gtx 570 (480 cudas)

With this system, will this be enough to "rip thru" and footage in real time?

Thanks,

Lou

[UlfLaursen]

Hi Lou

Please read this interesting thread:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972?start=0&tstart=0

There are tons of great info regarding disc setup for Premiere

/Ulf

[Jim_Simon]

1st. - Using an SSD for the After Effects Global Cache feature is not a bad idea.  That can definitely help speed things up.  But a 256 GB SSD may not be enough for all the Adobe cache files if you have a lot of media, several projects going on at the same time, or both.  This could be even more true once you start building up AE cache previews, so you may want to think about using the SSD only for AE's Global Cache and using a separate hard drive for PP's cache files.  The other SSD would also probably be better used as a System drive rather than a Media drive, simply because it is rather small and won't hold a lot of media compared to 1 1TB drive or larger.

2nd - The ability to "rip through" footage in real time is far more dependant on the CPU than the memory and graphics card.  Make sure that is up to snuff first, an Intel i7 model at least.

[nickdbomb]

SSD are different than disk drives so some of the default settings in Windows 7 should be changed. I found this information very valuable in setting up a SSD.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/zalman-n-series-128gb-ssd-review/4

I am using the Zalman drive discussed in at the link above and have been impressed by the performance, especially the search speed.

My CPU is a Intel 9450 and it is plenty fast enough for Premiere Pro editing of MP4 files.  I have not tried AVCHD fies but don't believe they would be any problem.

[SAFEHARBOR11]

I don't recommend SSD for Media drives. Use SSD for system boot.

For Media, get a 7200rpm SATA 6Gb/s with 64mb cache, something like the Western Digital Caviar Black. Avoid any drive with "Green" in the name, these sacrifice performance to save energy, not good for video editing. Actually, get TWO drives and do a RAID 0 for better performance. Note RAID 0 is not redundant, please back up anything important.

I can't speak for the RED footage, not knowing resolution/specs, but for any AVCHD or DSLR clips, a Core i7 machine with GTX card will work just great.

Jeff Pulera

Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Bellune]

[Moved to Hardware Forum]

[lou4uandme]

Thanks guys.

As far as cpu, I am not sure  2700k vs 3930k (6 cores) because some bench tests show a small increase in render times(10 seconds per minute savings time on 6 cores)But what I am interesting in is timeline playback.

I want the ability to drop 5D footage and some 4k r3D files on the timeline hit play and get fluid playback. right now i'm using a quad core 6600 with 6 gigs ram and although it plays back ok, if i apply an effect, it boggs down.

Its so annoying to have so many choices over cpu's and not know which one will be the best choice.

[Harm_Millaard]

For Red 4K material definitely the 3930 with lots of RAM. See Adobe Forums: Planning / building a new system. Part 1. 16 GB is not enough, you want at least 32 GB or more and very likely a dedicated raid controller for the large data streams and that excludes the 1155 platform, because of lacking PCIe lanes, unless you are willing to sacrifice 10 - 15% performance due to the throttling down of the video card to PCIe-8x on that platform when you add a dedicated raid controller.

If you go to Benchmark Results and select Version CS6, you will immediately see the impact of more cores and more memory. Pay special attention to the MPEG2-DVD results.

[Jim_Simon]

I'd agree with Harm here.  The 3930K with a dedicated RAID controller should server you very well with your media.

[lou4uandme]

I looked at the benchmarks. Very interesting. I noticed that  you really can't say that it's "Memory" or "CPU" or "RAID 0"

It seems to work like a symphony orchestra. All the players working together.

So, my last question is this:

My main concern is being able to add a transition, a curve and perhaps a blur to a clip and have fluid play back. (H264)  mostly and some ( Red  2K )

(You know, the way Adobe claims it works.)

Which item would help more in that area?

The video card?, Memory?

Thanks,

Lou

[Jim_Simon]

If the specific effects are accelerated, and you have a supported card, then the GPU will handle that playback.

If not, then the CPU will be the determining factor.

[lou4uandme]

  I am using (currently) the gtx470 which "should" have plenty cuda cores and is a supported card.

but if I add 2 effects and apply the clip on a 2nd layer, I start to see "judder" in the playback.

I.m guessing that's because of the old 6600 / 6 gigs ram sysytem i'm using.

If I build a 3930, 32 ram, onboard raid 0 ,would the 470 card be fine?

or would there be a noticable increase in performance if I bought the 680 card?

Based on the benchmarks, all systems being equal, the 470 vs the 680 doesn't make much of an increase.

What are your thoughts?

[Harm_Millaard]

If I build a 3930, 32 ram, onboard raid 0 ,would the 470 card be fine?

or would there be a noticable increase in performance if I bought the 680 card?

There is only a small performance difference, but the 680 uses less energy and is quieter, lowering the PSU requirements, and can steer up to 4 monitors.

[lou4uandme]

Thanks Harm,

Side note:

The thing I can never understand is how Nvidia can release 2 generations of video cards (ie. 480,500,520 600, etc..)

perhaphs 2 years in the making as well and only have a small performance increase?

I see that all the time with so many products.

I can't help but think..

"well lets see, I have the gtx470 and nvidia released about 25 newer cards in the past 2 years since then.

. I have to at least double my performance with the 680"

This is why I love benchmark tests,.....and forums

[Hvdpeppel]

Now looking at Generic Disk Setup for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve - YouTube

hope this will do the trick, will report the results.