Commercial Video Encoding Rig Upgrades

[Euon]

Hi guys

I work for a small company capturing and digitizing old video media (VHS, Video8, Hi8, Betacam tapes)
We have several PCs and they're all pretty out dated and poorly maintained.

Once we've captured our clients media, we then do some minor editing and output either directly to DVD or export as avi/mov. We use Edius 5 for all of this.

All our PCs have slightly different specs but generally look like the following:
-Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2666MHz
-A wide variety of motherboards
-2-4GB RAM
-On-board video or Nvidia 8400GT/9500GT
-All running 32bit WindowsXP professional

My main concern is that I would like to speed up encoding.
Due to the fact that these are for professional use, benchmarks are virtually irrelevant. Real world difference is what we're after! (Time is money right?)

Is anyone able to offer any advice in how we would best go about upgrading our systems?

Thanks!

 

[SuB]

What sort of budget are you looking at?

P.S. Welcome to the forums

 

[dalewakelin]

A budget would be helpful but i would suggest some 1155 hyper threaded xeons because you wont need overclock and they would be good enough for video encoding

 

[Euon]

A budget is difficult to give.
If we can reduce our encoding times by a significant amount, then I could make a proposal and show why certain upgrades would be worth the investment.

I guess it's more of a question as to how much we would need to spend to see significant changes.

Haven't looked into xeons yet but I'll check them out!

 

[dalewakelin]

Have a look at
Motherboard
Xeon
RAM
You only really need about 2GB of ram but the faster the better for encoding, motherboard makes little to no difference so pick whichever you want, and that xeon will destroy anything you throw at it encoding wise, it is basically just a locked 3770k but since you probably wont be overclocking it will be perfect, you could go haswell ofcourse but that is an extra £50 for no performance gain but it is about 20w less in power. Just something to consider

 

[Euon]

Thanks!
This is really great. Haha definitely wont be looking at overclocking all the work computers =P (although getting paid for that might be a dream come true!)
All I need now is to try and find some benchmark comparisons. If I look at 3770k reviews, would it be fair to quote any numbers from there, as the same as what you'd get from the Xeon?

 

[dalewakelin]

Yeah i would imagine so

 

[ObscureParadox]

I would be interested to know if a small SSD would help with encoding times as I always thought I was being held back by my HDD when I was using Sony Vegas to render some videos. I would overclock the CPU by say 20% and barely notice any difference in rendering speed.

Also I believe AMD CPUs offer very good x.264 performance for the money so that might be an option?

 

[SuB]

Is there a reason no-one is recommending x79 with hexcore/HTT gear for this ? (besides price)

This is basically what it's made to do...

 

[Euon]

I would be interested to know if a small SSD would help with encoding times as I always thought I was being held back by my HDD when I was using Sony Vegas to render some videos. I would overclock the CPU by say 20% and barely notice any difference in rendering speed.

Also I believe AMD CPUs offer very good x.264 performance for the money so that might be an option?

Sorry for the late reply

We would require at least a 500GB SSD and ideally a 1TB to handle the workload. Price puts this out of the question. Also we are writing/deleting hundreds of GB a month. Pretty brutal treatment for an SSD and from my understanding, it wouldn't last very long under the pressure.

I haven't followed AMD CPUs in a few years. But raw performance is definitely in favor over a less powerful chip offering 'specialization' in a particular area. x.264 is only a very small fraction of what we're using.

@SuB - Would the performance of an x79 rig (over the Xeon 1230V2 setup) justify the price?

 

[SuB]

I've not much experience with Xeon's fella so I can't really say/compare. I do know however that my 3930k eats video stuff even at stock...

As for SSD lifespan, get something like a Samsung 840pro (built for enterprise levels of usage) and I'm sure it'l be fine. People do over-exagerate how quickly they degrade, and oftentimes this will happen after the usage of the product has been overwith anyway.

So long as you leave about 10~15% free space on the thing it'l wear-level itself pretty well and it should be alright.

 

[Euon]

Thanks a lot for your thoughts! All very helpful.