Hardware for 4K video editing

zuikowesty wrote:

I'm interested in knowing what works and what doesn't in terms of hardware, specifically the editing systems, keeping in mind that these are for high school students, who will only have 4-6 hours per week to use them. Mac Minis are cheaper, but pretty limited in terms of CPU, RAM and video. The 21" iMac 4K is limited to 16Gb soldered RAM and Intel video. The 27" 5K will support 64Gb (reportedly) and 4Gb R9 video (I'd prefer to see nVidia).

Most important question is what softwareyou will be using. Some of the software is very optimized for more cores, some is optimized for GPU offload, some is optimized for more RAM, and some for a combination thereof. Since you're not going to get the high end Mac Pro with the 2x NVIDIA GPUs and 64GB of RAM, you're going to have to make some trade-offs

e.g. see http://anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/9

Local storage for working files will likely be the standard Apple fusion hybrid drives; I'm not really interested in local RAID, external drives, or the like, preferring to focus on shared network storage, as we are a large campus (30+ buildings), and teenagers + external drives don't work well together...

We have a decent campus network infrastructure, and our preference is to use network storage for nearly everything. We have three decent sized SANs, and will be looking to add a SAN specifically for multimedia content in the near future, to support video and audio editing, HD video streaming on & off campus, etc.

Use local storage for working on projects; do NOT use the SAN for that. The SAN is a fine place to store some stuff before you're working on it and after you're working on it, but not during.

Spinning hard drives are big and slow and cheap. Flash hard drives are smaller and fast and expensive. The Apple hybrid implementation is reported to be really good, but video works with very large files and I don't know how that will fare.

Software - we have the full Adobe suite available via a campus license, so Premiere Pro, After Effects, and the rest are all available. I suspect some will want to use FCP. We could get Avid MC (cheap for schools), but I doubt the students will have time to really learn it well enough to take advantage of it.

Sounds like a NVIDIA GPU will be important for the Adobe software (others mentioned that as well). I haven't used the Adobe stuff, so I can't comment on how much RAM makes a difference, although it appears 16GB is a reasonable minimum.

See:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe-premiere-pro-cc.html

http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/12560/what-is-the-maximum-amount-of-memory-adobe-premiere-pro-can-efficiently-utilize