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Premiere Pro PC Specs

Katy

By Katy
in AV and Multimedia Related

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Katy

Katy

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We've got a PC that music are trying to use to put some videos together with Premiere Pro, they're saying:

 

"I am currently concerned that it will not be possible to create the Carol Service by the required deadline as the computer runs so slowly when using the software that tasks are taking about 5x longer than they should - 2 new PCs are required (one for drama productions and one for music). There is the possibility that we could refurbish the Recording Studio PC with new video card / processor etc. but I'm wary of just delaying inevitable issues."

 

What spec PC are people generally using for video editing? This PC is:

 

i5-6400

8GB RAM

250GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Onboard graphics

 

Presumably a graphics card would help it out? We built the PC to do audio recording so didn't put anything in for that. I'm not sure what spec they think they need as they've said "We need 2 new PCs @ £2500 each"....

 

Actually just had a look on this Adobe Premiere Pro User Guide which says yes to a graphics card and maybe a bit more RAM. What graphics card would anyone recommend who is currently using Premiere Pro?

 

Cheers :)

dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
We've got a PC that music are trying to use to put some videos together with Premiere Pro

 

Most reasonably-aged PCs (5 years old-ish?) these days should be able to handle video playback easily enough, I'd be surprised if that was the bottleneck in performance. Are they trying to do something particularly fancy by way of effects? What format (video codec) is the footage in that they're editing and which of the drives in the machine are they using? A mechanical harddrive might be a bit slow if you're storing a large source file on there, especially if it's in a format not intended for editing. It's been a while since I've used Premier, but it used to have an option to render a good-for-editing version of your video file from the source footage that you could use for real-time editing. That, and make sure any cache folders and similar are pointing at the SSD and not the mechanical drive.

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Mako

Mako

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Posted

They're hardly producing broadcast quality telly or a film. It'll handle it no problem.

 

You say that, but never underestimate the end-user... we have some DSLRs that can record, and also some Sony Handycams. No matter how often I turn the settings down, someone cranks them up to 4k (or similar, depending on device) and tries editing that quality of video on an i3 desktop PC and wonders why it's slow and why it blows their storage space in 2 minutes.

 

But yes, agree with @ICTDirect_Dave the GPU and RAM would certainly help. Video editing is very heavy on the CPU, for rendering, and the RAM for the application. i5-6400 is quad core but no hyperthreading, but it should still be good enough. The GPU itself should be more about the amount of VRAM it has rather than being flashy, naturally the "studio" cards will perform better than retail GPUs, but if you're on a budget then I just stuck some cheap-o £60 cards in that were available at the time.

 

Make sure the quality of video they're editing and exporting is not excessive. I save a lot of aggro by telling students that 720p will be good enough for what they want to do. If you leave users to their own devices they may well end up trying to export some ridiculous quality.

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Katy

Katy

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Cheers everyone. Probably gonna suggest a new machine around £1k mark, 32GB RAM, a 1660Ti or similar as the CPU is below the recommended spec and it means they can video edit at the same time as using the recording studio (they were only trying it in there cause their office PCs are 12 years old).
Guest obsidianpillar

Guest obsidianpillar

Posted
Posted
Add a graphics card and some more RAM and it'll be just fine!

 

They're hardly producing broadcast quality telly or a film. It'll handle it no problem.

 

 

I second this. Having been a graduate of a performing arts academy; those taking a 'Broadcast' qualification produced all coursework etc on 2011 27" iMacs running Premier Pro (4GB RAM, 1TB HDD etc). The fore-mentioned upgrades you suggested would be absolutely fine. Although, that being said (historically!) the render engine for Adobe used to perform better on Macs (not too sure if this is true anymore!) so perhaps that had some bearing on the performance.

 

It's 100% down to the end user as others have said. I've seen many people produce etc in the likes of Logic with 100-odd pure MIDI tracks and wonder why it's crashing constantly etc. No bus sends, track freezing etc so once that's done it reduces the CPU load massively. Just make sure that the project settings etc inside of Premier Pro are set to 720p max in this case. You can always do 1080p/i (depending on preference) later on once you've upgraded the components.

 

For reference, a couple of the editing PC's used to build news packages at BBC Birmingham are less spec'd than the machine mentioned here, yet they're still happily in production (No SSD's etc, 4GB RAM). With a nice enough graphics card and a bit of extra RAM on your machine you should be fine.

Danp

Danp

Posted
Posted
...That's just the non-education branch of ICT Direct.

 

Indeed, it was a non-educational purchase. But, I'm sure Dave could help out a school B2B

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Davit2005

Davit2005

Posted
Posted (edited)

I have an old ThinkServer TS140 with a 4 core Xeon E3-1226 @ 3.3GHz. I put a Geforce GTX 750 Ti in along 20GB ram with an SSD for OS, 2 250Gb SSDs as scratch disks and bigger spinning rust for non-live files/normal usage.

 

I don't do 4k or anything but for YouTube 1080 Vids it does the job.

 

I did used to use CC 2015, had no issues but moving to Resolve as want to move to Linux.

Edited by Davit2005

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