Blackmagic Forum

Hi,

I realise that "what pc should I buy" is not a very populair topic.
However, I am about to spend 2700 euro on a pc, and for an amateur, that is quite a lot of cash.
So, I am asking for a little bit of help please

I will be editing H265 from a GH5 and GH52, and DNxHR and Prores (not raw) from a ninja v, 4K 10 bit 422.
Resolve version is Studio

The pc I am looking at has the following specs:

Intel I9 10850K
MSI SuprimX Gefore RTX 3080 10gb
ram 32 gb DDR4 Gskill ripjaws 3600
gigabte 850 watt powersupply P850GM ATX 80+ gold
Motherboard: MSI MPG Z490 gaming plus (Z490 S1200 ATX DDR Intel)
1TB samsung evo 970 m.2 NVMe PCI-E SSD
1TB samsung QVO 860 3D nanad SSD

Really all I would like to ask is, does anybody see something here that I have missed, something that would not work well with resolve?

If it was me I'd aim for

i7 11700k. The QuickSync is updated and handles more.

Seasonic power supply.

I'd look at Asus motherboards but there are other nice Z590 boards depending on what other features you want.

The Z590 are offering three or four NVME slots. I'd rather that than a SATA SSD.

You could substitute this or that component, but just be aware that h.265 4K may not edit smoothly in Resolve on this system, even on HD timelines, and more processing power may not achieve commensurate gains in performance.

If you want to avoid disappointment, there's no substitute for trying out the h.265 footage on a similar or more powerful machine. Of course, you always have the option to transcode or create proxies, but for amateur editing, this added step may not be welcome.

Thanks for the feedback. Why would it not edit smoothly? What is/are the component(s) that cause this?

I have to say, I can edit the footage I was talking about without any problems on the laptop in my signature, and I think in every way the pc described is an upgrade? What am I missing?


For resolve specificaly, would it be better to get an I7 cpu and spend the money saved on more ram?

It depends on the footage. Some 4K h.265 material just won't play well in Resolve. If you're satisfied with its performance on your current system, the new system should be fine.

Upgrading the RAM wouldn't help, if there were trouble. In most cases, the GPU is the decisive component, but you're already near the top of the line. When the footage doesn't cooperate, hardware improvements don't always help.

Any particular reason to go with intel at this moment when AMD offer better performance for the price?Just upgraded my 2 workstations with 5900x and 5950x 12 and 16 core CPU's and couldn't see anything from Intel that was as good at this but wasn't buying specifically for Resolve. Fairly basic Asus mb's have 2 NVME slots.

John Griffin wrote:Any particular reason to go with intel at this moment when AMD offer better performance for the price?Just upgraded my 2 workstations with 5900x and 5950x 12 and 16 core CPU's and couldn't see anything from Intel that was as good at this but wasn't buying specifically for Resolve. Fairly basic Asus mb's have 2 NVME slots.

the only reason is that I need to buy the pc from a website that only offers pre-build pc's that you can modify before ordering. The reason for that is that it is near impossible to find a 3080 as a single component to buy. And they only offer the 3080 with the i9, or with a way more expensive AMD type cpu. Damn cryptominers

Also, somehow, if you do manage to buy every single component individually, it is so much more expensive it's just not funny anymore.

Wouter Bouwens wrote:

John Griffin wrote:Any particular reason to go with intel at this moment when AMD offer better performance for the price?Just upgraded my 2 workstations with 5900x and 5950x 12 and 16 core CPU's and couldn't see anything from Intel that was as good at this but wasn't buying specifically for Resolve. Fairly basic Asus mb's have 2 NVME slots.

the only reason is that I need to buy the pc from a website that only offers pre-build pc's that you can modify before ordering. The reason for that is that it is near impossible to find a 3080 as a single component to buy. And they only offer the 3080 with the i9, or with a way more expensive AMD type cpu. Damn cryptominers

Also, somehow, if you do manage to buy every single component individually, it is so much more expensive it's just not funny anymore.

Ah yes I have heard that the only way to get a GPU these days is to buy it as part of a build. Damn cryptominers......

Wouter Bouwens wrote:Thanks for the feedback. Why would it not edit smoothly? What is/are the component(s) that cause this?

John Paines wrote:...Some 4K h.265 material just won't play well in Resolve...

To elaborate a little on what John already wrote,

Basically, h.256 and h.264 are designed to be streamed and played back efficiently; i.e., continuously. Editing is different, because you're constantly seeking, jogging, scrubbing, and accessing random points in time. If you've ever tried to jump to an exact frame on YouTube, you'll notice that it's difficult for the same basic reason.

Camera manufacturers often choose to record h.26x, even though it isn't designed as an acquisition format, because they can reduce the data rate requirement of the storage media. Their cameras can record to cheap SD cards instead of expensive CFAST2, SSDs, or proprietary media. Whenever consumers don't need or don't care to edit the footage, like a lot of family vacation video (is that still a thing?), recording to h.26x means it's already in a format ready to view, and it's compressed enough to easily upload to social media, directly.

In some flavors of h.26x, the computer first has to find the nearest keyframe, which stores all of the pixel values, then work its way backward or forward, computing the changes from that keyframe to arrive at the correct image to display. Easy to stream, but feels choppy or laggy to edit, unless you've got hardware that's specifically optimized to do those calculations very quickly. Also the reason professional cameras like REDs, Arris and Blackmagic cameras don't record h.26x, and also the reason people transcode to ProRes, DNxHD, Cineform, etc.

Editing H.26x in Resolve isn't impossible, by any means. And new editors might not even notice a difference at first. But when you make thousands of edits a day, every day, those microseconds start to add up.

John Paines wrote:You could substitute this or that component, but just be aware that h.265 4K may not edit smoothly in Resolve on this system, even on HD timelines, and more processing power may not achieve commensurate gains in performance.

I regularly use a 4K timeline with 50FPS H265 footage (200Mbps from a Panasonic HC-X1500) with my much lesser system (see .sig) and unless I'm doing a *lot* of grades and/or things like optical-flow or temporal noise reduction, it plays in realtime just fine. Even when using 4K 10-bit (422) footage it's still perfectly smooth for me.

Mind you, I am using Resolve 15 which is probably a lot better in this regard.

RCModelReviews wrote:

John Paines wrote: Even when using 4K 10-bit (422) footage it's still perfectly smooth for me.

Mind you, I am using Resolve 15 which is probably a lot better in this regard.

Kind of surprising you're having no problems with 422 HEVC.

No matter what CPU you end up with I think for H264/265 source files the best workflow in Resolve will be to generate optimised media to edit with which is mainly handled by the GPU.

John Griffin wrote:No matter what CPU you end up with I think for H264/265 source files the best workflow in Resolve will be to generate optimised media to edit with which is mainly handled by the GPU.

So less cpu and more fast storage? I believe optimized media can be rather large?

Wouter Bouwens wrote:

John Griffin wrote:No matter what CPU you end up with I think for H264/265 source files the best workflow in Resolve will be to generate optimised media to edit with which is mainly handled by the GPU.

So less cpu and more fast storage? I believe optimized media can be rather large?

Storage is cheap

John Griffin wrote:No matter what CPU you end up with I think for H264/265 source files the best workflow in Resolve will be to generate optimised media to edit with which is mainly handled by the GPU.

If you have the time maybe but common 4.2.0 265 is decoded fine by most modern GPUs. 4.2.2 can be decoded just fine with the Intel 11th generation. using the IGPU.

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-enco ... matrix-new

That's the latest Nvidia decode matrix. They haven't gotten around to updating it for the 3060 but it looks like even the 1650 handled 4.2.0 .

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... udio-2122/

Or the OP can look at the Puget overall comparison.

Nick2021 wrote:

John Griffin wrote:No matter what CPU you end up with I think for H264/265 source files the best workflow in Resolve will be to generate optimised media to edit with which is mainly handled by the GPU.

If you have the time maybe but common 4.2.0 265 is decoded fine by most modern GPUs. 4.2.2 can be decoded just fine with the Intel 11th generation. using the IGPU.

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-enco ... matrix-new

That's the latest Nvidia decode matrix. They haven't gotten around to updating it for the 3060 but it looks like even the 1650 handled 4.2.0 .

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... udio-2122/

Or the OP can look at the Puget overall comparison.

If time is an issue just turn on smart cache and Resolve will just transcode the parts of the timeline that are not playing smoothly.

I'm on the Mac side and have access to Final Cut Pro and Compressor in addition to Resolve.

When I receive h264 footage that needs to be edited, I can tell you that Final Cut Pro handles it MUCH better than Resolve does, but I still would not consider editing with it directly if given the choice. I always transcode any h264 footage to Prores using Compressor before editing. Resolve can probably handle that transcoding as well sometimes, but it is much easier and works more consistently with Compressor - I've had trouble getting Resolve to behave well at all with some h264 footage; Compressor generally just works.

As you are planning on being on the dark side of computing, you won't have access to Compressor, but you might want to consider a similar conversion tool of some kind and transcode that footage into a more suitable editing format before trying to edit with it. At a minimum, if staying within Resolve to do it, create a separate timeline, add one h264 clip to it, and render it out as something suitable for editing (I don't believe you can render out to Prores from the Windows version, will probably need to be DNxHR?), then repeat for each clip.

Better yet, if you aren't in a rush, hold out to see what the successor to Apple's M1 chip is (rumors have it that the next chip is already in production, so this may not be too long of a wait). The next version may well prove to be pro-level and ready for heftier workloads, and you could use Compressor to do the transcodes and be done with it.

John Griffin wrote:If time is an issue just turn on smart cache and Resolve will just transcode the parts of the timeline that are not playing smoothly.

A week or two ago some one posted that it took them nine hours to transcode a short 4.2.2 clip. Okay I assume the nine hours was a bit of an exaggeration but even one hour for a short clip is too much for many.

Nick2021 wrote:

John Griffin wrote:If time is an issue just turn on smart cache and Resolve will just transcode the parts of the timeline that are not playing smoothly.

A week or two ago some one posted that it took them nine hours to transcode a short 4.2.2 clip. Okay I assume the nine hours was a bit of an exaggeration but even one hour for a short clip is too much for many.

What CPU/GPU was this on?

Frank Engel wrote:I'm on the Mac side and have access to Final Cut Pro and Compressor in addition to Resolve.

When I receive h264 footage that needs to be edited, I can tell you that Final Cut Pro handles it MUCH better than Resolve does, but I still would not consider editing with it directly if given the choice. I always transcode any h264 footage to Prores using Compressor before editing. Resolve can probably handle that transcoding as well sometimes, but it is much easier and works more consistently with Compressor - I've had trouble getting Resolve to behave well at all with some h264 footage; Compressor generally just works.

As you are planning on being on the dark side of computing, you won't have access to Compressor, but you might want to consider a similar conversion tool of some kind and transcode that footage into a more suitable editing format before trying to edit with it. At a minimum, if staying within Resolve to do it, create a separate timeline, add one h264 clip to it, and render it out as something suitable for editing (I don't believe you can render out to Prores from the Windows version, will probably need to be DNxHR?), then repeat for each clip.

Better yet, if you aren't in a rush, hold out to see what the successor to Apple's M1 chip is (rumors have it that the next chip is already in production, so this may not be too long of a wait). The next version may well prove to be pro-level and ready for heftier workloads, and you could use Compressor to do the transcodes and be done with it.

Why would you want to do a tedious conventional transcode on a separate clips when optimised media, cache and even proxy tools are available to deal with difficult media on slower Resolve systems? When you come to render you will then be wanting to do it from the source media and not a transcoded one for maximum quality anyway.

Generate optimised media (DNxHR HQX at UHD size) on 9mins of 24p 10bit 4.2.2 H264 UHD footage from a GH5 on my Ryzen 5900x + 1080ti. All 12 cores were maxed out and the GPU was doing some work as well. Total render time 80 seconds.

John Griffin wrote:

Nick2021 wrote:

John Griffin wrote:If time is an issue just turn on smart cache and Resolve will just transcode the parts of the timeline that are not playing smoothly.

A week or two ago some one posted that it took them nine hours to transcode a short 4.2.2 clip. Okay I assume the nine hours was a bit of an exaggeration but even one hour for a short clip is too much for many.

What CPU/GPU was this on?

i7 10th generation, Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti, media on an external SSD, internal drive is SSD.

Not the latest but 300 seconds of clips taking 10 hours is a bit much for most people

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=142006&view=unread#unread

So, I created "optimized" media in Resolve - at 1/2 resolution DNxHD. I had 51 original clips of about 6 seconds of duration each, all 10bit Clog 3 8K HEVC All-I. It took Resolve 10 hours to create the media. The target folder and the original clips were on a fast external SSD.

Once the media were finished, editing on the timeline in 4K was easy and smooth.

It took 2 hours to render the 2-minute video in 4K from the 8-minute clips (H264 8bit).

It was 8k All-I H265 BTW and there was resampling involved - all on a pretty low spec GPU. What relevance does have to the OP's needs?

John Griffin wrote:It was 8k All-I H265 BTW and there was resampling involved - all on a pretty low spec GPU. What relevance does have to the OP's needs?

What's relevant is his laptop with even less power handled it just fine using the onboard IGPU.

The only problem with 265 today is 4.2.2 which won't be fixed by spending more money on a better GPU.

Wouter Bouwens wrote: However, I am about to spend 2700 euro on a pc, and for an amateur, that is quite a lot of cash.
So, I am asking for a little bit of help please

Hi.

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O, fusion, compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. More CUDA/OpenCL Cores are better.

In the paid STUDIO Version of Resolve, can certain combination of Codec, Resolutions, Bit width and Chroma subsampling be hardware decoded/encoded on either a AMD/nVidea Graphics card or in a Intel non Xeon CPU.

Let's first look at the nVidea, as they have the best dokumentation. Here is a link to their Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix:

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-enco ... ew#Encoder

As we can se do they only support hardware decoding for H.265 (HEVC) 4:2:0 and H.265 (HEVC) 4:4:4. NOT for H.265 (HEVC) 4:2:2. So 4:2:2 decoding will need to be done in software by the CPU, if the CPU don't have hardware decoding for it.

So I will suggest you to look out for an Intel CPU with the wanted hardware decoding?

Regards Carsten.

Frank Engel wrote:I'm on the Mac side and have access to Final Cut Pro and Compressor in addition to Resolve.

When I receive h264 footage that needs to be edited, I can tell you that Final Cut Pro handles it MUCH better than Resolve does, but I still would not consider editing with it directly if given the choice. I always transcode any h264 footage to Prores using Compressor before editing. Resolve can probably handle that transcoding as well sometimes, but it is much easier and works more consistently with Compressor - I've had trouble getting Resolve to behave well at all with some h264 footage; Compressor generally just works.

As you are planning on being on the dark side of computing, you won't have access to Compressor, but you might want to consider a similar conversion tool of some kind and transcode that footage into a more suitable editing format before trying to edit with it. At a minimum, if staying within Resolve to do it, create a separate timeline, add one h264 clip to it, and render it out as something suitable for editing (I don't believe you can render out to Prores from the Windows version, will probably need to be DNxHR?), then repeat for each clip.

Better yet, if you aren't in a rush, hold out to see what the successor to Apple's M1 chip is (rumors have it that the next chip is already in production, so this may not be too long of a wait). The next version may well prove to be pro-level and ready for heftier workloads, and you could use Compressor to do the transcodes and be done with it.

To me, Apple is definetly the dark side of computing. The most restrictive pc company. Decides for you what you can or cannot do, and hugely overpriced. So, no thank you . Been there, do not want to go back.

Carsten Sellberg wrote:

Wouter Bouwens wrote: However, I am about to spend 2700 euro on a pc, and for an amateur, that is quite a lot of cash.
So, I am asking for a little bit of help please

Hi.

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O, fusion, compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. More CUDA/OpenCL Cores are better.

In the paid STUDIO Version of Resolve, can certain combination of Codec, Resolutions, Bit width and Chroma subsampling be hardware decoded/encoded on either a AMD/nVidea Graphics card or in a Intel non Xeon CPU.

Let's first look at the nVidea, as they have the best dokumentation. Here is a link to their Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix:

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-enco ... ew#Encoder

As we can se do they only support hardware decoding for H.265 (HEVC) 4:2:0 and H.265 (HEVC) 4:4:4. NOT for H.265 (HEVC) 4:2:2. So 4:2:2 decoding will need to be done in software by the CPU, if the CPU don't have hardware decoding for it.

So I will suggest you to look out for an Intel CPU with the wanted hardware decoding?

Regards Carsten.

I did look for that, and I believe the I9 does indeed do hardware decoding of h265 10 bit 422. I edit the largest possible files my gh5 and gh5s can create (422 10 bit C4K All-I 24p) on my current laptop without issue, I am assuming the newer I9 would also decode it then?

I just ordered the pc, I want to thank all of you for input and help. Greatly appreciated!