Post-Production Equipment

Last week, I talked about the equipment I use when I'm shooting video for projects, classes, and jobs. This week I'm going to talk about my post-production setup. Before we dive in, just like last week, there may be terms that aren't common knowledge, so I'll provide links to resources that explain the terms. Here we go!

When I say "post-production setup," I mean my computer that I use to edit the videos, pictures and audio that I get out in the field.  I built my computer myself and tailored the parts to video editing, so that I could handle all of the programs I planned on using. The two programs I use the most are Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Adobe After Effects CC, but I also use Photoshop, Lightroom, Audition and InDesign to edit pictures, audio and make static graphics.

These programs, especially After Effects and Premiere, take a lot of powerful hardware to run effectively. The goal behind having powerful hardware in this case is to make live viewing of footage more smooth, make render times shorter, and increase the number of effects you can have applied at the same time. Handling all of this uses a lot of RAM. My computer has 32 GB, whereas the average computer will have around four to eight (32 GB is actually not that much when it comes to video editing). This is because when you have a lot of effects set on a video, the computer has to render it in real time and to be able to access the effect files and video sources quickly, they're queued up in your RAM and accessed by your CPU from there instead of your hard drive. The more effects you have at one time, the more RAM it takes.

RAM is important, but nothing is as important for video editing as the CPU and GPU. I chose an AMD FX-8350 8-Core CPU for my computer, because the more cores a CPU has, the faster it will be able to render a video for export (at least up to a point). But my computer's CPU is pretty far out of date, so I'm looking to upgrade it within the next year. For the GPU, I did something a bit different than most video editors. Most people would only use one GPU, but I actually have two that run in SLI, which was built to improve performance in video games, but it decreases burn times for DVDs and I do that a lot, which is why I chose to use two of them. Anyway, I use two EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB graphics cards. Graphics cards can reduce render times, which is helped by the card's VRAM and basically functions like regular RAM, except it only works with the graphics card's processor.

That covers the main components of the computer, but there is one other big piece to cover.

The last big piece is my main monitor. It's a Dell 34 inch ultrawide monitor that has a resolution of 3440x1440 and an aspect ratio of 21:9. The higher resolution provides more pixels for working with graphics, animations and other visual effects. Even if the footage is shot in lower resolutions like 480p, you can upscale the footage to higher ones, but that does have its own issues. The larger aspect ratio allows me to see a lot more on my screen at one time when I'm editing videos. In Premiere and After Effects, you have a timeline at the bottom of the screen that shows all of your footage, effects, audio, and graphics that you have loaded in, and with this monitor, I have a lot more space to work with. So, the reasons I have this monitor are mainly quality of life and ease of use improvements, but they make a big difference.

What are your guys' thoughts on these more technical posts? I really enjoy writing them and they give me an excuse to break out my camera equipment more often and have some fun with it, but I'm not sure if you guys like them or not. Let me know what you think of them and if you like them, what other topics you would want me to cover.

Finally, here are some more picture of the computer that I took for fun! What do you guys think?

These are the main hard drives of the computer.

This is of the two SSDs that store all of the main programs on
the computer.

This one is of the CPU and the RAM. CPUs get extremely hot, so
mine is water cooled by the block that says Corsair.