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Sony a7S III: Ignore the Hype

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Does hype sell you on stuff?  Sony spends a lot of money making sure.  Just this past week, they paid off the Associated Press to go all Sony, all the time, crossing an ethical line in journalism (besides simply looking tacky).  And we see how most every hyper-enthused “vlogger” about cameras and lenses — ogling maximum view counts with rapid cuts flailing around — is in the bag for Sony.  How many videos have we endured, watching them get flown out to expensive cities, hotel stays, and gang-bang shoots of waif models for camera launches?  “This is an independent review and I was not paid by Sony!”  Sure, whatever.  Maybe this year, cuz ‘rona.

Today is the same old stuff.  You need to scrub the ‘net hard to find any nuance on Sony, while they’re launching the new a7S III (in large part, a GH5 with a full-frame sensor — and that $1.3k camera launched just yesterday, or was it way back in January 2017?).  Sony has summoned their entire army to raise fists in the air, calling it unanimously “uh-ma-zing.”  The phenomenon actually creeps me out.  Imagine going to Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews, and finding some mediocre movie that everyone only loved or hated — no diversity.  Suspicious?

I pledged my allegiance to Sony a long time ago (and I’m still cheering for them); it started with the NEX-VG10 and just kept getting better from there, on to the NEX-FS100, then the a7S II, and currently, the a7 III.  That last camera remains my go-to for flying on gimbals, because the auto-focus nails it pretty much always.  (When I can stay locked down, though, it’s Blackmagic and Z CAM all day long.)  Sony has had zero competition in full-frame cinematography for many years, too.  So yeah, when this sort of thing happens, you get stuck:  I bought tons of active E-mount lenses, and now what?  They don’t attach to anything but Sony.  (Not so for EF mount — because of flange distance — which is practically on its deathbed now that RF mount is taking over.  My order of the new Canon R5 is arriving any day now…)

So I was among those schmucks anxiously awaiting the arrival of the a7S III, and Sony dragged their feet for almost half a decade.  Now that it’s finally arrived:  how does it feel?

First, we need to pull it into focus.  I’ll try.  From here on, instead of dense essay style, best to simply make a list.  Beyond that, it doesn’t deserve much of our time, because the a7S III has turned out to be an overpriced meh.

  1. Resolution: Yes, UHD-4k is enough for a lot of things, but not everything.  Final output resolution, exporting from a full editing workflow, isn’t the issue at all.  The ability to punch/crop/reframe into video footage, that’s really something.  And Blackmagic taught a huge lesson last week (John Brawley, one of those rare writers about camera tech who’s not gullible, explains this fully):  their new custom-built sensor is less revolutionary for its 12k resolution, but instead, literally how that image looks, because of how the sensor gathers light, bayers the image, allocates pixels, and integrates with BRAW efficiency which is by far the best RAW codec in the world (more on that later).  Point being, for a major, long-awaited, over-hyped product launch, Sony’s mere 4K (still incapable of even actual 4K/DCI) is a drag, especially for what the a7S III costs, which leads to…
  2. Pricing:  Sony has devolved into a multinational corporation run by its accounting/marketing department; every time they launch a “G Master” lens, their paid-off vlogger army drools and pretends that they’d have enough money to buy one, let alone the whole product line, instead of only getting temporary loans.  (A delicious sidebar to that, is how Tamron — ironically part-owned by Sony themselves — is beating out even G Master lenses in lab tests, at one-third or less the prices.)  Simply put, the a7S III costs too damn much, even if other cameras cost more (because they do, too).  The last time their comptrollers finally behaved smartly, was when they priced the a7 III as one of the best bargains in hybrid camera history, and it still is — much like Blackmagic priced the BMPCC4K stunningly low.  That wasn’t long ago, and the interim volume of sales spoke for itself:  when you price something smartly, lots of people buy it.  But insult them with price gouging, and they don’t.
  3. CF-express Type A: In a throwback to Memory Stick stubbornness and greed (remember those blue sticks of gum?), Sony wants you to buy their new kind of flash memory card.  It’s capable of up to 700 megabytes per second of write speed, which is the only spec that matters (read speed is irrelevant and always higher).  However, the a7S III is designed with slots that can also take UHS-II cards, having extra rows of contacts for faster speed.  I have a few V90 cards that I used in the BMPCC6K, and that spec means they can guarantee sustained minimum write speeds of at least 90 megabytes per second, which is the same as 720 megabits per second.  The fastest speed of any internal recording in the a7S III is the new XAVS S-I at 600 megabits per second, well below that 720 megabits per second headroom in a solid UHS-II V90 SD card.  Meantime, guess how much CF-express Type A cards will cost?  For the tiny 80 GB card, hilariously $200, and for the whopping 160 GB card, $400.  Meantime, other cameras are almost universally accommodating USB-C docking of solid state drives, that offer terrabytes of storage at equivalent speeds, costing dozens of times less per gigabyte.
  4. RAW: Starting with some facetious background, Atomos is like that last hook-up at the bar who hasn’t scored again, and just before closing, goes home with someone.  It needs the business, somehow, in a post-Atomos age.  They did have a bromance years ago with Panasonic, when they were the only way to record 10-bit 4:2:2 from the GH4 — but when they tried to hook up with Sony for the a7S II, it turned out disappointing, because that camera only output 8-bit.  These days, they’ve put their eggs in the ProRes RAW basket, which might have been alright if Blackmagic hadn’t revolutionized RAW(-ish) technology with BRAW.  You can read more about it (too much to explain here), but the issue for the a7S III is that to record RAW, you’re spending a ton of extra money and adding bulk to your rig that completely defeats the purpose of a portable mirrorless camera fundamentally designed for video capture in the first place.  The best that the new camera can do internally, is just another variant of CPU-taxing HEVC/H.265 compression, compared to — let’s face it — the perfection found in BRAW for smallest file sizes, fastest editing performance on all workstations, and internal recording.  (Also enough for a whole separate write-up is this, in a nutshell:  Sony has been litigation-averse since the surfer dudes at R3D Corporation magically scored a rad patent claiming that any compressed internal RAW recording is theirs forever — like, literally the whole concept of that, and no one else can ever do it.  By not fighting that frivolous patent, despite deep pockets, Sony forces you to hook a huge recorder onto your “portable” camera.  And the recorder doesn’t even exist yet.)
  5. Audio: It’s just a freaking 1/8″ stereo jack giving a bad-impedance, interference-prone, consumer-level microphone input.  Still.  And just like the RAW dilemma, hooking up to their comically waiting-to-crack XLR-K3M at the hotshoe (leaving no room for a RAW recorder too) is embarrassingly nothing more than a Salvador Dali surrealist painting of a pricey contraption held up by a toothpick.
  6. Stills:  12 megapixels is your mother’s purse camera, and your cellphone last century.  Next!
  7. SteadyShot:  This one was a nail-biter.  If they ditched internal image stabilization via the sensor, like Panasonic did for the GH5S, you would have seen two armies line up and face each other down:  the vintage old-timey self-appointed “A.S.C.” wannabes who say I.S. doesn’t matter, versus those of us tired of vomiting in the movie theater every time a hipster lenser says “whatever” to camera stabilization (cuz shaky iz cool).  Meantime, stingy Sony has been systematically removing lens stabilization across the board, to shave pennies off costs for maximum profits, pointing their fingers at I.B.I.S. as the patsy.  Now thankfully, the a7S III keeps sensor I.B.I.S., though it’s widely known as the very worst, even in the full-frame sensor world that has lot more mass to jiggle than crop sensors.  But here’s the thing:  yet another red herring is their so-called “SteadyShot Active” mode, and it assumes you’re just as gullible as GoPro customers.  It uses the same gyroscopic sensors in your cellphone (to play driving games or whatever), recording position and relative movement metadata for further digital stabilization only in post-production that’s already cropping into your image by about 10%.  This is a fool’s errand, and any good cinematographer knows why:  the 180-degree shutter rule is a real thing, and it’s not debatable.  You need proper motion blur on every single frozen frame of video footage, and it needs to blur in the right direction (like, literally how things happen in the world).  What digital stabilization does, is respond with exact opposite force, smearing the motion blur against itself.  It’s noticeable, and it’s wrong, and it’s fake.  What’s more, this “SteadyShot Active” process is a whole generation’s loss of extra encoding, since you need to churn through your footage using a proprietary, separate encoding application, to come up with a digitally stabilized source file.  It’s not lossless like Adobe Warp.
  8. S-Cinetone-ish:  This is a sneaky way of saying, if you’re too lazy to drop a free LUT onto properly captured log footage (which dates back to the earliest days of cinema), this is the best Sony can do, so far.  S-Cinetone is not a log format; it’s just REC.709 (standard video color space) that looks decent.  It started with the VENICE, continued in the FX9, and Sony wants you to think it’s incredibly generous for them to put a version of it into this little spy cam instead of charging thousands of dollars for a firmware update.  But the S-Cinetone improvements (really, bug fixes from historically awful Sony color science) are absent in S-Log2 and S-Log3.  Anyone spending this much money on a camera, shouldn’t lower their standards by reducing dynamic range and skipping log formats, so S-Cinetone is irrelevant.  And no matter what mode you’re in, “the low light king” (even so, just barely more sensitive compared to competing dual-ISO cameras) is only for a worst-case scenario:  color rendition is terrible because of low light physically, so you shouldn’t be shooting in the dark unless you absolutely have to.  Just examine the sample footage yourself:  a7S III color looks much worse at the highest ISOs.
  9. Minimum ISO:  Speaking of log, they always say, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all.  So I do have one nice thing to say about the a7S III:  Sony finally came to their senses (read: finally ignored angry Alister) and lowered the minimum ISO in log mode from sometimes thousands, down to 640 and even 160 in an “extended” mode.  Hooray.  We’ve actually had that on other cameras for years (e.g., Blackmagic).  It has a huge impact on controlling depth of field and shallow focus, avoiding ND filtration at top limits that severely compromise quality.

Even in quarantine, I’ve done a poor job writing posts routinely here, but among some more “recent” ones (on building an editing workstation), a big theme was how Intel got its asses handed to them by AMD who are now killing it in the CPU world with their 7nm process (no matter what Puget Systems tells you), and Intel is still years away from catching up.  As a parting thought:  this is exactly what’s happening to Sony.  Like Intel, they ruled the world for a while, but got cocky, and greedy.  This whole rant has taken a renegade tone simply because it’s too noisy out there.  Caveat emptor (“buyer beware”) has never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve to get hurt.  Make up your own minds, and ignore the noise.  Ultimately, it comes down to how good you are behind the camera, and whether you can see the difference in A-B testing between this new thing, and the last thing.

P.S.:  Remember when Sony’s loyal army of vloggers defiantly insisted that overheating Sony cameras was a non-issue, because real filmmakers never keep shots running that long?  My, how the tide turns, when the holy dictate needs to come up with something to boast about…

Sony a7S 8 Comments

Pandemic Playlist: My Creative Responses to COVID-19

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Is this thing over yet? We’ve watched the world open back up, sort of.

Is it too late for new art about the coronavirus, after months of lockdown and too-much-information? Sort of.

Yet there’s no vaccine. Another outbreak, or new virus might come along. Whether or not these past few months fade into memory someday: for the first time in a millennium, our whole world has shared an experience together. After the decimation we’ve seen in our lifetimes of mass media/broadcast television, it’s really something. We really are/were in this together.

Departing from my (albeit rare) posts about filmmaking tech here, I’ll show you a few little things I’ve made since March: a “pandemic playlist” of sorts. And it’s like a story too, in chronological order. You can access the whole playlist below or at this link, but I’ll embed each of its separate videos into this page also, as I get to them.

CONTAGION

The year was 2011, and it had been almost a decade since the book (and later movie) The Hot Zone took the world by storm and gave us a glimpse of the horrors to come. Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion gave us simply the best science ever from a film about coronaviruses (COVID-19 being just the latest one — not the nineteenth, but named for the year when it showed up). Its lukewarm reception was well-deserved: sometimes the acting is stiff, characters diluted, structure flat. Jude Law’s sideline story of fraud is an ambiguous distraction. And, shot on old RED cameras, the dynamic range is terrible with tons of blown-out highlights, and exaggerated color grading that hits you over the head with chem-lab green. Namely, it’s another mainstream Soderbergh film. But the electronic music score by Cliff Martinez is brilliant; and of course, the prescience of the subject is totally haunting.

Especially from the beginning of this year’s pandemic, the film has been a valued watch for everyone who’s trying to understand. What I thought I’d do, is excerpt all the good parts, organize them succinctly into an informational video essay via fair use, and fix some of those flawed exposure and color grading decisions in the original film. From its multichannel 5.1 source, I extracted mainly the center dialogue channel, then dropped in an original score by my collaborator BLK S^TRN who is a common thread through more of this pandemic playlist (see below). As seen in the video, my questions (with answers suggested by the film) are:

  • Where do coronaviruses come from?
  • How are contagious viruses transmitted?
  • How do we know the reproductive rate (R-0 or “R-naught”) of a virus?
  • Young people are stronger. If some get exposed, but stay healthy, why worry?
  • When people say there’s a cure, should we trust them? Is there a difference between a final cure, and meds that just profit big pharma little-by-little?
  • What’s the right balance between social order, and personal liberty?
  • After a final cure, who gets it first? How long is the wait?
  • How will life change after COVID-19? Will we ever shake hands again?

CORONA

In the decade since 2011, I traveled around the world a lot (and now especially miss it). Anyone who makes films, can’t resist grabbing good material abroad, even when there’s no immediate project. So, I shot footage in China, New York City, rural Pennsylvania, California’s Central Valley, and music concerts, that eventually accumulated into this next original film Corona. It was a response to a challenge from BLK S^TRN, who composed a 23-minute experimental hip hop work over a weekend, and asked me to set it to visuals. Within a few days, I had created this utterly strange experimental film divided into sections that respond to his seven-movement symphony of sorts. It’s punishingly minimalist, most of the time, in a common thread of outrage rather than optimism (and I’ve felt an absent longing these days to stare evil straight in the face, instead of those many feel-good streams that have dominated at-home culture with desperate wistfulness). What excited me most about the challenge, was actually technical: I had never gotten around to exploring the Boris FX “Beat Reactor” feature, so during most of this running time, you are seeing multiple discrete visual effects reacting to the music score at isolated pitch ranges. Camera gear ranged from the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera in China, to the DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 in flight.

UNION SQUARE NYC: MARCH 9, 2020

I was filming a big documentary project in upstate New York early March, and stopped by Manhattan for a weekend on my way back to Washington, D.C. In the hour before my train home, I grabbed a few pick-up shots at Union Square for another project. Simply put: we all couldn’t imagine what was coming, but we had heard the news.

I shot this handheld on the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, with the smooth stabilization of my Olympus 12-100mm f/4 lens. Against the bright setting sun, it pushed the (alleged) 13 stops of dynamic range in BRAW format, since most of the action was in the shadows. That wide vantage point of Union Square was from behind the window of a multi-story Men’s Wearhouse (the one high spot I could get). From there, I saw this thing happening on the plaza, then sped down the escalators to catch the performance, and the rest is editing.

It speaks for itself. Our cities will look like this again. How soon, is how we behave.

H2O

When I got back in early March, people started realizing that lockdown was around the corner. The premier new music ensemble in Washington, D.C., 21st Century Consort (with whom I’ve created The Passion of Scrooge and many other projects) was going to have a concert at the modern art Hirshhorn Museum, and had already loaded in heavy percussion for a week of rehearsals. As the Smithsonian began to declare its inevitable closures, the Consort’s artistic director asked me to salvage all that work and expense, by capturing the concert without an audience. This was a new idea at the time! Dr. Fauci had already warned us to keep everyone 6 feet apart, and we did. The local paper interviewed me and wrote about the production here, and we leveraged YouTube’s premiere feature with chat functions to launch it one week after the originally scheduled concert date. Compared to the lo-fi, smartphone streams that we’ve been watching at home (or suffered through, depending on how you feel about it), this was a pristine multi-camera shoot at UHD-4K resolution, color graded from log footage, using a nearly nightmare combination of: Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, Sony a7 III, Sony a6600, and Z CAM E2C. You might enjoy trying to guess which was used for each angle. I applied camera-specific FilmConvert LUT profiles to match things up, as a starting point (but as ever, it needed tons more refinement in the grade).

For this playlist, I’ve excerpted the first work on the program, whose prescience (programmed before the pandemic) is haunting now. You’ll see reflections of the water bowls on the ceiling, that look like the virus; it looks like everyone’s dutifully washing their hands; and one of the musicians later joked — very dry humor — that you could call this “Flu Man Group.” (Rimshot.) If you want to watch the full hour including more conventional music, click here.

SCENE FROM LES MISÉRABLES

We all know what happened next, as if things weren’t bad enough. Yet for a long time, America has been suffering from its original sin, and there is no end in sight for reparations.

This isn’t quite an original work, just a straight-up excerpt (though I’ve deployed a few J-cuts and L-cuts to help it stand alone). Enough has been said, and too much destroyed, in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I was just there in February, shooting a documentary interview, on my way to Winona’s Frozen River Film Festival (to show the last film in this playlist below), right on the heels of Winona Ryder painting a more nostalgic picture of Minnesota and her namesake small town during the Super Bowl. Tension was hiding in plain sight.

Distance helps, yes? Director Ladj Ly grew up in the Montfermeil commune of Paris and set his debut feature film there, drawing parallels between the actual Victor Hugo classic story, and today’s ethnic and economic tensions in “Les Bosquets.” Good drama resists tying things up neatly in a bow: this film shows good cops and bad cops, and the abiding reality that uprisings backfire, while rage is unavoidable. You can’t be surprised, after an accumulation of one injustice after another. The complete feature film — you’ll find it interesting that a drone camera is very central to the plot — streams in pristine UHD-4K/HDR freely on Amazon Prime Video.

QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME

And now we end right there in Paris. Sort of. Olivier Messiaen was a French composer who got imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II at Stalag VIII-A. There in captivity, he composed and premiered a transcendent work called Quartet for the End of Time that probably receives more consensus from musicologists than anything else, as the greatest piece of chamber music written in the 20th century. A few years ago, I had the rare privilege to document rehearsals, and a 75th anniversary performance of the work, by “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band Ensemble — this was during the Obama administration, if it matters to you — and around that time, Paris got bombed by terrorists. I show those memorials at the end of the film, while the interviewee eloquently relates that chaos is everywhere, and it feels like the end of time.

But there’s a misunderstood enigma about the title of the piece, also the title of my documentary: in fact, we should translate “the end of time” as “the end of the relevance of time,” pointing towards some kind of timeless spiritual existence that rises above this chaos. Hope and salvation isn’t just cheap therapy: maybe it’s written in the stars, and in ourselves.

[POSTSCRIPT]

So that’s the stuff I’ve made (so far), although if you’re like me, it’s also been tough to stay productive, absent routines, and the prior need to stay on our feet outside home. I hope you’re figuring out how to stay sane, creative, and engaged in good health. Laughter is still the best medicine, don’t forget that: for me, these endless weeks have been perked up by comedian Annie Lederman’s Patreon and podcast; Donterio Hundon’s on-fire barbeques; Michael Rappaport’s rants; and Bobby Lee and Andrew Santino’s Bad Friends. I’ve also passed (and wasted) plenty of time watching whole seasons of episodic television, consuming all five of Better Call Saul, the first of Lil Dicky’s heartfelt Dave, and Sam Esmail’s Homecoming. Got any must-watch tips of your own? Please let me know right back.

Stay well y’all, and for the love of god…

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Case Study: Building a Powerful Video Editing Workstation

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So here we are in 2020, when 4K/Ultra-HD footage is just the baseline, and 6K/8K is inevitable for us. HD video editing had once pushed computers to the limit, but 4K isn’t just a doubling of that resolution: it’s literally four times as many pixels to crunch, while 8K is a stunning sixteen times more than HD. And to deal with all that, cameras are compressing file sizes down more than ever, which takes much more computing power to unpack on-the-fly, when you’re editing. Can you buy a complete computer system off-the-shelf (or online), that keeps up?

Computer manufacturers think of filmmakers as a tiny niche market, despite the overlap with gaming computers. So, they don’t design systems that target the unique demands of video editors. What are these demands, and for each, what is the current state-of-the-art?

THE BASICS

  1. Fast central processing unit (CPU) with overclocking:  AMD Ryzen 9 / Zen 2 [Wikipedia]
  2. Fast storage drives:  Solid State Disk (SSD) via NVMe PCIe Gen. 4 [Wikipedia]
  3. Dedicated graphics processing unit (GPU) card:  Nvidia GeForce 20-series [Wikipedia]
  4. Large, fast DRAM memory:  DDR4 [Wikipedia]
  5. Expansible operating system (OS):  Windows 10 [Wikipedia]

That last item on the list is ammunition for warfare, pitting nerds against hipsters, but if you’re in the Church of Jobs anyway, read no further.  This case study simply focuses upon building a Windows system only, and my choice of Windows isn’t about loyalty or style: just to get maximum power. Meantime, laptops are totally out of the game: their portability isn’t worth it.

CPU:  NOW IT’S AMD, NOT INTEL

OS aside, our first fork in the road is choosing the CPU (brains), and there are basically two kinds, in the whole world of computers we’d use: AMD and Intel. Way back in 2016, the last time I built a custom editing workstation like this, Intel was the clear choice for a few reasons. Firstly, their CPUs were just faster than AMD, plain and simple. But also, Adobe Premiere had leveraged Intel’s QuickSync technology to hardware encode H.264 and H.265, native in most of its CPUs, for radically speeding up encoding times. But now, as of just last month, Adobe has begun expanding such hardware encoding of H.264 and H.265, also to exploit most modern GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. (Anyone with an Adobe subscription can find a “Beta apps” category on the left-hand side of the Creative Cloud app, to download the parallel beta versions of Premiere and Media Encoder that preview this feature. It works great!)

Then there’s the fact that CPU speed and efficiency has much to do with how its “die” shrinks from each generation to the next. This is measured in nanometers (nm), and Intel has been stuck at 14nm for years (starting from that Skylake PC I built here, almost half a decade ago!). However, just this past year, AMD took the industry by storm and completely demolished Intel, with its 7nm process called “Zen 2,” found in their CPU line-up that’s branded with numbers in the 3000s. For this build, I used the Ryzen 3900x: that’s the fastest of those CPUs, below a premium “Threadripper” tier that’s really overkill for video editing (because Adobe Premiere and other editing applications can’t meaningfully take advantage of “Threadripper” potential). Costing under $500, the 3900x is a great investment, and well worth the upgrade. But if you’re on a budget (and who isn’t, during lockdown especially?), even the new Ryzen 3 3300X at $120 outperforms corresponding Intel CPUs by a stunning margin. Let’s start with any of the Zen 2 CPUs.

Oh, and one more thing: hardly anyone custom-builds PCs for video production, but the leader in the industry is somehow (quite unfortunately) Puget Systems. They’ve been Intel evangelists for many years, sitting on tons of Intel inventory that they still need to sell, but when AMD creamed Intel badly (for the long-foreseeable future, too), Puget Systems hilarious refused to accept that, and they still don’t. They’re a great example of technological stubbornness, and suspicious brand loyalty. Ignore them.

MOTHERBOARD:  X570 CHOICES

Above is a picture of the motherboard before it’s mounted into a simple case that goes by the standard size name “ATX” (more on that later). For the new AMD Ryzen 9 / Zen 2 CPUs, you need a motherboard designated “X570” from any manufacturer (and soon, to save some money, “B550” motherboards will be an option). Most are tricked out for gamers, often gleaming with irrelevant tacky lighting effects and other gamer-centric features. The no-frills priority for video creators, instead, is to have maximum ports for connectivity with numerous storage devices — and among the many manufacturers and models, I ended up with something on the cheaper side that doesn’t sacrifice performance at all: the Asus Prime X570-Pro. Unfortunately, X570 motherboards aren’t cheap, and they’re so intensive, that they have their own surface-mounted fans as seen at right. But you shouldn’t be too picky about finding yours: the feature distinctions are minor for video production. And, good news: unlike Intel who make you change your motherboard for every new CPU, it’s just been announced that X570 motherboards will be compatible with AMD’s Zen 3 / 4000-series CPUs someday.

GPU:  USE THE GEFORCE

Just like the battle between AMD and Intel, there are GPU wars between AMD (again) and Nvidia: simply put, the latter wins. Adobe (for example) deploys Nvidia’s CUDA acceleration to a much more impactful extent than AMD’s use of OpenGL. The current state-of-the-art by Nvidia is their GeForce 20-series, and a reasonable median compromise is to buy any manufacturer’s use of their RTX 2060 chipset. Available in 2GB to 8GB of VRAM, 4GB is generally enough, but if you’re pushing the limits, 6GB or 8GB may be worth it. There are RTX 2070s, 2080s, and Titans too, but those performance gains diminish rapidly the higher you go. There’s only so much of that power (designed really for gaming vectors) that you can use as a video editor. (At right, you’re seeing a GTX 1060 installed, but since then I’ve upgraded to a RTX 2070 — anything inside this range is more than enough, given the limitations of all editing applications such as Premiere.)

MEMORY:  CLOCK SPEED MATTERS

One last core ingredient to building your system is DRAM, which is the kind of memory that disappears when you turn off the computer (compared to a storage drive). AMD Zen 2 requires the latest type of DRAM, rated DDR4. Inherently fast to begin with, the new AMD architecture takes special advantage of memory clock speed (over and above latency ratings), so the choice you see here is a great compromise at 3600 MHz, from G.SKILL in their “Ripjaws V” Series. I’m recommending a single pair of 16GB sticks, getting you to 32GB of total DRAM which is plenty to start out with, while leaving two empty slots for expanding up to 64GB someday.

But let’s pause for a second, and consider whether it’s worth building your own PC after all! If you lack the patience of a saint, and you feel tech-averse, that has nothing to do with being a good filmmaker, and you’re better off buying something ready-made that approximates these specs (but definitely costs more). Yet if you do want to build your own system, you should be prepared for the risk that it won’t work at first because of one component or another that you hooked up wrong: diagnosis isn’t always easy. But if you feel comfortable with this stuff, and enjoy kit-building as a hobby (LEGOs?), then the benefits of building your own system are pretty huge. Mainly, it saves you a ton of money that you can spend on making real art. (Meanwhile, specialists like Puget Systems who build dedicated video editing workstations notoriously price-gouge, as if it’s genius to buy these common parts from mass retailers everywhere.) Also, every time you upgrade to the next system, you conserve by re-using some parts. Most importantly, you get a way more powerful system than you can buy from any store. Put another way, Best Buy doesn’t sell anything this fast. Not even close.

So what are we looking at above? That’s the motherboard ready to get stacked. The square that holds your AMD CPU is capped at first, but the metal latch has been swung open as seen above. To get full speed out of your DDR4 DRAM memory, you have to install them in pairs, and those DRAM sticks must have the exact same specs. (In the motherboard’s BIOS settings before booting into Windows, you’ll want to load up the so-called Extended Memory Profile (XMP) so that the rated full speed gets enabled.)

SSD:  DEATH TO MAGNETIC SPINNING PLATTERS


Before we get to installing the CPU into its little square socket, nearby there’s a slot labeled M.2. That’s the newest and fastest possible way to run a boot drive (commonly called your “C:” drive). Even newer than mSATA (which was a notebook computer form factor for small SSDs), M.2 can tap into the motherboard’s PCIe x16 bus — those expansion slots with clips on the end, as seen at right — using a protocol called NVMe for the fastest possible disk speeds you can achieve today (theoretically, 5000 MB/s if the drive is PCIe Generation 4).

Lightning-fast speeds from the PCIe NVMe SSD

What you see installed here is an HP EX950 2TB PCIe NVMe drive, but in the other M.2 slot on the motherboard, I’ve got a faster/smaller boot drive too (more on that later). Namely, SSDs are the holy grail of fast, reliable media, just as traditional magnetic hard drives are becoming more and more antiquated. We’ll laugh someday about how our data got stored on spinning wheels with styluses bouncing back and forth to scribble data in and out.

CPU FAN


But back to the CPU: you probably know that they get hot, after seeing fans, and hearing them whir louder when a computer’s thinking hard. We need to put a heat sink onto it, bonded with thermal paste, to transfer heat from the burning hot metal surface of the CPU to a fan that bolts down on top of it, seen at left, blowing away the heat. You might have heard about “liquid cooling,” with futuristic tubes delivering refrigerant, but it’s really unnecessary. You’re not going to be overclocking into danger zones if you want a reliable creative platform. I chose the median of best-in-class fan coolers, Noctua’s NH-U12S, which you could re-use on your next system someday too.

POWER SUPPLY


So we’ve got our CPU installed, got a fan bolted down to keep it cool, and the memory’s installed. But we still need voltage/amperage from a power supply unit (PSU). I chose a 650-watt model, which is the neighborhood of power that most systems of this type need. 1,000 watts is overkill, 500 watts is pushing it at the low end, and less than that is dangerous. It is not critical to find the perfect number, but more is better, and PSUs are relatively cheap.

CASE:  TOWER OF POWER

So, what about that case again? As our computer comes together, you’re starting to see the biggest headache in system building: all those wires. Mainly, there are SATA cables (for the drives), USB/port cables, and power cables (usually braided). Down the middle, the Nvidia GPU card takes up lots of room, and it even needs its own power cable from the PSU, being a kind of a computer unto itself, with its own circuit boards and internal pair of cooling fans. Around this whole mess, some folks spend lots of time on “cable management,” neatly bundling together related wires and even color-coding them, but I’m not so tidy. A good case should leave enough room to reduce confusion, but even more important is how the case holds your media storage drives in place, usually bracketed horizontally once you tip the case upright. You’ll be shifting them around a lot over time, whether you’re upgrading drives, or removing crashed ones. So, the measure of a good case is how easy it is to do that. I chose the Fractal Design Focus, especially because it has the inexplicably rare feature these days of front-panel slots for drives and inputs. Most other cases, you’ll find, seem like they’re designed for teenage girls who want rainbow colored lights and pretty mirrors.

MORE FANS:  GO BIG

Another key feature of a case is air flow. There is always a rear fan as seen at left, and often a top fan, built into the case that together push-pull circulating air, especially to exhaust the heat from the CPU fan. By having more and larger (120mm) fans, your overall noise level goes down compared to the worse loudness of one small (90mm) fan or two that otherwise would need to carry a heavy load, spinning madly beyond its means.

ADDING STORAGE DRIVES:  CHOOSE CAREULLY

By now, everything’s hooked together, and in the picture at right you can see the rear panel with its numerous ports. From this angle, it’s healthy to equate the whole idea of external ports with the term “bottleneck,” especially when it comes to data storage. Internal drives directly connected to the motherboard via SATA3 (or especially that new M.2 NVMe bus) are faster than external drives connected via USB 3.2 or worse, as a general premise. You could be booting internally from the fastest drive on the market, but: if you’re also editing video files stored on an external drive via USB, or even an internal 5400rpm “green” drive, everything slows down. Of course, video files (especially these days, with high bitrates and Ultra-HD resolutions) are the most demanding streams of data, and they deserve the fastest drives — not the slowest, which is ironically where many filmmakers store them in a sort of premature archival spirit. Similarly, you could get the fastest and biggest single drive on the market, shouldering all of your data, instead of spreading tasks across multiple drives, and you’d have another type of bottleneck. Basically, you could have an extremely fast computer like this AMD build, but it all means nothing if a single drive slows everything down. So, what’s the plan?

  1. Boot Disk (or “C:” Drive):  smaller and fastest SSD, for system and applications
  2. Camera Footage Disk:  large SSD, for video files, preferably removable (see Vantec example below)
  3. Project Disk/Library:  large SSD or 7200rpm hard drive (not 5400rpm), for project files and library
  4. Cache Disk/Scratch Files:  small SSD or 7200rpm (not 5400rpm) hard drive (can be combined with #3 if necessary), for, e.g., Adobe Media Cache and audio peak files

Those are just suggestions, but the theme is, you should spread out categories of use across multiple drives, and allocate fastest drives to those tasks that need it most. Granted, we are on the brink of an all-SSD world, but they’re still expensive, and one versatile way to maximize their use is to put them into removable cartridges, for mobility and swapping projects. Above, the Vantec slot accepts a proprietary cartridge that not only connects straight into the motherboard’s native SATA3 6Gbit/s bus for maximum speed, but also has a reasonably fast USB 3.2 Gen. 1 port for when you need to go mobile from a laptop. I am putting 1TB SSDs of camera footage into these cartridges, letting me swap between projects, and I take them with me to other workstations between studios, and on the road. It’s a clever solution that never quite caught on, but you might find a solution of your own among currently available hot-swap drive tray options.

One last thing to mention is the inevitable fact that you’ve been accumulating a bunch of old hard drives over the years, replacing them with bigger and faster ones. You may not want them to be mounted and spinning inside your case, but for redundant archiving, an external enclosure can keep them useful. The Mediasonic 4-bay enclosure seen at left connects to your computer via USB 3.2 Gen. 2, and inside you can span multiple drives into single larger volumes using the “Storage Spaces” feature included in Windows 10. True, you wouldn’t want to rely on this feature for critical data (it’s just as dangerous as a Drobo), but it fits my archiving needs perfectly: I keep my camera footage and project files stored on drives inside my case, while also paying a small fee to Backblaze for unlimited cloud storage of everything, while making a parallel copy onto the external drives — so, I’m less worried about that external array, given the two other copies. This is a more pragmatic setup compared to redundant RAID arrays, which are thankfully nearing extinction (even though IT-department-types will probably stay stubborn). RAID was always a goofy compromise, invented mainly for a speed boost that has since been eclipsed by the SSD.

CONCLUSION

Wrapping up, for such a complex subject, this case study couldn’t have been a thorough step-by-step, how-to guide (and for an example of a detailed general guide, check this out). But it’s meant to get you thinking about whether to build a system, and what would be involved. Upon flipping the power switch on, you’d need to buy an inexpensive Windows license, and you’d have a world of overclocking waiting for you, to try and push the AMD Zen 2 CPU to its limits. Overclocking used to be only an enthusiast’s art form, but today it has become rather easy if not automatic at both the BIOS and background-app level: for example, stepping up processing power, as any video render job might demand it. Taking the broad view today, this is a good time to upgrade, especially if you’re reading this during quarantine because of COVID-19, waiting for creative projects to resume, when we’ll need a fast platform to support our work. Life is short: Don’t let your workstation slow you down!

SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDED PARTS
Asus Prime X570-Pro Motherboard
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core 3.8 GHz Desktop CPU
G.SKILL Ripjaws 5 Series 32GB DDR4 SDRAM Memory
Nvidia GeForce 20-Series Graphics Processing Unit Card
Corsair 650W Power Supply Unit
Fractal Design Focus Mid-Tower Computer Case
Samsung 970 Pro M.2 NVMe 512GB Solid State Drive (Boot Disk)
HP EX950 M.2 NVMe 2TB and/or Crucial MX500 SATA 2TB Solid State Drive (Footage Disk)
Mediasonic 4-Bay External Drive Enclosure
Backblaze Unlimited Cloud Backups

(Your grand total will vary a lot, depending on sale pricing, the X570 motherboard you choose, opting for the 3300X instead of the 3900X CPU (a $400 difference), etc. — but it can go as low as a grand, if you economize. The great thing about building your own system, is that it’s constantly scalable.)

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