Required specs for editing?

[Aussie shooter]

I am looking at upgrading from my laptop to a desktop for editing. At the moment i have a 7d2(around 20mb files give or take) bit want to future proof for when i upgrade camera bodies as well. What sort of specs would you recommend for a computer to handle to load effectively?

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Pretty much any modern computer can edit stills. A SSD, 32GB memory and a slight upgrade to video card are good to have. I have a 2nd hard drive that I store my photos and other files on, its something that can be added depending on how much space you need. I currently have a 500GB SSD and 4TB hard drive.

If you want to edit 4K Video, them a bigger upgrade is needed, particularly higher end video card and a power supply and cooling to handle the heat. I don't do serious video, so someone else can recommend.

I prefer to buy a fairly basic Dell PC with a current i7 processor. Then I change out the drives and add my own memory and video card simply because it costs less for more performance. I'm currently in the process of upgrading to a Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 1TB with M.2 NVMe Interface. They cost less than $200 and are the biggest factor in speeding up a PC. When the prices drop further, I'll get a 4TB SSD.

 

[cayenne]

I am looking at upgrading from my laptop to a desktop for editing. At the moment i have a 7d2(around 20mb files give or take) bit want to future proof for when i upgrade camera bodies as well. What sort of specs would you recommend for a computer to handle to load effectively?

I'd also like to add, that a lot of it depends on the applications you are using or plan to use for editing stills and/or video.

Pretty much any application will give you minimum specs of what it takes to run their software.
Plan to get MORE than the min they list by as much as you can afford for longevity....and with more and more software , both stills and video....are using GPU for speed, do keep that in mind when shopping around.

HTH,

cayenne

 

[AlanF]

I am looking at upgrading from my laptop to a desktop for editing. At the moment i have a 7d2(around 20mb files give or take) bit want to future proof for when i upgrade camera bodies as well. What sort of specs would you recommend for a computer to handle to load effectively?

I thought it was going to be about spectacles for us oldies with failing eyesight.

 

[Joules]

I'd also like to add, that a lot of it depends on the applications you are using or plan to use for editing stills and/or video.

I think that is a point worth stressing. Different applications benefit from different components. There is a trend towards really high core counts with the most recent AMD CPU releases, for example, which yields dramatic improvement for software that makes use of these - but for other applications, spending money on these may be a total waste as they actually cost a lot and perform similar or worse than CPUs with lower core counts and higher clocks in some.

Assuming Photoshop and Lightroom are your tools of choice, I would recommend having a look at this site that has benchmarks for current hardware tailored around those applications :

Photoshop Benchmark

The core takeaways are these in my eyes:

"Adobe has been making improvements in order to make more effective use of higher core count CPUs, but for now, having beyond ~8 cores is typically not going to give you any higher performance."

"Although Adobe is constantly expanding GPU acceleration support to Photoshop, the current demand on the video card is actually relatively light. Even an entry video card will be able to provide a huge boost in performance for GPU accelerated effects but there is a sharp drop in performance benefit by using anything more than a mid-range video card."

"The exact amount (of memory) you need will depend on exactly what you are doing, but based on your document size we recommend a minimum of 16GB of RAM for 500MB documents or smaller, 32GB for 500MB-1GB, and 64GB+ for even larger documents."

I'll upgrade my PC soon too, likely with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, a Samsung 970 Plus 1 TB as a new main drive and probably 32 GB memory. For the board I haven't looked into it enough yet, so I haven't decided between 470X or 570X, this will require some more research as I plan to experiment a bit with GPU passthrough and virtual machines and that does not work well with all boards. This will be paired with my existing case, BeQuiet Dark Power PSU and Nvidia GTX 1070 and a bunch of different drives I already have in use.

That will be a system that is used mainly for editing with Lightroom and Photoshop, with some applications like Sequator, Deep Sky Stacker and Autostakkert getting some irregular use, as well as some gaming (too little nowadays).

 

[cayenne]

Right now, I"m saving my pennies for the new Mac Pro, that I HOPE will be finally released sometime soon this month.....so I can put an order in and get the write off on my taxes for year 2019.

 

[Aussie shooter]

Wound up with a hp with 16gb ram, ryzen 5, 2tb ssd and i cant remeber the designation but a mid range graphics card. Luckily the fella helping me was a photographer so had a decent understanding of what would do the job(with my current gear and a future likely upgrade). Unfortunately it is a xmas pressie and the boss wont let me have it untill then.

 

[cayenne]

Wound up with a hp with 16gb ram, ryzen 5, 2tb ssd and i cant remeber the designation but a mid range graphics card. Luckily the fella helping me was a photographer so had a decent understanding of what would do the job(with my current gear and a future likely upgrade). Unfortunately it is a xmas pressie and the boss wont let me have it untill then.

Well, cool, give us an update on this thread when you get around to giving it a whirl.

Congrats!!

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

There is a reported incompatibility with Ryzen and Canon R that USB tethering. I'd check it out. Ryzen is fast, but ....

I had issues with 16 GB memory and several images open in Photoshop, the software writes to the hard drive when there is not enough memory. That's not as big of a issue as it was a few years ago before my SSD. You have to have multiple things running as well as lots of open photos to use over 16 GB. With just photoshop and this forum open, I use 10.1 GB. With 3 images, its 13GB. If I was running several programs in the background, I'd exceed 16 GB.

Help - 5dIV losing connection to USB (AMD Ryzen CPU)

The moment I connect my camera to USB 3.0 I can hear the sound of Camera connecting. But in like 5-6 seconds connection will be lost and I will hear "connection out" sound. Still when I physically turn off the camera, I can hear that sound again. So it's like the camera is losing "software"...

www.canonrumors.com

 

[Aussie shooter]

Well, cool, give us an update on this thread when you get around to giving it a whirl.

Congrats!!

Will do

 

[Aussie shooter]

There is a reported incompatibility with Ryzen and Canon R that USB tethering. I'd check it out. Ryzen is fast, but ....

I had issues with 16 GB memory and several images open in Photoshop, the software writes to the hard drive when there is not enough memory. That's not as big of a issue as it was a few years ago before my SSD. You have to have multiple things running as well as lots of open photos to use over 16 GB. With just photoshop and this forum open, I use 10.1 GB. With 3 images, its 13GB. If I was running several programs in the background, I'd exceed 16 GB.

Help - 5dIV losing connection to USB (AMD Ryzen CPU)

The moment I connect my camera to USB 3.0 I can hear the sound of Camera connecting. But in like 5-6 seconds connection will be lost and I will hear "connection out" sound. Still when I physically turn off the camera, I can hear that sound again. So it's like the camera is losing "software"...

www.canonrumors.com

That wont matter. I never tether. I'd need a really long cable to reach when out shooting wildlife. Might get tangled

 

[cayenne]

There is a reported incompatibility with Ryzen and Canon R that USB tethering. I'd check it out. Ryzen is fast, but ....

I had issues with 16 GB memory and several images open in Photoshop, the software writes to the hard drive when there is not enough memory. That's not as big of a issue as it was a few years ago before my SSD. You have to have multiple things running as well as lots of open photos to use over 16 GB. With just photoshop and this forum open, I use 10.1 GB. With 3 images, its 13GB. If I was running several programs in the background, I'd exceed 16 GB.

Help - 5dIV losing connection to USB (AMD Ryzen CPU)

The moment I connect my camera to USB 3.0 I can hear the sound of Camera connecting. But in like 5-6 seconds connection will be lost and I will hear "connection out" sound. Still when I physically turn off the camera, I can hear that sound again. So it's like the camera is losing "software"...

www.canonrumors.com

I actually have a SSD on an external thunderbolt connection that I use solely for cache for all of my stills and video editing, seemed to help especially with my old computer I'm still running on, which I hope to upgrade soon.

But anyway, I thought pushing this bit of potential I/O out to a dedicated resource might help and it seemed to.

Just a thought.

But at a minimum I found it very helpful to also put all my content I'm editing to a dedicated external drive too, so that basically the only thing hitting the internal drive of the computer is for 'house' work, but all images being worked on and cache were on their own dedicated spindles.....

HTH,

cayenne