Any video editing must haves?

What are some video editing must have gear that are worth the $$ if you have sort of an unlimited budget.

kaitanium wrote in post #18914697
What are some video editing must have gear that are worth the $$ if you have sort of an unlimited budget.

One thing to note is that if you're using Adobe Premier Pro and practically any other video editor, the bottleneck is usually going to be the software pretty quickly. The software is not endlessly

At least four gigs of memory on the video card. In Adobe Premier Pro, whenever I tried "scrubbing" (advancing quickly) through a video clip with only 2 gigs, the GPU would crash hard--it required a computer restart to recover. The problem is that as you're scrubbing, the CPU is madly trying to cache data behind and in front of your cursor position. Four gigs resolved that issue.

I found that multiple video cards did no good with Premier Pro. Adobe claims that if there are two cards, the software will alternate processing frames between the cards during rendering. That might have been a good thing back when cards were very, very slow--like 15 years ago. But today even cheaper cards are so fast that a single card can process faster than the software can shuffle frames between two of them.

Wider bandwidth on the video card also improves performance. Most cards sold today are pushing memory data through a 128-bit interface. A card with a 256-bit interface makes a significant difference. Given a modern card today, you really won't do better at any price than making sure it has 4 gigs of video RAM and a 256-bit interface. Everything else is already more than Premier Pro can utilize.

A fast CPU. Premier Pro does continually improve speed with a faster CPU. It also improves speed with multiple cores/threads up to eight cores/threads. Beyond that, no improvement. The software apparently can't manage more than eight processes simultaneously. But faster CPUs help.

I'm using 16 gigs of RAM on my main board. That has never caused me a problem with having Premier Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder, and Chrome with a bunch of tabs open all at once. I can have Media Encoder rendering a video while I'm editing another video. No problem. If I try to run a YouTube video at the same time, then I see some issues. But, heck, who can effectively edit a video and watch a video at the same time?

Monitor space. More square inches, more square inches, more square inches. You can't have too much monitor space. There are a lot of panels and screens that it's nice to have open and visible during editing. Some people do edit on a laptop. That blows my mind. I might do some really simple stuff on a laptop, but that would get real tedious really quickly.

Video editing is very demanding on the hardware: lots of RAM, high performant GPU, fast CPU with as many cores as possible, SSD's for the system drive (nvme) and storage drives (can be some SATA drives in RAID mode). If budget is not limited, I would personally go for a top dual processor Xeon system, 128GB of ram, a fast nvme drive for the system and programs and a couple of sata SSD's for the data. By the way, some modern video editing software can make use of more than one GPU for rendering. However, the main question is do you need all that power? What kind of editing or rendering tasks are you going to do that demands the ultimate system?

Ok so a good comp is necessary. What about accessories that make editing easier? Trying to build out a room for work. Even if I dont know how to use a certain piece of equipment, i may just learn it too. Im pretty well versed in Premiere for the most part. Accessories that may make my life easier is something I havent done much research on.

kaitanium wrote in post #18915345
Ok so a good comp is necessary. What about accessories that make editing easier? Trying to build out a room for work. Even if I dont know how to use a certain piece of equipment, i may just learn it too. Im pretty well versed in Premiere for the most part. Accessories that may make my life easier is something I havent done much research on.

They've got some fancy editing input boards, but I think just learning the keyboard shortcuts works better than anything.

Except monitor space. As I said before, get as much monitor space as you can afford.

Gimbal/stability + Camera + Macbook + Final cut gets me there. Much more efficient than Premier.

If sky's the limit and you want editing accessories, there are a multitude of editing boards. I think the Black Magic Da Vinci system is pretty comprehensive and flexible:

DaVinci Resolve 16

+1 for DaVinci Resolve. It has even a free version which has almost all features of the commercial version (for casual user).

On another note, monitor should not be neglected. A quality monitor is important for editing tasks and correctly evaluating the final output (color grading, etc.).

Really nice speakers. Really nice chair. Dimmable lights. Two monitors, maybe three if you want to have a larger television for a preview screen for others to view. Acoustic treatment for the room.

raminolta wrote in post #18915801
+1 for DaVinci Resolve 16. It even has a free version which has almost all features of the commercial version.

On another note, monitor should not be neglected. A quality monitor is important for editing tasks and correctly evaluating the final output (color grading, etc.).

Except if you're wanting to get into 4K HDR formats (of which the paid version of Da Vinci Resolve gives you 4K resolution with HDR grading of Dolby Vision, HDR10, or HLG).

noted on the davinci resolve!
I didnt even think speakers. I looked into this back in the day but not for video editing. Would the highly rated Edifier brands on amazon be good?

Thanks for the information.