Audio/Video Editing Workstations

Professionals that edit multimedia material require workstations that excel in three areas:

• Video enhancements
• Specialized audio
• Specialized drives

The following sections assume the use of nonlinear editing (NLE) schemes for video. NLE differs from linear editing by storing the video to be edited on a local drive instead of editing being performed in real time as the source video is fed into the computer. NLE requires workstations with much higher RAM capacity and disk space than does linear editing. Although maximizing RAM is a benefit to these systems, doing so is considered secondary to the three areas of enhancement mentioned in the preceding list.

Video Enhancements

Although a high-performance video subsystem is a benefit for computer systems used by audio/video (A/V) editors, it is not the most important video enhancement for such systems. Audio/video editing workstations benefit most from a graphics adapter with multiple video interfaces that can be used simultaneously. These adapters are not rare, but it is still possible to find high-end adapters with only one interface, which are not ideal for A/V editing systems.

When editing multimedia content, or even generalized documents, it is imperative that the editor have multiple views of the same or similar files. The editor of such material often needs to view different parts of the same file. Additionally, many A/V editing software suites allow, and often encourage or require, the editor to use multiple utilities simultaneously. For example, in video editing, many packages optimize their desktop arrangement when multiple monitors are detected, allowing less horizontal scrolling through timelines. The ability to extend the Desktop across multiple monitors is valuable in such a situation. For more on setting up this feature, see the section “Multiple Displays” in Chapter 4, “Display Devices.”

To improve video-editing performance, insist on a graphics adapter that supports CUDA and OpenCL. CUDA is Nvidia’s Compute Unified Device Architecture, a parallel computing architecture for breaking down larger processing tasks into smaller tasks and processing them simultaneously on a GPU. Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a similar, yet cross-platform, open standard. Programmers can specify high-level function calls in a programming language they are more familiar with instead of writing specific instructions for the microcode of the processor at hand. The overall performance increase of macro-style application programming interfaces (APIs) like these is an advantage of the technologies as well. The rendering of 2D and 3D graphics occurs much more quickly and fluidly with one of these technologies. CUDA is optimized for Nvidia GPUs, while OpenCL is less specific, more universal, and perhaps, as a result, less ideal when used with the same Nvidia GPUs that CUDA supports.

Furthermore, depending on the visual quality of the content being edited, the professional’s workstation might require a graphics adapter and monitor capable of higher resolutions than are readily available in the consumer marketplace. If the accuracy of what the editor sees on the monitor must be as true to life as possible, a specialty CRT monitor might be the best choice for the project. Such CRTs are expensive and are available in high definition and widescreen formats. These monitors might well provide the best color representation when compared to other high-quality monitors available today.

Specialized Audio

The most basic audio controllers in today’s computer systems are not very different from those in the original sound cards from the 1980s. They still use an analog codec with a simple two-channel arrangement. Editors of audio information who are expected to perform quality work often require six to eight channels of audio. Many of today’s motherboards come equipped with 5.1 or 7.1 analog audio. (See the section “Analog Sound Jacks” in Chapter 3, “Peripherals and Expansion.”) Although analog audio is not entirely incompatible with quality work, digital audio is preferred the vast majority of the time. In some cases, an add-on adapter supporting such audio might be required to support an A/V editing workstation.

Specialized Drives

Graphics editing workstations and other systems running drive-intensive NLE software benefit from uncoupling the drive that contains the operating system and applications from the one that houses the media files. This greatly reduces the need for multitasking by a single drive. With the data drive as the input source for video encoding, consider using the system drive as an output destination during the encoding if a third drive is not available. Just remember to move the resulting files to the data drive once the encoding is complete.

Not only should you use separate drives for system and data files, you should also make sure the data drive is large and fast. SATA 6Gbps drives that spin at 7200rpm and faster are recommended for these applications. Editors cannot afford delays and the non-real-time video playback caused by buffering due to inefficient hard-drive subsystems. If you decide to use an external hard drive, whether for convenience or portability or because of the fact that an extremely powerful laptop is being used as an A/V editing workstation, use an eSATA connection when possible. Doing so ensures no loss in performance over internal SATA drives due to conversion delays or slower interfaces, such as USB 2.0.

If you cannot find a drive that has the capacity you require, you should consider implementing RAID 0, disk striping without parity. Doing so has two advantages: You can pay less for the total space you end up with, and RAID 0 improves read and write speeds because multiple drives are active simultaneously. Don’t confuse spanned volume sets with RAID 0. Simple volume sets do not read and write to all drives in the set simultaneously; data simply spills over to the next drive when the preceding one is full. The only advantage volume sets share with RAID 0 is the ability to store files larger than a single drive. Consult Chapter 2, “Storage Devices and Power Supplies,” for more information on SATA and various RAID levels.

If you would also like to add fault tolerance and prevent data loss, go with RAID 5, which has much of the read/write benefit of RAID 0 with the assurance that losing a single drive won’t result in data loss. RAID should be implemented in hardware when possible to avoid overtaxing the operating system, which has to implement or help implement software RAID itself.