Hello,

I have an old (4 years, now) HP computer with basic i5. I upgraded it with 256 Gb ssd and 8Gb ram (I can't add anymore). The included nvidia video card is basic.

It works with kdenlive pretty well, but:

* when I use two cams, I can't activate the transitions/effects while reading, and it's a bit disturbing
* rendering takes ages... approx 5x the video duration

so I want to buy a new computer.

I guess high end game computer would do the job, but I can't afford to pay $4000!

I notice it's pretty rare to find 32Gb ram computers, so I may have to add it myself.

But the main question is the one of the video board. High end video boards are extremely expensive. I use openSUSE which have pretty up to date drivers , but what Linux kernel is able to do with cuda and such? will this really be used by kdenlive?

seeking for hints
thanks
jdd

Graphic card is not important for kdenlive today. jbm wrote in the release notes of 15.04 that openGL and GPU effects will be added in future. But the GPU effects work pretty well without a dedicated GPU, just by using HD4000 graphics from intel. Memory is nice to have, but 32 GB is not worth the prize I guess. If the near future brings rendering with GPU acceleration? I don't know. Is getting rendering from factor 2 down to 1.5 worth some hundred bugs? You decide.

What are your plans? What word fits best to you? Hobby? Amateur? Professional? Making one or two projects a year (like me) or one in a week? I am a absolutely happy with a notebook (intel 3632qm 2.2 to 3.2GHz, 8 threads), 8 GB ram and onboard(!) intel HD4000 graphics. I am cutting HD with proxies. Rendering full HD in h.264 is about 1.2-2.5 times slower that original length using an external USB3 HDD. Using shotcut (with gpu acceleration) worked perfectly fine, so I am looking forward to have GPU acceleration in kdenlive and possibly skip proxy creation.

If you do not render a video every week, consider saving some money for the next computer, that will surely be even more faster and have a better GPU at the same lower price.

capslock wrote:What are your plans?

Yes, I should have said that. I'm an amateur. I mostly shoot bands shows (my daughter is a singer, and have friends , length around 3 hours, to be cut in as many clips as songs. Some shoot with two to three camcorders + sound track.

I shoot mostly in summer (now and on), I did two last week (still mounting the first), and have one a week in the near future (most are not public, so I can't show you).

Mostly, when I don't make too complicated effects, I can render and continue editing (great feature of kdenlive), but kdenlive is not that stable, so when the work is long I have to wait to the end of the render to do the next. (3 crashes only today).

3 hours rushes, 3 hours first scan, around 6 h basic editing, 15 h rendering that is more than half the time.

When I began editing videos rendering was much longer , but this stay much for a one week work, I don't do this only

thanks
jdd

video card is a waste since kdenlive will never ever touch it. Whether working with low res clips, or qp=1 x264 with a bunch of video effects, my GPU always idled at 37c using kdenlive. No video editors in Linux touch the GPU besides maybe one or two obscure effects/transitions that will require lots of messing with to compile and get to work.

Save the money you would have spent on a GPU to get two SSDs in RAID 0 and the fastest processor you can. CPU will improve things, GPU is a waste.

I can do 1080@30 heavy editing with a gts450.
A gtx750TI is sure able to handle heavy 1080@60.
Note that you still need a good cpu for video decoding. (I5 4460 here)

P.S. This is with MachinTruc.

So no need to an expensive video card, good news

thanks all
jdd

I have an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz with 32GB RAM here and two WD1000DHTZ (one programs, one data) formatted with BTRFS. The program one is backed using bache by a 8GB SSD (wanted to use it also for data, but it has not enough write cycles).
The 32GB are never used. kdenlive uses <4GB. For rendering it seems every one of the four cores runs 1 hyper thread. I have not checked during editing. The GPU is a Nvidia GT 640 with proprietary drivers and near to idle even on my 4K2K display.
Where I experience some stucks is during playback of clips or the project when I zoom in the timeline to see the thumbnails or when scrolling there in the same resolution. I haven't fully tracked it down to the last, but the problem are disk accesses. I am not sure if the problem is that the harddisk is to slow or BTRFS is not optimized for the application.
Regarding by background/ experience. I just started with kdenlive to do some cooking videos (<>15min) with my wife with our digicam or smartphones.