I won’t say that budget is not a concern because that would not be true. However, I do not often replace my workstation, so it will always eventually pay for itself. Like any professional tool, you try to find the balance between performance and cost. More performance means less time waiting on projects to transcode. But, at the same point, it’s not like I’m working 24 hours a day so arguments could be made either way.
Basically, I’m going to be investing a significant amount of money into this tool so I would rather put a bit more money into it to be able to work as efficiently as possible. So, that being said, let’s remove costs from the discussion.
Now, I do need PCIe lanes with my current workflow. The AM5 platform will basically only allow me to have a GPU and Optane drives. Beyond that, I have several cards that soak up the lanes…
I am still using a Rocket-X card, REDCODE makes up about 70% of the video I ingest and this card makes transcoding REDCODE into DNx, ProRes, and proxies much faster.
I use a DeckLink 4K 12G, for I/O from my decks and out to my reference/production display. I’ve been doing this a long time and I do have some equipment that wouldn’t necessarily be in someone’s workflow that is starting from scratch but they come in handy enough that I’m not ready to remove them just yet.
And, I have a few cards that are dedicated to audio processing and I/O. I have a lot of money invested into these and have no desire to spend more money to go with an external solution. If I were starting from scratch I may do things differently, but this is what I’m working with.
So, there’s just no way I can make that work on a consumer platform and my Threadripper 1950X is really starting to show its age. lol
With all of that being said, would you guys agree that I should just go ahead and pull the trigger on EPYC? I am looking specifically at the 9175F and the 9275F. I don’t think that I need to go crazy with the cores, because at that point I’m not so sure the expense is justified. I have to consider diminishing returns.
Any thoughts?
I do feel compelled to note that no professional workflow should include Bluetooth for audio. It’s unreliable, compressed, and super high latency. Please don’t take this as me throwing you under the bus or anything like that. I thank you for your input and I’m grateful for your opinions. I just couldn’t leave that out there without saying something. And, I appreciate the fact that this says more about me than you. But, we’re all passionate about whatever it is that we’re passionate about. lol