Configure: Adobe CC Video Editing Computer Workstation-Core i7 for 2019

The Render-Spare Drive is not required for your Adobe System, but it's a good idea to have.

Having a secondary SSD or hard drive in addition to your Media RAID can be important. This drive can be used as your EXPORT DRIVE for your exports to MPEG-2, Blu-ray, H.264/265, QuickTime, or anything you are exporting.

Using a separate storage for exports will decrease your render times because the system will perform better reading from one drive and writing to another. In addition, it allows you to make backup copies of your important clips and projects. If you selected a 4TB Media RAID then a 4TB Storage drive makes sense.

If you are a serious power user for Premiere Pro, After Effects, or Photoshop then you should consider adding an SSD drive for your Media cache, scratch disks, and After Effects cache. The SSD drive will considerably speed up those applications, when working with complex projects.

In this section, you can choose your option for the secondary full size bay. You can select a Blu-ray or DVD recorder with the same options as the primary optical drive or you can add a USB 3.0 (4) port hub for maximum flexibility on the front of the case.

In this section, you can choose your Internal Media RAID drive array. Please note that configurations that have 8 drives require the 8 bay case.

The Media RAID (volume) is where you will store your video, audio, stills, and other media for online editing. Although the Media RAID shows up as one drive letter, it is actually made up of two or more spinning hard drives or Solid State Drives.

We offer 2 types of RAID configurations. We use a multi drive RAID configuration for your media storage because one single hard drive is not fast enough to edit the formats used today in most cases. We use a proprietary 'caching' algorithm combined with our RAID configurations to enhance the multi stream performance. The end result is that you don't have to wait for your storage system to catch up to your creativity.

Media RAID-0: for Performance

In a RAID-0, we use 2 (or more) hard drives and combine them together so they appear as one drive letter (volume) in Windows. This is required for SD/HD/4K editing because a single hard drive is not fast enough. If you take the steps to make sure your important video and audio assets are backed up, then the standard (2) drive RAID-0 is adequate. Hard drives are mechanical, and they can fail. Our systems have numerous external ports for easy connection to USB 3.0, optional Thunderbolt drive arrays. There are many options to keep your media online and available. 

Media RAID-10: for Performance and Content Protection

In a RAID-10, we essentially mirror a RAID-0. This is all done in the background with no intervention from you. The UPSIDE to this solution is fast speed with data redundancy. If a hard drive fails in the RAID, all of your projects and media are safe. With our RAID-10 configuration, if a drive goes down, the system continues to operate without a hiccup, and there is no need to rebuild a RAID-10 array to access your projects and media stored on it. Once you replace the failed drive, the array will be protected again. The DOWNSIDE to this solution is that it is more expensive, and doubles the number of hard drives required to implement it.

In this section, you can choose an I/O device for your Adobe workstation.

We offer I/O hardware from Black Magic Design. These powerful cards and external boxes allow for real time 10 bit monitoring and capture capabilities. The Black Magic products offer impressive connectivity at a very affordable price.

For an internal solution, the Black Magic Design Intensity Pro 4K is an internal card that offers HDMI HD/SD Capture, as well as SD analog capture from S-Video, Component, or Composite sources. You also get outputs of all of these connections allowing you to monitor your audio in video in full HD 1080p or UHD. The Black Magic Design Decklink Studio 4K offers an internal card with every connection a pros could ever use. You get HD/4K/UHD/SD SDI 3G, AES audio and multiple SD analog connections including 4 channels of audio.

For an external solution we, we offer two choices. The first choice is the Black Magic Design UltraStudio 4K. This box is housed in a small 1U rack-mountable chassis and offers a wide variety of SDI and analog inputs/outputs. The Black Magic Design UltraStudio 4K requires the Thunderbolt card found the connectivity category further down the page. The next choice is the Black Magic Design UltraStudio 4K Extreme. This extremely versatile box is housed in a 4U rack-mountable chassis and offers the most connectivity of any product in it's class. Connection to your DreamStation is accomplished with Thunderbolt 3 or the included PCI-e card.

Keep in mind that all of our Graphics/GPU cards include the ability to have at least 3 monitors and most support 4 monitors. Adobe CC 2017 allows you to use a computer monitor as a full screen preview display. The extra displays do take away from the GPU power available for effects processing making the BlackMagic hardware a worthwhile investment.

Thunderbolt is required for the Black Magic Design UltraStudio 4K and recommended for the UltraStudio 4K Extreme.