Pro Video - Video Workstations for Media Composer

What is Media Composer?

Media Composer, from Avid Technology, is a film and video editing software application or non-linear editing system. It automates time-consuming tasks in the background, so instead of waiting for transcoding, rendering and consolidating jobs to complete, you can just keep working. Plus, it offers automated bin saving, audio mixes, audio/video sync, and more.

What makes the best system for Media Composer?

There is no one ideal system configuration for Media Composer, as users will have different video resolutions to edit and make different use of the software. Media Composer makes use of both CPU cores, higher clock speeds and GPUs too, ultimately depending on whether you are working on video editing, motion tracking and rendering or more intensive tasks like video exporting, which will place more demand on CPU and GPU resources.

What CPU should I choose for Media Composer?

As explained above, a system that will be used for a mixture of Media Composer functions needs to strike a good balance between CPU and GPU(s). Like most digital content creation (DCC) applications Media Composer performs best on a CPU with a high frequency and at least eight cores, although more cores can be beneficial in some processes. We recommend starting with an AMD Ryzen 7 or Intel Core Ultra 7, upgrading to Ryzen 9 or Core Ultra 9 if budget allows. If you’re also going to be generating higher resolution video content then an AMD Threadripper PRO or Intel Xeon W is a good choice as these CPUs have more PCIe lanes, enabling the system to support multiple GPUs and other devices such as capture cards and faster network interfaces.

What GPU(s) do I need for Media Composer?

A fast GPU is crucial for a responsive DCC experience in Media Composer, with more powerful models providing a more noticeable benefit when working with complex and high resolution video. Avid only official supports professional-grade NVIDIA GPUs for Media Composer, so we recommend using one of the RTX-series of cards in your workstation.

How much RAM is recommended for Media Composer?

The minimum RAM that we recommend for Media Composer is 32GB for HD projects, upgrading to 64GB for 4K, 128GB for 6K and 256GB for 8K footage.

What storage does Media Composer need?

We always recommend using an SSD for the boot drive that will host your OS, Media Composer itself, and any active projects you are working on. The high speed of SSDs allows your system to boot, launch applications, and load files many times faster than any traditional hard drive. We would also recommend a second SSD or even an NVMe SSD - depending on your budget - for active Media Composer projects files. If files are large or numerous several secondary SSDs can be added in RAID configurations to protect data integrity. An alternative solution for high capacity SSD active storage or cheaper HDD archiving could be to employ an external NAS device allowing both sharing and RAID protection.

When it comes to deciding on drive capacity, this will very much depend on your number of files and the project sizes. You should also consider the space required by other applications and their associated files too.