The Ultimate Vegas Editing machine

For those that know about such things:
Could you describe the ultimate Vegas Workstation (assuming you had the cash to set it up RIGHT) in your opinion? Any information is appreciated, and specifics are helpful.
Here are the parameters:

-Busy [skydiving] operation, 4 editors churning out approximately 100+ 6-7 min. videos/day.
-Goal is for ultimate speed in edit, render.
-Optimized for USB delivery (rendering at 720p as mp4's).
-Vegas Pro 10
-Production Assistant 2

What's the best Off-the shelf computer?

What are the best components if I were to build it myself? ie: CPU, Power, etc...

Is there anything I need to be sure and consider?
Any leads on brands, websites, etc are helpful

Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge!
cheers!
pope

And do not turn off the external enclosure with the eSata cable, EVER, while the computer is on. I ended up having two hard drives crashing needlessly this way.

I have been using eSATA with SATA drives and powering off and on whilst the computer is on for several years now without incident. If you use a separate SATA controller such as a Promise controller in your system (other than the one on the motherboard), most of the time Windows lets you 'Safely remove hardware and eject media' just like a USB drive.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

And in response to David's response, if you are paranoid (like me), get two (2) drive for your source files (which includes your project files) and mirror them (RAID 1)

RAID 0 for your output is fine because you can always recreate from source. Note: RAID 0 is also known as striping, in which a single volume of data spans two physical drives, therefore 2 500GB drives striped give you 1TB of capacity. However, lose 1 drive, and you lose everything.

RAID 1 (mirroring) maintains a copy, so therefore 2 500GB drives give you only 500GB of capacity. Lose 1 and you still have a copy.

Alternatively you could RAID 5 and use 3 drives + 1 hot spare, but you effectively have the capacity of 2 drives as 1/3 is lost to maintaining parity.

And if you really want to do your head in, and are super concerned about maintaining uptime, you can implement RAID 10 which is a.k.a a 'stripe of mirrors', using 4 drives + 1 hot spare.

Whatever you end up doing, you will need a motherboard that supports your multiple drive connectors, has enough power headers and has a power supply capable of supporting your system.

If you plan on getting a u-beaut video card, I would budget for at least 750W or even consider 850W. Make sure you choose a quality brand from Antec or Thermaltake

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

This may not be conventional but here's what I might consider if you're working on multiple projects simultaneously. Just have a bunch of different internal drives. Have the SSD for the OS and programs, then since these are all 7 minute projects and you're not going to keep raw footage around (although do you backup the 720p final renders in case clients lose their copies in the future? Use external for that,) just get a couple more SSD's. SSD's are getting cheaper by the month so if you don't need large ones you can spend the money on the really fast ones. You could have 4 total, one for the OS, one for project 1, project 2, then one for a project to render to while you load/work on the other. Maybe I'm just SSD-happy but if you have such a specific workflow and never have to worry about getting bogged down in 3 hour projects, I'd make a really purpose-built machine. And if there are 4 editors crammed in close proximity you might appreciate not having all the heat that 20-some traditional hard drives raided together would generate.

Most motherboards today should have USB 3.0 ports but I wouldn't worry about it much. You don't want to be editing off that anyway and if you're giving the mp4's to clients on flash drives they won't be usb 3.0 so that won't help with the transfer time. If they're give-away flash drives you're probably not blowing cash getting usb drives with the fastest usb 2.0 transfer rates anyway, right?

One thing that you probably already know but is worth mentioning, is if you're looking to increase render time and your output is 720p, make sure you're shooting in 720p. I don't know if you're using GoPro's or whatever and you're probably shooting at 60p so that you can have great slow motion, but there's really no benefit to shoot at 1080p if everything will be 720p when it's delivered.

Skydive videos sure are fun to capture and watch, but it's a shame you've got to crank so many out so quickly, kind of sucks the fun out of editing. Do they make you use Lenny Kravitz' Fly Away on every video? :P

Thanks for your response David;
Yes it is a shame about there being so many videos to edit, but that's why I need better machines, to give the editors more time to have fun with them!
And FYI, The Lenny Kravitz song is not allowed in my edit room, nor is Tom Petty's "freefallin'" or anything from "Top Gun," Or Van Halen's "jump" or that "Live like you were dying" country song...too painful to hear for a 9000th time! ;)

http://www.triaxproductions.com

The things Nigel posted are all true, but that's why I was asking about GoPro's, since I assumed you'd be dealing with 100% h264 footage and rendering out to h264 720p mp4's, the GPU acceleration would actually be a great boon to you. Of course if you guys are jumping out of planes with shoulder-mounted XDCAM cameras then... well good luck ;)

Networked rendering was a nice feature that I never used once but it's a shame they got rid of. However if there are 4 editors working simultaneously I don't imagine the other 3 would appreciate you stealing their CPU power.

Rendering doesn't require a fast drive at all, unless you do lost of RAW output. The typical finished video output is 25Mb/s (AVC,HDV) to 150Mb/s (Cineform, DNxHD)... that's a walk in the park for any old USB 2.0 drive, USB stick, etc.

The big hangup on writes will be disc thrashing... any time a drive seeks, it's losing speed. So it is very smart to use a separate drive for output. Even the C: drive.. by the time you're rendering on a well tuned system, the C: drive is just sitting there, not doing any work anymore (your code is all loaded, you have enough RAM to not need virtual memory, etc).

Input assets can definitely slow up a render... if you're not hitting 95%-100% CPU (or very high rates of GPU and CPU together), you probably have some kind of input holdup. You're only ever rendering one output file at a time (well, two in a few rare cases), but you can have dozens of input files in a single project. RAID 0 or 1 here can help, but spreading out your assets across multiple drives can help just as much. Per byte transferred, RAID is faster, but per seek, RAID is actually slower. It's a useful tool, but no panacea.

-Dave