Dell Precision Workstation 650 Video Editing Computer Review

D. Eric Franks
June 2003

Take two Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors, each with HT architecture, and you end up with a virtual quadro-CPU system. Pragmatically speaking, there is only so much a single user can do to stress out four processors. Still, we'll take a serious whack in this editing computer review and see if candy spills out or not. For power-users and production houses that absolutely need the muscle of two premium-priced professional Xeon processors, this is the editing computer for you. This is clearly more computer than the casual home video hobbyist would ever need.

The system is built around the two professional Intel Xeon CPUs accessing a gig of RAM at a 533MHz front side bus. While this hardware is technically cutting edge as of this writing, the rest of the machine is solid but unremarkable. For example, the 80GB video hard disk is isolated from the 40GB system disk for flawless capture and output, just like we'd demand from any video editing system. The onboard FireWire port uses the Windows natively supported TI chipset. Perhaps the only hardware feature we were less than enthusiastic about was the onboard sound card, but for DiDo (Digital in Digital out) applications such as FireWire or DVD, it makes no difference at all. The 64MB ATI FireGL E1 dual-display card (+$80) should make a difference in displaying OpenGL 3D optimized applications, but not for video. In fact, the only minor problems we experienced during the entire review process involved screen redraw/overlay problems in Premiere that were very likely related to the display card.

The Precision 650 we received was totally loaded with software as well. Premiere 6.5 was installed for video editing, as was Photoshop 7 for still image support. The no-compromises Adobe After Effects Production bundle ($1,654) rounded out the software suite. This machine really is ready for a professional post-production house.

Almost all real-time rendering software is "scalable," which is marketing-speak for "the software is faster on a faster computer." Well, the Precision 650 is indisputably fast, so Premiere should really fly. And it did: real-time previews are instantaneous. Even rendering was fast, however. When sending DV out to a camcorder for previews on a television monitor (which is a critical feature), renders typically did not interrupt the workflow significantly. For example, a five-second title overlay took only 4.74 seconds to render. Adding motion to the title increased the wait to 8.06 seconds. Crossfades (dissolves) happened in less time than the duration of the effect itself. At this speed, renders are so fast that you will simply want to render everything all of the time and preview on your DV camcorder and television. We therefore found Premiere's old-fashioned non-realtime editing mode to be more efficient and pragmatic than the RT preview mode.

After editing and subjectively finding the machine to be fast, we performed our standardized Videomaker MPEG render test (VeRT) to get some real numbers for comparison. Objectively, we were able to render two-pass VBR MPEG-2 video at 21.03fps (about 70% realtime).

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