Case Study - Pinewood Studios: Production Company Needing Powerful Workstations for Video Editing

Introduction

We recently sold three high-performance HP Z8 G4 Workstations to a company in Pinewood studios. The customer informed us that they are a picture editing company, specifically for TV and film, and had worked on popular series, such as Afterlife, Call the Midwife and Would I Lie to You! 

For such important pieces of media, the company really needed workstations that had some real horsepower. 

To run systems like Avid and DaVinci Resolve,  processors capable of multitasking are essential. Film and TV production requires the workstation to run 4k, 8k, and possibly even 12k media, as well as complex audio processing. Multicore processors are necessary, at a minimum, a 6-core processor running at 3.0GHz.

Powerful memory is also a quintessential part of any video editing workstation. This is what allows the workstation to cache the preview files you are working on. If you have  larger media frames, the more RAM you will need. 32GB is enough for smaller projects, but 64GB and above is recommended for those major editing jobs.

Now, you’re going to need something to lighten the load off of the CPU and RAM - which is where the Graphics Card comes into play. 4GB of VRAM Graphic Cards should be enough to assist, but for more complex pieces of work, the faster the better. This reduces your rendering time, ensuring that your video editing process is nothing like watching paint dry.

Of course, large files of media will require a large amount of storage - 1TB SSD should do the trick! 

The Solution

We know you’re wondering how Intelligent Servers fixed this for our customer. Well, we made sure they were provided with three HP Z8 G4 Workstations. 

With great brain power (CPU), comes great memory (RAM). Fortunately, with a dual Intel Xeon-Gold 6145 (18-core, running at 3.0GHz) Processors, and 192GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM configuration, the Z8 G4 Workstations are shy of neither.

For Avid and DaVinci resolve, the NVIDIA Quadro P5000 comes highly recommended. To guarantee a rendering time faster than you can blink, these Graphic Cards are 16GB.

To top it off, each workstation has 1x 1TB M.2 2280 SSD, with Windows 10 Pro 64-bit pre-installed and fully activated, so that all their projects will be unstoppable!

By buying refurbished instead of new, the customer purchased the workstations at just under £5,000 each, including VAT. A huge saving compared to buying new at £9,500 excluding VAT! 

All the Workstations and components came with our market-leading three year warranty, including three years of remote setup and support. The Workstations were configured and thoroughly tested by our HP experts and shipped in a ready to deploy condition.

At Intelligent Servers, we offer a wide selection of refurbished Workstations, including the HP Z Series and Dell Precision Workstations. Have complete control over your budget and specification by configuring your Workstation using our online build tool on the product page - or speak to our team with over 10 years experience for recommendations. 

We have worked with thousands of video editing agencies, architects, engineers and graphic designers to configure powerful Workstations that will support high-intensive software. We hope that you’ll be next!