Part of an Ordinary Aggressive Marketing Campaign for my latest video.

We’ve been doing some updating of the Newforge Studios hardware recently. The main editing rig is getting on a bit, and packed a Core i5 2500K, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, Radeon HD 5850 graphics card, and a Samsung 840 EVO SSD for a system drive. The first upgrade was a 500 GB SSD to store files for the in-progress video projects, to reduce access times from a standard platter hard drive. I had been working off USB 3.0 drives for convenience, which was fine for smaller projects and 1080p work, but it’s time to move on.

The MSI motherboard was limited to a max 16 GB in 4 GB DDR3 modules, so that was the next target. I purchased an 8 GB Kingston HyperX Fury kit, and instantly ran into problems. Compatibility seemed to be an issue with the 2×4 GB G.Skill Ripjaws memory in place, which was a shame. It had worked reliably for many years, but it was time to swap it out in favour of 16 GB of faster Kingston RAM. This appeared to solve the stability issues, and I upped the clock speed of the processor from 3.5 GHz to 4.2 GHz with no niggles. This lasted for a few weeks until the motherboard started complaining and refused to boot until the overclock was reversed.

We’ve got a Blackmagic Cinema Camera 2.5K, and to make the most of it we needed Davinci Resolve up and going. Resolve is a professional level colour grading software, and one that comes bundled with the camera. Unfortunately the ageing Radeon 5850 1 GB was no longer supported, and Resolve refused to open, let alone perform well. It was time to say goodbye to the old card and welcome in a Nvidia 10 series – the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB. Why 6 GB over 3 GB? From my limited research, the more VRAM you can throw at rendering, the better. It’s no GTX 1080, but it’s not a slouch either, and can handle games pretty well.

The video took longer than I had initially planned, but was pretty enjoyable to make, and I learned a lot along the way. I had some experience with masking in the past, but it went really well for this project. I was able to make use of the Huion graphics tablet for more detailed masking, and planned out the sequence in advance. Planning is key to getting these videos out with a reasonable quality, and in a timely fashion. I also got to play with Adobe Audition and the other elements of the Creative Suite.

Enough chit chat, just watch the damn video already!