[SOLVED] 16 vs 32 go RAM for Video Editing. Would 16gb bottleneck 3900x?

xxscienceboyxx

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Nov 30, 2018
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Hello,
For occasional editing of 25 minute long videos at 1080p, is 16gb fine? Or would I need 32 gb?
I could have a few chrome tabs open in the background, or another program.
Edit: The CPU I’m thinking of is the 3900x. Would having 16gb of ram be a bottleneck to it and slow it down for editing?
 
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It would take longer with less RAM? Does that mean that if I had 16gb ram, and a 3900x, the 3900x would edit more slowly because of the lower amount of ram?
When any ram intensive program runs of out of ram, it will resort to using the swap file extensively. This makes a tremendous difference if the swap file is on a hard drive, but still makes a difference when the swap file is on an ssd as even the fastest ssds are still many times slower than ram.

So essentially if you run out of memory, it's like running the program off disk and will slow down a whole lot.
  • 8GB of RAM: Only if you are editing smaller than 1080p projects and are ok with closing down other Programs that are using up lots of your RAM in the background.
  • 16GB of RAM: Good for editing 1080p – 4K 8bit Projects, with minor usage of background Programs
  • 32GB of RAM: Good for any type of editing with heavy use of background hogs, such as editing large images in Photoshop.
  • 64GB or more: This is recommended if you are editing 8K footage in 10bit or more and rely heavily on having several RAM-hogging Programs open at once such as After Effects or Cinema 4D.
 
D

Deleted member 2838871

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  • 64GB or more: This is recommended if you are editing 8K footage in 10bit or more and rely heavily on having several RAM-hogging Programs open at once such as After Effects or Cinema 4D.

Good list. That's why I went with 64GB in my new build... I don't edit 8k footage but I will be editing 6k footage from my Evo 2 Pro drone.
 
Hello,
For occasional editing of 25 minute long videos at 1080p, is 16gb fine? Or would I need 32 gb?
I could have a few chrome tabs open in the background, or another program.

You would always benefit from 32GB with video editing however you can still manage the occasional video editing session with 16GB, It would just take longer. Do you want to spend the extra on an upgrade to 32GB and is the time to do it important.? Remember to not mix RAM kits!!!
 
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xxscienceboyxx

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Nov 30, 2018
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You would always benefit from 32GB with video editing however you can still manage the occasional video editing session with 16GB, It would just take longer. Do you want to spend the extra on an upgrade to 32GB and is the time to do it important.? Remember to not mix RAM kits!!!
It would take longer with less RAM? Does that mean that if I had 16gb ram, and a 3900x, the 3900x would edit more slowly because of the lower amount of ram?
 
It would take longer with less RAM? Does that mean that if I had 16gb ram, and a 3900x, the 3900x would edit more slowly because of the lower amount of ram?
When any ram intensive program runs of out of ram, it will resort to using the swap file extensively. This makes a tremendous difference if the swap file is on a hard drive, but still makes a difference when the swap file is on an ssd as even the fastest ssds are still many times slower than ram.

So essentially if you run out of memory, it's like running the program off disk and will slow down a whole lot.
 
Solution
It would take longer with less RAM? Does that mean that if I had 16gb ram, and a 3900x, the 3900x would edit more slowly because of the lower amount of ram?

It would take longer due to your paging file quota regardless of which CPU.
The page file, also known as the swap file, is a hidden file on your hard drive.

Your computer stores files and programs, and other data you’re using in your RAM because it’s much faster to read from RAM than it is to read from a hard drive. Files are read from your hard drive and placed into RAM.

The computer uses the copies in RAM rather than repeatedly reading the same files from your hard drive. Programs store the data they’re working with in RAM. When you view a web page for example, the web page is downloaded and stored in RAM.
When you watch a YouTube video, the video is held in your RAM but when your RAM becomes full. Windows moves some of the data from your RAM back to your hard drive, placing it in the page file.
 
When you view a web page for example, the web page is downloaded and stored in RAM.
When you watch a YouTube video, the video is held in your RAM but when your RAM becomes full. Windows moves some of the data from your RAM back to your hard drive, placing it in the page file.
This is actually incorrect. Web sites download all files to the drive and then load them from there. Hence the 'cache' and 'cookies'.

And even with videos they are actually written to the drive as well--just not as plainly as they were back in the day (when you could easily save them).

Most applications write to the disk, sometimes even continuously. The bulk of the code runs in ram, but it's always amazing how much of it is just read from the drive as needed.