Does an SSD have to read a whole video file to get a specific clip?

Commander Matt

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Nov 3, 2014
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That's one long title, sorry.

So with the help of Tom's Hardware-ers I've found a nice OCZ SSD for editing videos. The main goal I want to accomplish is reducing, if not removing, any and all playback lag while editing caused by HDD access times.
At the moment, the only SSD I have is a 60GB one. I can edit a few things off it, but I'd really like to have another to have dedicated to editing (and maybe another for games 😉 )

So, now for my actual question:
I know that an SSD does not have any "finding" lag (it's just there). But is it instant in accessing a specific point in a video, or does it have to read the whole thing, or read up until that point?

In other words, does an SSD have to read through a video file in order to find a specific clip of it, or can it just read the specific clip?

Thanks in advance! 😀
 
Solution
That has nothing to do with SSD or HD.

Is the editing software that does the "jumping" It looks at the video file and if it already have time stamps (already indexed) then it will move unimpeded. In the absence of proper index the editing software should have a tool to create a index for the file, it takes one pass though but it's a once-off thing, if you remember to save the file with the new index.

That depends more on the filesystem. FAT listed the next sector at the end of each sector (it was basically a linked list). So it had to read the entire beginning of a file to get to a specific part of the video.

NTFS I believe stores the list of the file's sectors in one place, so it can quickly "zoom in" on the part of the video you want and read only those sectors.
 
That has nothing to do with SSD or HD.

Is the editing software that does the "jumping" It looks at the video file and if it already have time stamps (already indexed) then it will move unimpeded. In the absence of proper index the editing software should have a tool to create a index for the file, it takes one pass though but it's a once-off thing, if you remember to save the file with the new index.
 
Solution


Okay, thank you!

Thank you Mitchell and Solandri as well! 😀