Video Editing Help

[turbopants]

I have an AMD X6 2.80 GHz, 8GB DDR2 RAM and a GeForce GTX 550Ti video card, running Win 7 Pro 64-bit. I recently got into editing 1080 videos using Adobe Premiere. Some of the longer videos end up around 5-8 GB files size. It really starts to choke after 15 minutes of video time. I'm not really a video editing guy so I don't know what the weak link is. I was debating buying 16GB of DDR3 RAM, and I'm sure that can help a bit, I just wasn't sure if 16GB was enough. You can get 32GB for around $165 nowadays. Based on the setup I have, what would you recommend upgrading to help process and render these really big files?

 

[MichaelSP]

As to RAM usage, have you tried viewing to amount being used while editing using task manager? (ctrl-shift-esc to bring it up). If it is using all of it (unlikely as 8GB is a fair bit) then RAM may be the issue. More likely though it si something else. Hope this helps

 

[killerhurtalot]

well. First of all, your motherboard doesn't support ddr3 ram. You're going to have to buy a new motherboard if you want ddr3 ram. (you said you're using ddr2 ram)

Secondly,I agree with the other guy. Check your ram usage while running premier. Windows+alt+del and look at the ram usage for premier while you're editing.

 

[turbopants]

Sorry for the delay, and thanks for the replies. I opened up a 6.7GB premier project and when editing it really only used 29% CPU and 2.91GB RAM of the available 8GB. So now I really have no clue why it lags, unless it's just limitations of my video card memory or possibly RAM speeds. Maybe it's time to start overclocking?

 

[manofchalk]

The Graphics card has no impact on video editing performance, and in the cases it does, its a question of how much faster it goes. The GPU isn't a bottleneck here.

Try monitoring CPU and RAM usage when exporting the video or previewing a large section. That is what uses the CPU and RAM respectively. I recently did a small film project and would notice my 8GB of RAM being used up quite quickly when previewing (rendering inside Premier).

Your disk speed can also be an issue when exporting video. Tell us your storage solution and I can advise on how to improve it. Just that if you are running a single drive (possibly IDE given the age of the system) with the OS, Premier, raw footage and being the site of where the video is being rendered too, that will significantly slow down performance.
I wont be online for a few days, so the answer may take a while though.

I suspect that to get a big improvement, you will need to effectively get a new computer. That system is pretty old and your dealing with high resolution footage.

 

[turbopants]

Thanks for letting me know your experience with Adobe.

I actually built this PC from the ground up, and it's only about 3 years old. I used a 1 yr old MoBo because the early released DDR3 RAM was barely any faster than DDR2 but cost 4 times as much in 2008, so I opted to stick with DDR2. The main C: drive is a 350GB Sata drive, where Adobe is installed. I have a 2nd 1TB sata drive where the media is stored, but it's getting very full. I don't know if that plays a factor on dedicated storage drives, or if the slow down only occurs when your OS C: gets full. But I believe they are both 7200 RPM if that's relevant.

I have 2 30GB solid state drives at my disposal, I was original going to strip them and use it as the Win7 OS only drive, and install programs to a sata drive. Not sure if that could help or not, but wanted to mention I have them if they could be used in this scheme.

As for Adobe premiere, it takes a good 30-40 minutes to export the project file into a DVD ISO format for burning. I'll have to try that again and check RAM usage, I just didn't want to get that started last night and have to force quit and cause a reboot.

 

[manofchalk]

Just that if everything was on a single drive, then the HDD is being used to feed information to the OS and any programs that are running, feed the raw data to Premier and write the rendered footage to itself. As you can imagine, doing all that will slow down whats happening a fair bit.

My immediate thought was to use one of the SSD's as a cache drive for the OS, but I am fairly sure you cant given that SSD caching has only really become available since last year. Maybe throw them in the system and have one as your output drive, and the other to hold raw footage. Using them as an OS drive I wouldnt advise, as Win7 64bit takes up ~20GB and formatting will wipe out about 5GB, not leaving much room for updates and such.

To chheck for RAM usage, just have Task manager up with the system performance stuff open, get into a large Premiere file and hit space to play through the video. You should notice that the RAM will increasingly become full as the work area is rendered.