Recommendations needed for video editing

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

When I put together my computer a year ago, I had no idea I'd want to
edit home video recordings.... but now that my wife is teaching our
Border Collie how to herd sheep, I find myself with hours of footage
that I need to edit and organize into reasonable videos. I'm thinking
my present box is probably lacking in many areas that could be
optimized, so here's what I have.... I'd appreciate recommendations on
what to upgrade to get the most improvement....

I'll be using Adobe Premier Elements ver 9 for the video processing

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit

Foxconn P45A-S LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
BX80570E8400

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual
Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK (8 GB installed)



GIGABYTE GV-NX96T512HP GeForce 9600 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express
2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

SAMSUNG 2433BW 24" 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500410AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"
Hard Drive (for data) (2 of these available)

OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD3-2VTX120G 3.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid
State Drive (SSD) (for OS and installed software)


I've tried reading several video forums, and most seem to say that the
processor is what affects speed the most. If this is the case, are
there any reasonable CPU changes that can be made without having to
get a new motherboard? What about going to a quad core.... would that
help?

It "seems" like it takes a long time for Premier to react when I ask
for something. would a faster drive for data help much, or am I really
CPU limited? I could RAID my two 500 BG Seagates, if that might help.
I backup daily to external storage anyway, so I could easily go to
RAID 0.... I haven't so far because I haven't really needed faster
access to data until now.

Rendering is what really seems to take a long time, and I don't really
know what that process "uses" in terms of hardware.

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone doing similar work with video.

 

[John Doe]

I'll be using Adobe Premier Elements ver 9 for the video
processing

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core
Processor BX80570E8400

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500410AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA
3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive (for data) (2 of these available)

OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD3-2VTX120G 3.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal
Solid State Drive (SSD) (for OS and installed software)


I've tried reading several video forums,

You might consider posting in a UseNet group dedicated to that
software.

and most seem to say that the processor is what affects speed
the most.

Yeah, CPU and memory are the main speed elements.

If this is the case, are there any reasonable CPU changes that
can be made without having to get a new motherboard? What about
going to a quad core.... would that help?

Assuming Vista is the same as XP... Use Performance Monitor and
Task Manager. I always have Performance Monitor running. I am
always monitoring CPU core usage x 4, disk usage x 3 (probably
should be only 2), and Internet bytes sent and received. In order
to tweak CPU core usage, open Task Manager and Set Affinity. A
free program called Prio might be necessary to make those settings
permanent, I dunno for sure, you can check. Using Set Priority has
always seemed like voodoo (I have played with that for ages), but
Set Affinity does noticeable good. At least in XP, some program
tasks are poorly distributed. When playing Supreme Commander 2, I
can make the game run better by doing the Set Affinity thing.

So... If Performance Monitor indicates that one core is being
overly used at near 100%, open Task Manager and take a program
process off of that core.

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone doing similar work with
video.

That makes sense. The best advice usually comes from a forum with
lots of users of the software you have in mind.

Good luck and have fun.

 

[Paul]

When I put together my computer a year ago, I had no idea I'd want to
edit home video recordings.... but now that my wife is teaching our
Border Collie how to herd sheep, I find myself with hours of footage
that I need to edit and organize into reasonable videos. I'm thinking
my present box is probably lacking in many areas that could be
optimized, so here's what I have.... I'd appreciate recommendations on
what to upgrade to get the most improvement....

I'll be using Adobe Premier Elements ver 9 for the video processing

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit

Foxconn P45A-S LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
BX80570E8400

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual
Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK (8 GB installed)

GIGABYTE GV-NX96T512HP GeForce 9600 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express
2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

SAMSUNG 2433BW 24" 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500410AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"
Hard Drive (for data) (2 of these available)

OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD3-2VTX120G 3.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid
State Drive (SSD) (for OS and installed software)


I've tried reading several video forums, and most seem to say that the
processor is what affects speed the most. If this is the case, are
there any reasonable CPU changes that can be made without having to
get a new motherboard? What about going to a quad core.... would that
help?

It "seems" like it takes a long time for Premier to react when I ask
for something. would a faster drive for data help much, or am I really
CPU limited? I could RAID my two 500 BG Seagates, if that might help.
I backup daily to external storage anyway, so I could easily go to
RAID 0.... I haven't so far because I haven't really needed faster
access to data until now.

Rendering is what really seems to take a long time, and I don't really
know what that process "uses" in terms of hardware.

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone doing similar work with video.

As John says, you use Task Manager, to gauge how a program is responding.

Programs can "block" on I/O, if the kernel is holding up the processor. Or
if some other blocked resource is being used. To give an example, a few
minutes ago, Internet Explorer was virtually frozen and not responding.
It was a networking problem, cause by the design of the web page. The web
page seemed to be stuck in a loop (for minutes at a time), and yet the
browser wasn't smart enough to notice it was a loop.

So if you watch Task Manager, and one of your cores isn't "pegged", then
it could be that some software defect is causing the lack of response. It's
one thing for an "honest" responce to be causing the problem, and quite
another for your fun to be hijacked by some bug.

*******

Video editors have two requirements. The first, is the ability to
preview footage in the editor window. Such an action may be single
threaded. A 3GHz core2 core is plenty for all except the most outrageous
formats (AVCHD 1920x1080 60p), If you're dealing with SD rather than
HD, you'd expect a single core to be able to handle previews without
complaint.

Rendering may use multithreading, allowing all available cores to be used.
When I used Windows Movie Maker, by using Task Manager, I could see that
most of my two cores (E8400) were being used. The rendering was still slow,
I think it was roughly real time, meaning frames could be processed at
about the same rate as if I was playing back the content.

In principle, turning off previewing during render, could speed things up,
but it's just possible that the "decode and re-encode" requires the data
to be in a plaintext form anyway. So perhaps turning that off, makes no
difference.

Some video editors, can use other types of hardware devices, to accelerate
rendering. One example is the Spurs Engine, which uses a Toshiba Cell Processor.
Another is GPGPU computing, which uses the video card GPU for rendering.
Depending on the age of the video editor, it may not have support for that.
Industry wide, proper documentation of actual accelerator usage or performance,
is lacking. (I was reading something just yesterday, where someone found
their GPU rendered video slower, than their CPU. And it was a decent video
card too.)

A possible work flow, would be creating the output in some intermediate
format, and using another tool with better rendering options for
final output.

In terms of hardware, with a P45 board, a quad processor might be an option.
That would double your render performance. But for portions of the program
that are single threaded, that might not help.

I would say it has more to do with program design, than with a deficiency
of your computer. Trial versions of other video editors may be available
for download, and you can do some comparison shopping that way.

https://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/systemreqs/

"2GHz or faster processor with SSE2 support,
3GHz processor required for HDV or Bluâ€ray,
dual core processor required for AVCHD"

If you believed that, you'd be good for even AVCHD.

I doubt the problem is your hard drive. If you have tons of RAM,
you can split the RAM into two pieces, and store a small sample of
footage on the RAM disk. It's even possible, if you have a 32 bit OS,
to define RAMdisk *above* 4GB. I tried the following product, with
6GB of RAM installed, and was able to define a 2GB RAM disk above
the 32 bit limit. That gave me up to 3.1GB for programs, plus 2GB
defined as a super high speed storage device.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

I tested that software for four days, and defined the 2GB RAMdisk
as part of system swap. I only saw two strange events in the four
days of usage. When used as a scratch disk for hosting files, I
doubt you'll have any problems at all. Using it for swap, placed
extra requirements on its behavior, and it appeared to me, it
wasn't entirely bulletproof. Close, but not perfect. Since I'd
set a restore point before using it, I "evicted" it and returned
to my normal 4GB RAM setup.

(Benchmarking the RAMdisk. With 8GB installed, and a 32 bit OS, you
could have up to a 4GB drive. At least, according to their website.
Someone with decent RAM on their motherboard, will be able to beat
these results. I'm still stuck with DDR2. Yes, that's close to
4GB per second. But more is possible, if you've got decent RAM.)

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/8694/hdtunedataram2gbabove.gif

I seriously doubt compressed video footage needs to be pulled faster
than about 10MB/sec off the hard drive. And even my most crappy
drive, can do that. I you had totally uncompressed footage of some
sort, I ran into one person who was pulling HD data off a RAID array at
135MB/sec. But not many people use or manipulate totally uncompressed
video. Video is normally in a highly compressed state - the fact that
processor needs to be wasted, to uncompress it again, is part of
slowing the rendering process.

*******

This is an example of a socket compatible processor upgrade. $340

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-1333MHz...6S3G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302272702&sr=8-1

By comparison, you could swap out the motherboard and CPU, and build
a Sandy Bridge system. The upgrade would be in the vicinity of $550
or so.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt/msg/3fa25d3873725d1f?dmode=source

Paul

 

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

Thanks for the great information!
I suspect that first, I was expecting too much (used to editing in
Photoshop only), and really don't know enough about video yet. Quite
possibly after I understand more I can make some adjustments... EX,
some of the things I've tried editing are old 8 mm home movies,
converted to VHS several years ago, and then to digital recently.. The
quality is very poor, so it doesn't make any sense to render at a high
quality video setting. I'll make some tests and see what difference it
makes.

 

[Red Cloud]

Thanks for the great information!
 I suspect that first, I was expecting too much (used to editing in
Photoshop only), and really don't know enough about video yet. Quite
possibly after I understand more I can make some adjustments... EX,
some of the things I've tried editing are old 8 mm home movies,
converted to VHS several years ago, and then to digital recently.. The
quality is very poor, so it doesn't make any sense to render at a high
quality video setting. I'll make some tests and see what difference it
makes.

I converted old VHS video files into digital DVD format. I thought I
need a faster
computer to handle this. Maybe new upgraded computer does little
faster but not that faster than I would expect. The digitized process
ain't much help with faster computer. Amount of memory size is not
even matter. Quality of the digitized
process can't be functioned by hardware. I learned mobo system has a
limitation on the speed of digitized process. NO matter how faster
your CPU and larger
memory size is, digitizing timing and output quality is never
significantly improved. So is hard drive speed.

One way new upgrade computer needed is playing video game. Since I
don't play
any video game, I don't need new system. And new system is not even
help in
online video files handling. Faster CPU would not render faster
online downloading speed.

 

[Flasherly]

When I put together my computer a year ago, I had no idea I'd want to
edit home video recordings.... but now that my wife is teaching our
Border Collie how to herd sheep, I find myself with hours of footage
that I need to edit and organize into reasonable videos. I'm thinking
my present box is probably lacking in many areas that could be
optimized, so here's what I have.... I'd appreciate recommendations on
what to upgrade to get the most improvement....

I'll be using Adobe Premier Elements ver 9 for the video processing

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit

Foxconn P45A-S LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
BX80570E8400

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual
Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK (8 GB installed)

GIGABYTE GV-NX96T512HP GeForce 9600 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express
2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

SAMSUNG 2433BW 24" 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500410AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"
Hard Drive (for data) (2 of these available)

OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD3-2VTX120G 3.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid
State Drive (SSD) (for OS and installed software)

I've tried reading several video forums, and most seem to say that the
processor is what affects speed the most. If this is the case, are
there any reasonable CPU changes that can be made without having to
get a new motherboard? What about going to a quad core.... would that
help?

It "seems" like it takes a long time for Premier to react when I ask
for something. would a faster drive for data help much, or am I really
CPU limited? I could RAID my two 500 BG Seagates, if that might help.
I backup daily to external storage anyway, so I could easily go to
RAID 0.... I haven't so far because I haven't really needed faster
access to data until now.

Rendering is what really seems to take a long time, and I don't really
know what that process "uses" in terms of hardware.

I'm used to single cores, or what it doesn't use being preferable, as
unrelated background program processes may introduce unwanted
aberrations into a final rendition or encode. MPEG2 is probably the
standard to work within in terms of meeting compliance over the widest
range for various optical players. TMPGEnc, say, as opposed to Adobe,
might involved matching other programs for compatibility with
TMPGEnc's encode, again, either by necessity or preference to
supercede added functions of Adobe's suite concept. Individual
programs to edit the audio track, splicing, subtitles, or a title
screen to a menu items and underlying chapters, are within means to a
professional, or not, product in terms of broadcast
engineering. ...as close as that would be in proximity from a
standpoint outside the studio, from a home PC, which in likelihood
will extensively be covered within these forums.

http://forum.doom9.org/

 

[RayLopez99]

Rendering is what really seems to take a long time, and I don't really
know what that process "uses" in terms of hardware.

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone doing similar work with video.

Software is as important as hardware. Check out the freeware
"Handbrake" for video editing--you can compress a normal video file by
ten fold using the default settings in Handbrake, with little loss of
quality.

RL