OMG OMG OMG Video Editing is so SLOWWWWWWWWWWWW

[theNEOone]

Jesus christ this is ridiculous. I can't believe how slow this junk is. I mean, I just spent 3 minutes listening to my goddamn harddrive spin and spin and spin and all I did was add a 5 second clip to my sequence!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is there anything I can do to speed this up - significantly. I seriously can't stand it. I mean SERIOUSLY. If there's anything that PISSES me off it's a SLOW COMPUTER.
:|:|:|:|:|:|:|:|


Editing Program:
Pinnacle Studio 8 DV (Only program out there that can handle the MicroMV format)

System specs:
60gig Maxtor 7200 rpm (where editing is taking place/being saved)
2200+ XP
512mb Corsair PC2700 XMS
Ti4600

 

[Jeff7]

Sounds like it was re-encoding or examining the entire video again to add that bit. No idea why some software has to do that.
And no, your computer doesn't look like it'd be slow.
Make sure you have DMA enabled for your hard drive though. What OS do you have?

 

[theNEOone]

I'm running on WinXP.

Also, that clip I added was only the first!!

 

[AluminumStudios]

I do a ton of video editing on an Athlon XP2000+ (overclocked to 2100) with 512 megs of PC2700. Video editing, rendering, encoding is an intense and slow process. I edit with MJPEG with data rates from 3000 - 6000 KB/sec.

Reading source clips and rendering to the same drive is a very slow operation (I use Premeire and AfterEffects.) I put two WD400bb IDE hard drives in a RAID 0 and the speed increase for this operation was wonderful. I highley recommend this to anyone - put two IDE hard drives in a cheap RAID 0 with a big strip (256kb or larger due to the large streams of data that are written/read.)

Your specific problem is probably from the Pinnacle software and some superflous work it was doing internally (like rescanning to find scene changes or something ... I'm not sure, I've spent a whole 10 seconds using Pinnacle Studio.)

Try making sure that Pinnacle Studio isn't using any temp files on your boot drive/the drive where your swap file is.

 

[theNEOone]

Yah, I was thinking about putting in a raid array. I realized that my HD was chugging away, but Task Manager only reported 14% CPU usage and I hade about 380mb of ram free. Question about that raid setup. I realize that I should save my captured files and do all my editing off the raid setup HD's but should I also have Studio 8 installed on the raid drives? Would the 256kb stripes hurt performance since the program itself uses files smaller than this?

Also, do you have any idea how I would go about checking if Studio 8 is "using any temp files on your boot drive/the drive where your swap file is"? Thanks!!!

 

[tart666]

Yah, I was thinking about putting in a raid array.

It would be much better to put the source and the target of your encoding process on two separate harddrives.

Even with raid, reading from and writing to the same logical volume will make the drives move the heads a lot. It's the seeking that both slows things down and wears out the drive.

Edit: PS if that's not enough, make the target drive RAID. The writing is usually slower, so RAID will help there. But overall, buying a bigger faster drive is a much better solution for the home user. You only need to use RAID if the fastest drive of the day is not good enough for you.

 

[dszd0g]

This is where SCSI rules (faster access times, faster transfer rates), but its $$$.