Upgrades for faster video editing?

[supaidaaman]

-check below- My sig is what system im using now <<

Im mostly editing motion graphics in after effects and nothing over 10min in length (at this time) Recently ive felt my system is getting a little sluggish on the response time of apps loading and multitasking. I dont know what i should upgrade to make things a little smoother. I'm about 35% through my drive space, and slowly climbing.

Should i look into a RAID or more memory? Or just wait and do a total upgrade in 5 months.

 

[Hulk]

You have a reasonably fast system.

I'm not sure what you're asking though?

Your system seems to have slowed down when starting apps and such?
Then make sure your hard drive is defragmented and that you don't have a lot of programs running in the background that have snuck up on you over time.

Your system is slow for video editing?
Video editing needs cpu cycles. Yours is not starved for memory or hard drive speed. Rendering and previews need CPU power. Only and upgrade to a higher clocled (over say 2.4GHz) Conroe will give you a significant boost there.

 

[alimoalem]

Originally posted by: Hulk
You have a reasonably fast system.

I'm not sure what you're asking though?

Your system seems to have slowed down when starting apps and such?
Then make sure your hard drive is defragmented and that you don't have a lot of programs running in the background that have snuck up on you over time.

Your system is slow for video editing?
Video editing needs cpu cycles. Yours is not starved for memory or hard drive speed. Rendering and previews need CPU power. Only and upgrade to a higher clocled (over say 2.4GHz) Conroe will give you a significant boost there.

i think the OP just needs an 8800GTX

actually i agree with everything Hulk said. and definitely on the hard drive defragmentation and CPU points. i'm not even sure a conroe 2.4GHz would be a huge upgrade.

 

[mshan]

Current bottleneck is single hard drive as combined system and video editing scratch disk.

Use the WD3200KS as dedicated video editing scratch disk on a single SATA channel and get any decently fast hard drive (IDE or SATA) as your Windows system drive.

Two SATA hard drives in RAID-0, with a separate Windows / system drive would be ideal as you can get blazing fast sequential data transfer (i.e. working with large video files will feel a lot snappier), but recommendation above should also make a big difference (RAID-0 scratch disk is just icing on the cake).


http://www.videoguys.com/system.htm

http://www.videoguys.com/DIY.html


Once that's been removed, perhaps moving up to Core 2 Duo for greater cpu horsepower? (Dell E520 desktops can be often had for $550 + tax with Dell discount coupons).

 

[supaidaaman]

Its strange, over the past few months photoshop cs2 has been taking a lot longer to start up. After i pass the loading pop up, it takes a good 10 seconds before i am able to click on the File>New> or access any menu...its strange.

Firefox or other programs may take a few extra seconds here and there, but my CPU and memory will only be at 2%, yet there is considerable lagging.




hmm ill probably get another HD then.

 

[mshan]

Run a spyware test?

And / or re-install Photoshop after you have defragmented your hard drive. Or you could do a fresh installation of Windows.

(you have an obvious bottleneck in your system in terms of video editing, but the delayed start-up problems you are describing really shouldn't be a problem with a drive as fast and snappy as the WD3200KS)

EDIT: Ad-Aware is a good place to start if you don't already have a Spyware removal program installed. Spybot search and destroy is also supposed to be good. Webroot is recommended highly, but i think you have to pay for that one.

 

[supaidaaman]

run about 4 spyware scans a week as well as 1 av scan, so im clean

So the bottleneck is the single drive you say?

Could it be bad mobo/HD drivers i installed when i set up my system? I remember changing from the on CD drivers to some nvidia ones and it improved the performance of the HD...

 

[mshan]

For start-ups time and general computing, a second hard drive will probably make no to minimally perceptible speed increases.

For video editing, you should absolutely see a potentially drastic increase in performance, even without RAID-0!!!

Might try a fresh install of Windows and see if that improves start up times. However, for video editing, I definitely recommend a separate dedicated video editing scratch disk, either on a separate SATA channel or on an IDE cable different from the one your system hard drive is one (I believe traffic on these IDE channels is uni-directional at one time)

2 GB of RAM is probably plenty for video editing; I think more than that is typically recommended for power Photoshop users.

 

[supaidaaman]

well im doing motion graphics with after effects right now, and using heavy photoshop work, so i think im seeing myself limited in AE without 4gigs.

 

[mshan]

You can click CTRL + ALT + DELETE (simultaneously) to pull up the Windows Task Manager.

Go to the Performance tab and look on Commit Charge (Total should be current memory usage and Peak is peak memory usage).

Try using your video editing and Photo Editing programs and see what types of memory you are using. Unless you are exceeding 2 GB, I don't think you will see any benefit from additional RAM (reason is that once system memory is exceeded, Windows goes to your Page File, which is on your hard drive, and is obviously going to be slower than system memory)