Video editing box - hard drive allocation question

[MichaelD]

I'm trying to get the best possible video crunching performance out of the rig in my sig.

Using Windows Movie Maker, it took 26 minutes (too long IMO) to render 13GB of raw DV down to 680MB to fit on a CD...I think it may be b/c of my hard drive setup. I want to check if I've got things set up correctly.

I have two SATA-II hard disks.

Disk 1 has the operating system and programs on it.
Disk 2 is my scratch/storage disk.

I DL raw DV from my cam to a folder on Disk 2. Windows MM is set to use Disk 1 as "temporary storage"; I'm assuming that's where the rendering gets done? The destination for the final video is another folder on Disk 2.

Is this correct? Should my raw DV NOT go on Disk 2? Would I see a performance increase if I added another HD for the raw DV, still have final render go to Disk 2 and not touch the Operating System (Disk 1) at all?

Thanks much!

 

[gsellis]

Your real performance issue on the conversion is almost all CPU. Playback in the editor and editor "snapiness" is controlled by the source distribution of work/render, video, and OS.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: gsellis
Your real performance issue on the conversion is almost all CPU. Playback in the editor and editor "snapiness" is controlled by the source distribution of work/render, video, and OS.

If you're doing considerable compression, this is likely the case.

Having separate drives for the source and destination files (and, I guess, one for temporary data for the compression program) will improve performance if you are disk-bound. This would likely help if you were just editing the file (removing or adding clips) but not changing the format or bitrate.

But when you are actually transcoding, especially with complex formats like DIVX or H.264, the limiting factor is almost always going to be your CPU.

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks guys. I know this is no quad-CPU rig, but this rig smokes my old dual 1.6GHz @ 2.6GHz Xeon system.

It's not playback I'm concerned about; it's the rendering time. I've noticed that when it's rendering, with nothing else open/running, the CPU (both cores) usage is only about 75%.

Being that they aren't maxxed-out, this points to the disk subsystem not getting the CPUs the info fast enough.

 

[MichaelD]

Anyone else have any thoughts or suggestions?

 

[Blain]

13GB down to 680MB! :shocked: That's some heavy compression.
What HDs are you using?

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: Blain
13GB down to 680MB! :shocked: That's some heavy compression.
What HDs are you using?

Yeah, it's quite a squeeze. I'm using two Seagate 320GB 7200.10 SATA's.