6 Replies Latest reply: Apr 19, 2011 9:22 AM by John T Smith RSS

    What HW should I upgrade?

    woodwizer Community Member

      Hi

       

      I have Premiere Pro CS4 and am editing footage from a Canon XHA1 and a Panasonic SD-700, both HD though I think the Panasonic is AVCHD and not sure what the XHA1 is.  My old laptop wasn't up to editing the HD footage, so I upgraded to a new PC. It is running W7Pro 64bit, but I don't think CS4 takes advantage of 64bit, does it?  Whilst editing is much better on the new setup, playback from the timeline is very choppy.  It's passable, but annoying.  The source files play and seek much better, but have moments of freezing.  Video exported from the timeline (MPEG2) plays fine.  Here are my PC specs

       

      HP8100

      Core i5 650@3.20Ghz 3.33 Ghz

      4gb RAM

      Integrated Intel HD Video Card

       

      So question is.  What should I upgrade?  I have about £300 ($490).  There's not much I can do with the CPU, the RAM seems like a lot, but I would be the cheapest to upgrade to something like 8GB.  From what I have read, video cards don't make much of a difference until you get up into big bucks.  What about upgrading to a SCSI hard drive system?  I'm currently using the stock 500GB drive, so this needs upgrading anyway?

       

      Any help, appreciated.

        • 1. Re: What HW should I upgrade?
          Bill Hunt CommunityMVP

          CS4 is optimized for a 64-bit OS, but that is to run ON it, though not to be able to use all the features and power, as it is a 32-bit program, with the limitations of 32-bit code. CS5 is a 64-bit program, so CAN take full advantage of the 64-bit OS architecture.

           

          With AVCHD material, the CPU is the biggest bottleneck. An upgrade to an i7 - 9xx series would improve playback of that, and all H.264 footage.

           

          With a 64-bit OS, though CS4 cannot fully utilize more RAM, the OS certiainly can, and then it can allocate the max RAM to PrPro. The 4GB is just enough to run Win7 - 64. More will improve things.

           

          Last, the I/O becomes very important to smooth playback (though with AVCHD/H.264, the CPU is the bigger bottleneck). More, faster HDD's will help here. For HD material, having a RAID 0 for the media can be useful. See Harm on To RAID, or Not to RAID.

           

          Good luck,

           

          Hunt

          • 2. Re: What HW should I upgrade?
            woodwizer Community Member

            Thanks Bill.  So to surmise:

             

            Upgrading to i7 is important (but outside my budget)

            CS5 will ustilize more of the 64bit architecture (but outside my budget)

            More Ram will allow PrProCS4 to have more (or all) of the 4GB

            Improving my HDD strategy is probably the biggest and best thing I can do with my budget at this time.

             

            I hope I've read that tight.  Now I'll read Harm's post on RAID and order some new RAM.

             

            Many thanks

            • 3. Re: What HW should I upgrade?
              Bill Hunt CommunityMVP

              For the AVCHD material, the RAID will not have that much effect, but for other HD footage, it will.

               

              Good luck,

               

              Hunt

              • 4. Re: What HW should I upgrade?
                John T Smith CommunityMVP

                Add more Ram so Win7 64bit may run faster by not having to use the page file as much... and which should allow more ram to be used by CS4

                 

                You need AT LEAST two hard drives, three are better... internal 7200rpm drives, or eSata as a 2nd choice

                 

                My 3 hard drives are configured as... (WD = Western Digital)
                1 - 320G WD Win7 64bit Pro and all programs
                2 - 320G WD Win7 swap file and video projects
                3 - 1T WD all video files... read and write
                .
                Trying to use only ONE Hard Drive for Video Editing
                .
                You are a music conductor, with a baton that you use to point to various parts of the orchestra... this is like Windows pointing to various parts of the hard drive to do Windows housekeeping or to load program segments for various functions
                .
                Now, at the same time and with the same hand... while still using the baton to conduct the orchestra... pick up a bow and play a fiddle... this would be doing something with your video file at the same time as all the other work
                .
                You as a person cannot do both at the same time with the same hand
                .
                A computer is a LITTLE better, in that it can switch from one kind of task to another very quickly... but not quickly enough for easy video editing
                .
                One hard drive is not as good as two which is not as good as three

                 

                PS - your computer will always struggle with an i5 CPU and AVCHD files

                • 5. Re: What HW should I upgrade?
                  woodwizer Community Member

                  Thanks John, I have been doing some research and your post does make sense.  Can I just ask why the C: Disk has to be so large?  Could I get away with using a 180GB drive? or 150GB even?  I'm currently using a 60GB partition with 11GB free.  I can't see me using much more than this. 

                   

                  Also, I'm not sure if I understand the third drive.  Is that just for final exported media?  I'm also currently trying to figure out how to store finished projects.  I'm currently looking at NAS server and will probably store finished projects off site.  This is off topic, but does it make sense to store completed projects on something like SD cards?  or are these less resillient over traditional hdd's?

                   

                  To My mind, the PC should be

                   

                  1 150GB (C:)

                  2 250GB swap and temp storage

                  3 500GB working directory

                  4 500GB for exporting prior to storage or backup

                   

                  I'm very new to video editing, so happy to learn if I'm looking at this wrong.

                   

                  Thanks

                   

                  Tom

                  • 6. Re: What HW should I upgrade?
                    John T Smith CommunityMVP

                    My 1st 2 drives are 320G 'cause Newegg had a sale when I built last year, so I bought several... I'm not there to look, but I think I'm using <80G for Win7 and all software (one computer for everything, so that is ALL software I use)

                     

                    2nd drive is (not mentioned) misc data storage (not video) plus I told Win7 to use it for swap file... and all of my PPro project files

                     

                    1T drive is for ALL video files... read and write

                     

                    Your use of 4 drives may be even better... I had a small budget when I was building

                     

                    Using a server for finished storage is good (I use a 2T USB drive) as long as you don't try to EDIT from a server drive... lots of problems with that have been posted over the years, since PPro is not designed to work in a distributed environment 

                     

                    The only SD cards I use are in my Canon Vixia, so I have no idea about using one for storage... they would certainly be smaller than an external hard drive!