I have a workstation based around a three year old 9650 processor
running at 3.45Ghz, 8GB of RAM, two Sapphire 5770s, a Intel SSD for
Win7 64bit, a couple of small OCZs in a RAID 0 for installing games
on, a 300GB Raptor and a collection of drives for storage. This has
worked out well for my needs and has been great for SD video editing.
However, now I record cable broadcasts at 1080i and am editing HD
TS files. I use TMPGEnc video software and I own their encoding,
editing, and DVD making software. In SD I had no problems editing the
frames would slide by, back and forth, quick cuts and paste, it has
been great. But when I started doing the same thing with the TS files
things slowed down enormously trying to deal with the blizzard of
data running through the editing stream. I edit from the RAPTOR which
is surprisingly faster and easier to work with then the RAID 0 SSD
although it is common knowledge that for what ever reason SSDs are
not particularly good for video editing.
Then TMGEnc Video Master Works 5 came out and this made the task
doable. It will edit a TS file and will skip displayed frames in
order to provide the same time line at considerably faster speeds.
But this also caused, at times, abrupt transitions and was not as
quick and silky smooth as working with SD. I started to wonder what
it would be like to edit out of a RAM drive. Unfortunately, doubling
my DDR2 800 from four 2GB DIMMS to four 8 GB DIMMS cost a fortune..
like 4 or 5 hundred dollars. Even though this year I decided to hang
on to my system for a few more years, spending that kind of money on
something I can't take with me when I upgrade later on, would be crazy.
But this month some memory manufactures are dumping old inventory and
I was able to buy 4GB Patriot DDR2 800 DIMMS for 59 a piece and with
a special 15 percent Newegg offer plus free shipping I decided to
pull the trigger. And after I Ebay my old RAM I will be only in at a
little over a hundred bucks ,which I can live with.
So today I installed the 16 GB and booted up. I did not expect to
notice any change what so ever from the desktop, but for what ever
reason, I do. Things seem a little quicker and slicker, kind of the
feeling you got the first time you turned off your pagefile and ran
out of RAM with XP. But the real reason for this upgrade was video
editing and I am very happy to report that placing the file I want to
edit in a 6GB RAM drive made a huge difference. It turned HD editing
into an experience that is very much like SD editing. There are no
missed frames and performance is quick and silky smooth. So my theory
actually worked in practice.
And it is kind of cool running 16GB of RAM. I can't help thinking
back to how impressed I was when I was able to afford 16 megabytes of
4X4MB DRAM SIMMS installed in my 486DX33. :)
- [H] video editing out of a RAM drive Winterlight
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