[Graphicism]

I recently upgraded from my core 2 duo (specs in sig) for video editing work and it's not much faster, if at all!

I thought programs like Adobe Premiere made use of multiple cores? I'm exporting a 33 minute video which gave me a time estimate of around 3:30 hours and the CPU isn't exceeding 15% while the RAM is almost topping out. Funny that when I asked here about upgrading I was told more than 8GB of RAM is pointless and it seems to be the component always maxing out.

Any idea whats going on?



New specs:
MOBO - INTEL DZ68BC
CPU - INTEL CORE I7 2600K
MEM - CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600
SSD - Corsair Force Series GT 90GB SATA III
GPU - ATI HD4850
MONITOR - Asus PA246

[TsunamiJuan]

My guess is you are running into two different bottle necks with what you are doing. Let me try to explain.

If i am reading your screen shot correctly you are editing a 33m video. Part of the way adobe works with video is it decompresses it and puts it in a combination of ram and scratch disk ( Ie on the hardisk in a large series of temp files). from the memory usage it looks like its grown to the maximum allowed amount of memory that you have it configured for. This is normal. For something like this more ram is good. I am not sure of the current upper limits of Premier these days as I haven't used the current versions much. However I am sure the adobe site could probably tell you more about maximum files sizes and memory allocation.

Second thing is its possible that you are hitting a I/O limitation on your storage media, which could explain the extremely low cpu usage. You seem to be using about a core and a half of cpu usage. You can check this under your system resource monitor. Look at not just the cpu usage, but disk usage, and memory usage. This will help give you an idea of where your bottleneck is.

Last thing, is you might want to check the overall settings for premier to see if its being limited from running enough threads or overall cpu utilzation. I know some current editing programs as a default are set to use the minimum recommonded settings until set to do otherwise.

Hope this points you in the right direction.

[FX4]

Is the install of adobe premier fresh? I seem to recall it checks your system at install time and not at load time.

[WeThePpl]

That kind of seems like it could be memory dude.

[Graphicism]

Originally Posted by TsunamiJuan

My guess is you are running into two different bottle necks with what you are doing. Let me try to explain.

If i am reading your screen shot correctly you are editing a 33m video. Part of the way adobe works with video is it decompresses it and puts it in a combination of ram and scratch disk ( Ie on the hardisk in a large series of temp files). from the memory usage it looks like its grown to the maximum allowed amount of memory that you have it configured for. This is normal. For something like this more ram is good. I am not sure of the current upper limits of Premier these days as I haven't used the current versions much. However I am sure the adobe site could probably tell you more about maximum files sizes and memory allocation.

Second thing is its possible that you are hitting a I/O limitation on your storage media, which could explain the extremely low cpu usage. You seem to be using about a core and a half of cpu usage. You can check this under your system resource monitor. Look at not just the cpu usage, but disk usage, and memory usage. This will help give you an idea of where your bottleneck is.

Last thing, is you might want to check the overall settings for premier to see if its being limited from running enough threads or overall cpu utilzation. I know some current editing programs as a default are set to use the minimum recommonded settings until set to do otherwise.

Hope this points you in the right direction.

I've used Premiere for quite some time and I'm fairly familiar with the preferences. You can tell the program how much memory to use between Premiere, After Effects and Encoder and that is automatically set at 6GB which I left it. It maxed out very quickly when I'm editing 156Mbit AVCHD files, the screenshot was a low resolution video file but it still ate it up when rendering. I have both windows and my Adobe suite installed on my SSD and use my Rapter as my scratch disc which is kept almost empty.

I checked the system resource monitor and saw that nothing, save for memory (6GB allocation) was maxed out.

Originally Posted by FX4

Is the install of adobe premier fresh? I seem to recall it checks your system at install time and not at load time.

Yes. I did a fresh install of windows on a new SSD and installed Adobe suite shortly after.

Originally Posted by WeThePpl

That kind of seems like it could be memory dude.

Well it renders really slowly before getting close to maxing out the 6GB memory allocation. For example as soon as I boot Premiere after a fresh windows boot the video will still not play smoothly or render quickly and CPU stays at around 15%.

Should I buy another 8GB?

Would a CUDA Nvidia card make a big difference?

[hafa]

Check the memory column on the processes tab in event manager during rendering and see which application is using the most RAM. If it's Premier, then more RAM is likely the ticket.

[WeThePpl]

The videocard could be an issue as well. The fact that the RAM seems to stay loaded down, makes me think it is more of a RAM issue. I have definitely seen computers doing video editing that have a hard time carrying out tasks because of the videocard. RAM is inexpensive man. If you are going to spend money on anything, I would make that the first choice.

I will admit that I did not even take an account for your videocard in my first post; I was not thinking about it at all. One thing you could try - find out the temperature of your gpu upon startup, doing something a little more intense (gaming, watch an hd movie) anything to put a little more stress on the card. And then load it down with your editing software and see how much the temperature varies. If the GPU keeps heating up, and takes a really long time to stabilize the temperature, your card just may be a bottleneck. If it gets exceptionally warmer than the idle temp, it is obviously working the card. When the temperature increases, the performance decreases.

[Graphicism]

I did a little test with a 1 minute clip and kept an eye on the task manager.

Format: H.264 720x576 25 fps
Size: 1min ~ etimated file size 22 MB
Render: CPU 15-20, RAM 550MB and slowly climbing to 2.7GB at completion.
Completion time: 5 minutes

Once the job has been completed the RAM stays at 2.7GB. I would say the process time was quite consistent throughout, it didn't appear to speed up or slow down.

I'll take a look at my GPU temps but I don't think it's using much GPU as the GFX card fan doesn't get loud like it does when I game.

[Graphicism]

So it looks like I might have found my problem.

I need a Nvidia card with CUDA for the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine. It would appear that any Adobe software is purposely crippled without the use of a Nvidia card and despite supporting multiple cores won't utilize them unless you have one...

So it looks like I spent a whole lot on a new system and all I needed was a Nvidia graphics card. Doh! So now the question is which card do I need, do I find a cheap replacement for my HD4850 or go with a next gen.

Video here showing the Mercury Playback Engine in use. (Starts at 1:55)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lyJxBtQqMg

Thanks to all those that took the time to chime in, I appreciate it!

[CrustyButt]

Go into "Power Options" and change it from Power Saver or Balanced to "High Performance" Hope it helps, this helped me with low FPS in games....