100% cpu usage when just opening video studio

[webpdq]

I have read other posts but they are old and don't seem to relate. Hope someone will help. I have been using VS for years but lately VS9 has started eating up 100% of my cpu usage when I just open Video Studio Editor. Pf usage is 329mb. I have dma enabled. I set my virtual memory to 1536 and 2048. I have a HP media center Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 , 3.00 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
c: (on drive 0) 158.34 GB 101.11 GB free
k: (on drive 5) 250.06 GB 225.84 GB free (extra storage)
l: (on drive 6) 203.87 GB 68.79 GB free (backup)

I used to write my video files to an extra internal western dig 250 but it burned out in just 4 months so I now I just write to C in hopes to simplify things. This eeems to have gotten worse since that hard drive died.

I really need help. I have several projects but it is so slow and occasionally crashes. Thanks!

[sjj1805]

Try using your K drive for the video files.
The problem with using just the C drive is that the drive heads on the C drive are doing all the work and having to work that much more moving back and forth over the drive. Even if this doesnt solve the CPU issue it will speed things up as you now have two drive heads doing the work.

(Can you just clarify these are all IDE drives)

Steve J

[webpdq]

thanks for the suggestion. I used to do that but was afraid it was part of the problem. I actually stumbled across something that helped. While googling, I read a post somewhere else about an input device. I realized that my ADS instant dvd usb device was still connected. I use it to convert vhs tapes. VS was evidently spending 100% of the cpu trying to talk to it. When I removed it, the cpu went back down to normal levels... but I still have a problem. I have 30 minutes of mpg files that I am laying captions on. When I open that project, it loads fine but when I move the slider through the project, the computers slows way down and I wait minutes for it to find its place. Then when it finally begins playing the project at that spot, it often freezes on an image as the audio continues to roll. I have had a few problems with titles before so I am wondering if it is related to that? Sometimes VS stops responding and I have to close it. When I do and check in taskmanager I see that VS still has 280,000 of memory even though it is closed. I end that process and start over.

I will start writing to my K drive but is there anything else I should look at? I love this software but it has become unmanageable to me recently. Should I cache clips to memory? Are they other tweaks I should try?

Thanks

[sjj1805]

View this post by Terry Stetler, Moderator of the Media Studio Forum

One thing that'll slow down large programs is themn having to constantly hit the system swapfile.

Sometimes this is due to not having enough physical RAM, forcing programs to use virtual memory (the swapfile). The only real fix for this is adding RAM to the system. More often this affects systems with less than 1G of physical RAM, and these days RAM is cheap so....

There is another cause for swapfile hits: Windows keeps the DLL's (libraries) used by programs in memory (cached) even though the program has been closed.

Since some libraries can be several hundred kilobytes in size this can eat memory like a hawg, forcing many programs to hit the swapfile to load the module for such mundane functions as an autosave. I've had this happen not just in MSPro but in PhotoImpact or Photoshop when I have a large image loaded. The "fix" is to turn off DLL caching in the registry. To do the fix you first Start/run regedit. Next you browse the tree in the left panel until you arrive at the following key location;

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer

Right-click on Explorer and from the context menu choose "New/String value" and name the new key "AlwaysUnloadDLL". Doubleclick on this new key and set its value to "1" to automatically unload DLL's and "0" to turn unloading off. Restart WinXP and the change will be applied.

[2Dogs]

It's odd that your 250Gb drive should "burn out" in 4 months. It's unlikley that it would be caused by your using it too much, so that should not prevent you taking advantage of the extra speed you'll get in certain operations. You won't see a significant speed increase when encoding say AVI to MPEG-2, but if you're trimming avi clips, effectively "Smart Rendering" them, it will happen maybe 3 times faster if writing from one physical drive to another. That being said, most video editing time is taken up with encoding.

I don't have any experience with XP Media Edition, but perhaps you might keep an eye on the number of processes that are running, using Task Manager. When I'm doing any video editing, I like to configure my pc into a minimal mode that maximises it's performance, and you can check out various posts on the subject. You can aim for a minimum of 11 processes, including task manager and VS.

As for the pagefile - the usual recommendation is for 2 x RAM, but I rarely see more than 180Mb used on my system, so you might reduce it to say 512Mb. Do set the maximum and minimum values to be the same, however, so XP doesn't consume resources figuring out what size it needs to be. I've experimented with the pagefile on different physical drives and different partitions, but have never found any measurable benefit from moving it from the C: partition - but for defrag purposes, I keep it on its own 2Gb partition on one of my drives.

Terry's dll tip is interesting, Steve - I'll have to check that out!

[webpdq]

I did the regedit and will see if that helps. As to my drive dying, I took out the memory card reader "drive" and put in the western digitial drive. It was a tight fit and I did not add another fan so it may have just been too hot. I am trying to guess what to search on for the optimum processes. I found a post about enditall and installed that. I am just not sure which processes I can safely stop. I recognize some but there are the ones that I don't:
cfd.exe, lsass.exe, several occurences of svchost.exe, spoolsv.exe, smss.exe, mspmspsv.exe. ... or if someone knows where a post is that might help me figure these out..

Thanks

An UPDATE, the project with captions still runs like molasses uphill but I just started a new one with an hour of avi and it spins like it should. Also when I close VS now (I did the regedit), it releases the 228m memory pretty quickly so I think that helped.

[sjj1805]

The post concerning processes is here
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=9611

Look for the posts relating to the creation of a user profile.
Steve J

[webpdq]

Thanks for all your help. I think they all helped.