Is my computer powerful enough to handle Ulead?

[helpwanted]

I'm experimenting with the trial version of Ulead Video Studio 11 and so far it works the best of all the Uleads on my admittedly antique computer, but still have problem with overlay video slowing down (at least it's not stop-motion anymore)

this may be the wrong place to ask but is there any way to upgrade my computer (specs below) to be able to handle Ulead specs (specs below that)? do I need to buy a computer with Intel® Pentium® 4? or is there a way to upgrade the Athlon processor? or whatever might solve this problem

thanks for any help MS

Processor
Type AMD Athlon XP 3000+ / 2.17 GHz
Installed Qty 1
Max processors supported 1
Cache Memory
Type L2 cache
Installed Size 512 KB
Cache Per Processor 512 KB
Mainboard
Data bus speed 333 MHz
RAM
Installed Size 512 MB / 2 GB(max)/added more now 960
Technology DDR SDRAM
Memory speed 333 MHz
Memory specification compliance PC2700
RAM form factor DIMM 184-pin
Storage Controller
Type 1 x IDE - Integrated
Controller interface type IDE
Storage
Hard Drive 1 x160 GB - Standard - IDE - 7200 rpm
Optical Storage
Type DVD±RW - IDE
CD / DVD read speed 40x (CD) / 12x (DVD)
CD / DVD write speed 32x (CD) / 8x (DVD±R)
CD / DVD rewrite speed 16x (CD) / 4x (DVD±R)
Optical Storage (2nd)
Type CD-ROM
2nd optical storage read speed 48x
Graphics Controller
Type AGP - Integrated
Graphics Processor / Vendor NVIDIA GeForce4 MX
Video memory technology Shared video memory (UMA

at some point I think I also upgraded the NVIDIA
------------------------------------------------------------

Intel® Pentium® 4 (equivalent) or higher recommended
Microsoft® Windows® XP SP2 Home Edition/Professional, Windows® XP Media Center Edition, Windows® XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows Vista™
512 MB (1GB RAM or above recommended)

[helpwanted]

forgot to add, I have Windows XP Home edition service pack 2

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forums,

Do you foresee editing HD, now or in the near future? If so then it is underpowered.

Now for SD video projects, it is sufficient, however to decrease the demand on your PC, I would add a second Hard Drive, increase your RAM to 1gig. Then I would look for a good PCI video card, that does not use shared memory. Using shared memory, means it borrows from your RAM, which then further slows things down. Try one that has it's own memory, at least 128 megs or more if possible. That would free up RAM usage.

[helpwanted]

thanks for the advice

am also thinking about just buying a laptop

do you know if this would be compatible with ulead? although circuit city always gives you 30 days to return something no questions asked, so it's just a matter of deciding if I can afford it (although note it has no firewire which I would like to have)

Toshiba Satellite 15.4" Widescreen Notebook PC (A135-S2356)

Processor

Processor brand Intel®
Processor type Celeron M
Processor speed 1.60GHz
Bus speed 533MHz
Level 2 cache 1MB

Memory

RAM 512MB
Memory Type (RAM) 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-4200)
RAM expandable to: 2GB


Storage/Drives

Hard drive speed 5400RPM
Hard drive size 80GB
Burns DVDs Yes

Graphics and sound

Screen size (diagonal) 15.4"
Maximum screen resolution 1280 x 800
Video memory 128MB
Video memory type Shared

Ports
USB 2.0 4
Firewire 0
Infrared port No
PC card Yes
Express card No
S-video out Yes
Media card slot No
VGA Yes
TV tuner No

[joosuna]

HelpWanted...how do you plan to transfer video files from your camcorder to your computer for editing when using the proposed laptop ? if the laptop does not have a firewire port ?

Just asking to see if there is there another way...?

[Ken Berry]

If when it says it has a PC card, I am assuming it means a PCMCIA card. If so, you can buy a PCMCIA firewire card to slide in that slot. They aren't expensive.

However, I would have to say that the laptop you outline is far less endowed with computer resources than the desktop you described above. And you don't say if the laptop will use Vista or XP. If the latter, it might be OK, though I think would run extra slow with VS11+. If Vista, then I would say it would not run very well at all with only 512MB. My Vista machine has a Core 2 Duo 2 GHz chip but came with only 1 GB of RAM, and frankly it was simply not enough to run VS11+ properly. It runs much better with the extra 1 GB I have now inserted.

[helpwanted]

<HelpWanted...how do you plan to transfer video files from your camcorder to your computer for editing when using the proposed laptop ? if the laptop does not have a firewire port ?

Just asking to see if there is there another way...?>

I use computer software DVD decrypter (no longer available but I think something called DVD Fab Decrytper is out there) or DVD Shrink (not sure if still available). It's far easier than hooking up your camcorder cuz you just put the dvd-r into your drive, but I would like firewire because I have some dvd-r that will only play on a standalone dvd player/recorder for whatever reason, probably the original encoding is old and not supported by the more recent player/burners

[helpwanted]

thanks to both vidoman and ken berry

it occurs to me (after so many years trying out various versions of Ulead and other programs) is that the problem may be I have more than one user account on XP?

if I delete the extra account do you think that would help solve the problem of memory use?

my wife and I each have an account in order to have our own favorites on the internet pulldown, but I could install firefox in addition to explorer and keep my favorites there.

Then I'd only have to worry about her deleting my stuff off the desktop by accident! but it would be worth it to have full use of the program, without the overlay video etc slowdowns

[helpwanted]

<probably the original encoding is old and not supported by the more recent player/burners>

oops, wrong, it appears I forgot to finalize them and now the standalone won't do it for some reason, probably cuz of a later "upgrade"

[helpwanted]

well six months later and I may be finally getting around to addressing the problem. Changing my computer to one user didn't help with the Ulead slowdown problems

<Now for SD video projects, it is sufficient, however to decrease the demand on your PC, I would add a second Hard Drive, increase your RAM to 1gig. Then I would look for a good PCI video card, that does not use shared memory. Using shared memory, means it borrows from your RAM, which then further slows things down. Try one that has it's own memory, at least 128 megs or more if possible. That would free up RAM usage.>

My computer originally had 512 MB of RAM and I bought another "memory stick" and installed it which brought it up to the current 960 MB of RAM. I know the computer has another slot for another chip, and I found this one for a full gigabyte (link) so if I added it the RAM memory would be close to 2 gig(?).

http://www.4allmemory.com/index.cfm?fus ... _id=126909

Does anyone think it would help and/or would it be the same as adding another hard drive? I would be comfortable adding another chip as I figured out how to do that before, but I would not be comfortable trying to add another hard drive on my own so would have to take it to a shop.

I'd like to try adding more memory first and if that doesn't solve the problem go for the new PCI card, but again that would be new installation worries for a novice like myself. Would the new PCI card replace the old one, or be in addition to it?

thanks for your help

[Ron P.]

448 meg memory card is a real odd configuration. I know several years ago, laptops used bizarre memory sticks, but I can't recall that size. Are you sure it's not a 512 meg?

I recently purchased a laptop, and it too only came with 512 megs of RAM, and was upgradeable to 2 gig. To bring it up to 2 gig, I had to purchase 2-1gig sticks. That's generally the way they are configured.

Ok I just re-read your first post, and you're referring to your desktop right? If so than the 448 meg is real bizarre, it should have been a 512 meg stick. In fact I think that nowadays it's real difficult and more expensive to buy less then 512.

If you click on my System button below, you'll see that my system is not much more, if any more powerful than yours. It can only handle 1 gig ram. So to help I added the additional hard drive, which incidentally there is no slot/mounting bracket for, other then the "zip tie" I'm using to hold it in place. For Desktop computers adding a second hard drive is not expensive, and most PCs have a built in slot for them. So installing is very simple. Laptops do not have that ability, and would require using an external hard drive.

Ok back on track, since you're running XP, 1 gig RAM should be sufficient, since it uses much less than Vista. So with your current setup you should be alright, but more RAM never hurts.

You might want to review Steve's tutorial on Creating a Video Editing Profile. That is the method that I use. I have 2-hardware profiles, and of course 2-user accounts (one "normal" account, and one for video editing). This seems to help alot, because while editing all the "bloat" is shutdown, providing more CPU resources for editing. Your wife could also still have a user account, with the "normal" hardware profile.

[2Dogs]

With XP on the AMD 3000 machine, I would say that 512MB of RAM would be sufficient to run VS for SD editing. Increasing that to 1GB will help load times, but you'll see no speed increase for things like video encoding. I don't think it's worth increasing it further to 2GB, especially with the current price of DDR RAM - well over double what you pay for DDR2.

If your pc is from one of the Tier One suppliers, such as HP etc, you would probably see a significant improvement in performance if you were able to do a clean install of XP. Most pc's come with all manner of pre-loaded software which is difficult to get rid of, and it tends to slow things down.

I still use my old Pentium 4c 2.8Ghz desktop for SD editing with VS, and it's fine. Not as fast as my C2D laptop, but it has much faster optical drives and hard drives, which tend to make up for that, together with built in Firewire ports.

I fully agree with vidoman's recommendation to fit a second hard drive. Just about all pc's will have a slot ready for another drive, so it's really easy to do.

Definitely a good idea to use Firefox in place of Internet Explorer for more secure browsing, but you should also run regular disc cleaning software. In addition to what's built in to XP, I use several third party programs for that.

Also don't neglect to defragment your discs on a regular basis. I prefer to use a program called Diskeeper to do that, rather than Windows Defrag, since it runs several times faster and can tolerate much less than 15% free space on a hard drive, which I believe is the minimum for the Windows utility.

I don't think there are any easy cpu upgrade options - the 3000 was pretty much the fastest cpu to use Socket A as I recall, so you'd have to go for a cpu + motherboard combination - which would mean you'd have to reinstall XP, and it would be like building a whole new pc.

[helpwanted]

Thanks for all the new tips.

Yes I am still on my desktop emachines T3092. Was considering a laptop for awhile to just do video editing on but maybe it would be better to get a laptop for everyday stuff like email and clean out the emachines T3092 completely for just video editing. We're getting to where we need two computers anyway.

But until I can convince my wife (heh heh) we should put out the money for a laptop no matter how cheap, I'll look into adding the second hard drive since this sounds like the most complete solution. I'll also look at the "creating a video editing profile" post.

I just got rid of Norton AntiVirus in favor of AT&T (which came with the DSL) and it seems easy enough to turn off all the AT&T functions in task manager before video editing. I also have Power Director and they warned me that Norton could interfere with that if it wasn't turned completely off. I have the same video slowdown problems with PowerDirector when using overlay video.

So I'll try Ulead and PowerDirector again now that I've gotten rid of the Norton and see if that has helped. I'd like to work out the kinks with ULead especially because I think the final video quality output is slightly better. If I go into task manager and turn off all the unneeded processes I can usually get the performance PF usage down to below 200 MB before calling up the editing programs.

thanks again

[2Dogs]

I presume you're in the US, since you mention AT&T. I actually have a DSL account with AT&T - but I'm not aware of them having any anti-virus software. I don't actually use any of the AT&T software anyway, since my DSL modem connects to my wifi router, and that won't work with the AT&T stuff installed. Although some may find the AT&T help centre quite useful, it uses too much in the way of resources for my liking and I have a thing against software that keeps reporting back to base, so I uninstalled it shortly after evaluating it.

I would suggest you try AVG free edition in place of Norton - it doesn't slow your pc down as much. (and it's free!) You definitely don't want to connect to the net, or indeed plug in any removable device without having an anti-virus program. I would also recommend ZoneAlarm free edition as a firewall, in place of the Windows firewall, and Spybot SD as the anti-spyware program. Beware, there are tons of anti-spyware programs out there that are actually....spyware!

Whatever video editor you use, encoding will be slowed down significantly by filters and overlay video. If you add enough filters, it can slow even the fastest cpu to a crawl. With your pc, you should be able to encode miniDV avi source material to mpeg-2 at about something approaching 20 frames per second - i.e. it will take maybe 100 minutes to encode a 60 minute video.

In actual fact, the time to encode the video doesn't form the most significant part of the time spent on a project anyway, so you really shouldn't worry about the pc not being particularly fast when compared with the latest dual core machines.

I looked at some e-machines pc's similar to yours when buying a pc for video editing a few years back. In the end, I picked up my HP at what was then a bargain price on eBay. At the time it seemed that the Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading just beat the Athlon for video encoding, whilst the Athlon was better in general usage. I also preferred the look of the HP case to that of the e-machines too, for what it was worth!

If you're on a budget, you can generally get a much faster desktop pc for the price of a laptop, and laptops are generally quite limited in the speed of their drives, especially the optical drives. That might be significant if you ever need to run off a load of copies, say of a school video. There's also very little upgrade potential in a laptop.

I would suggest you wait until a suitable hard drive is on offer at a local big box store, or get one from the likes of Newegg. It should be possible to pick up a 320GB drive for about $80 or less. Not sure if your motherboard supports SATA drives - the e-machines site only gives pretty sketchy info, so you need to make sure it does, otherwise get an IDE drive.

If you're the sort who might entertain building your own pc, you could consider a more substantial upgrade. Since standard resolution video editing does not need a fancy graphics card, integrated graphics work just fine. Therefore you could get a cpu/motherboard combo and add 2GB of cheap DDR2 RAM, probably all for about $160 - $200. You'd be using your existing case, power supply, hard drive, optical drives, card reader and so on. You'd have to install Windows and all the new drivers, but you could turn your humble 3092 into a decent dual core pc, with an Athlon X2 4000 at that price. Just a thought. If you were adventurous enough to do that, you could probably gain an additional 20% in performance from simple overclocking too - something not possible with the e-machines motherboard.

[helpwanted]

Yes I'm in the U.S. When I got BellSouth DSL the BellSouth Anti-Virus came free with the package. When I installed it, it "upgraded" to the AT&T Anti-Virus (also free).

Using task manager I determined all the processes I didn't need (including a lot of the AT&T) and turned them off, which got me down to about 160 MB RAM/PF usage before turning on the Ulead. I output the overlayed video to mpeg again and it seemed a lot better although still not quite perfect.

What's the idea of installing a second hard drive again? Do I do all the video editing on the second hard drive, coupled with setting up a user account just for video editing? ("Creating a Video Editing profile" http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=13950)

Will my computer recognize it as a totally separate hard drive or does it complement the C drive in some way? sorry for all the rookie questions

thanks