system requriments?

[cyprusx]

i constantly get errors trying to open saves, and people kept telling my specs are too low, so i looked at the system requirments.

it says that the minimum ram is 256 and i have 448
Pentium® III 800 MHz processor is the min and i have a celeron D 3.2ghz
it say u need 4gig space and i have 6gig free
i dont have a sound cars or a graphics card though

are my specs too low

[heinz-oz]

Yes

A good portion of the little RAM you have is going to be taken up by the on board video card. Just because the Celeron processor is above the minimum requirement speed wise does not make it adequate either. There is more to processing power than the clock speed. 6 GB free disk space is not going to be enough to even defrag that drive let alone to provide the required space for the project temp files and the swap file. The swap file is likely to take up most of that free space and heavily fragment it in second just because of the frequent swapping the OS has to do because your RAM is less than adequate.

[cyprusx]

but im above the minimum requirements, so are you saying that the official requirements are misleading?

[cyprusx]

if I put a Gforce 6200 256mb in my pc would that help

[Devil]

There is nothing misleading. If you have a computer with 256 Mb of free memory, it will work but...

* 256 MB of RAM (1GB or more recommended)
* 800 MB of available hard disk space for program installation
* 4 GB+ hard drive space for video capture and editing
* Windows-compatible display adapter with at least 1024x768 resolution (1280x1024 recommended)
* Windows-compatible sound card (multi-channel sound card for surround sound support recommended)

... it will not work at all unless the minimal requirements are available. That means your graphics and sound adaptors must not hog memory and on-board ones do. It means you must have nothing else working on the machine, no other software, no internet, no firewall, no anti-virus, no browser, no e-mail client, no other windows open, no networking, no scheduling, no nothing.

Press Ctrl-Alt-Del and click on the Processes tab. You can see how many are working and their memory usage. Click on Performance and you can see how much physical memory is available (I have 1 Gb on the machine I'm writing this on; at this moment I have only 363 Mb available and the only things that are running are the Internet, Security devices, browser, e-mail client and a weather software consuming ~70 Mb).

Heinz has told you what he thinks about HDD. I agree with him. The 4 Gb+ recommended is sufficient on a defragmented C: disk for a, say, 2-3 minute DV project, provided it is free. Unless you have permanently allocated virtual memory, this will expand to >2-3 times your total memory size, reducing the availability of HDD space for your project. On my video machine, with 2 Gb RAM, I have a fixed 6 Gb partition just for VM, the latter set for 5.8 Gb max and min, so there is no variability. In addition, I have set MSP to put all temp and preview files on a dedicated 80 Gb drive, keeping 15 Gb free on C: and using a 300 Gb dedicated drive for video. I defrag the C: drive and reformat the temp/preview and the video drives before the start of each new project. As Heinz said, you cannot even do a decent defrag with what you have allocated yourself.

So, I agree with Heinz: it is very unlikely you have sufficient horsepower for a reasonable project.

[cyprusx]

thanks for the reply, if I put a Gforce 6200 256mb in my pc would that help.

by the way I currently have 37 processors and 510 PF usage is that bad

[Gorf]

No, they are the minimum requirements, which means you can get the minimum benefit from the program (in other words, it works, but only just). The more complex your project, the more likely you are to suffer slowdowns and crashes.

Having said that, my laptop is lower spec than your machine (half the CPU but slightly more main memory - onboard GPU) and I have no problems with stability, just speed. I think you need to look elsewhere for your problem.

[Devil]

Yes it's bad. 37 processes are FAR too high for video work and the 510 Mb of page files is very high when it is more than your total RAM. I just switched on my video computer to get a comparison. It starts with 28 processes pinching a total of about 120 Mb and the PF usage is 90 Mb, What is more important and I notice you ignore this, of my 2 Gb of physical memory, I have 1.8 Gb available.

I suggest you find someone with expertise in setting up a computer for optimal usage, but I fear you will fight a losing battle unless you invest in some more hardware. You simply do not have the horsepower for serious video work.

Yes, installing a graphics card with its own memory will help a bit, provided you disable the existing system in BIOS, but don't expect miracles.

[cyprusx]

so to make it run good i need 1 gig of ram and more hard drive space

i used other programs before and they never gave me these saving errors, but i get it constantly with this program.

[heinz-oz]

Upgrade your system or keep using the other programs.

[EDell]

Regarding system requirements, here are the specs on my computer:

HP Pavilion 520N
Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (build 2600)
1.30 gigahertz Intel Celeron
Maxtor 4D060H3 [Hard drive] (61.48 GB)
56.47 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
33.64 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. TUW-LA REV 1.xx
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
512 Megabytes Installed Memory
Slot 'DIMM 1' has 256 MB
Slot 'DIMM 2' has 256 MB
32 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache

The problem is this: Media Studio 8 runs and everything functions but it's always in choppy and slow mode. Watching a film in preview, the film will be choppy as it plays, and doing editing requires a lot of patience since every action seems to take forever to complete - and this is with NO other programs running other than what is necessary for the computer to work.

So the question is this: What's missing in my specs to allow for a smoothly running and functioning Media Studio program, or what can be adjusted or updated?

[jpal]

Just a thought, have you tried temporarily disabling any Antivirus/firewall software, while disconnected from the Internet? These can be system hogs. Not saying this will be a fix, because I don't think your system will be that responsive, but could improve things a bit.

JB

[Devil]

If you use Instant Preview, this would be almost inevitable with your minimal horsepower. If you use normal Preview and allow it to render, it should play smoothly, provided you have everything unnecessary switched off.

[Gorf]

Further to Devil's answer, a slight performance improvement can be had by creating a Video Editing Profile. It allows you to keep certain programs (such as antivirus programs for the internet) on one user ID, while you can run a trimmed down session for video editing.

[EDell]

To Response 1: Yes, everything's turned off, including the firewall and antivirus, but I still get the problem.

To Response 2: The preview window I'm referring to is the one that plays while editing. I'm not sure what the difference is between the instant and normal preview windows. It's while I'm seeing what I'm trying to edit that the video is choppy, not the playback, and that any editing I try to do takes forever for each action to complete itself. This program worked fine on my other computer which had about the same specs. So it seems that something with this current computer is interfering with the program. Could it be the video card or anything else video-related?

To Response 3: I'm not sure that creating a video editing profile would work since I'm the only ooe who uses the computer - unless you're talking about another kind of video editing profile.