Dedicated HD for UVS

[screwball2]

Hi, I have just aquired a second 160GB drive and would like to dedicate it to ULVS 11. There are a number of questions if anyone could/would help?

1) I can boot to this disk alone, is that a help or mean nothing.
2) Do I need windows on that drive or a bare disk with just uVS?
3) Should I install UVS 11 again from Disks or transfer what is on main drive.
4) If the answer to above is transfer, what directories are required.

In a nutshell, all I want is to set up the machine / disk to enable smoothest operation in all departments.
I am sure there must be other past topics on this subject.

[mitchell65]

Why not leave your program where it is on the "C" drive and use your new hard drave as storage for all you videos and project files. Just make sure that when you go to save as you chooose a folder on your new drive. Also remember to download your video clips to the same drive. Then if at any time you need to format your hard drive you have no worries about loosing any video data.

[screwball2]

I understand your logic and suggestion, but is what you suggest maximising the smoothness, speed of rendering etc.etc. If so, than this is what I will do. It's just that someone (as there are many experts here) may say "Ah, this is the best way to maximise efficiency of UVS" ??
But thankyou

[mitchell65]

The overall speed of your program is determined by your computers hard ware, hard drive speed, CPU spec and amount of RAM you have installed. Installing more RAM on a PC is the easiest way to increase performance. The speed of your vatious hard drives is also quite important. If you have a fairly new PC then your onboard hard Drive the "C" drive is probably rated at 7200rpm. Some hard drives are only 5000rpm.
Finally if you store your data on a separtate drive, like your external hard drive, it will make no difference to how fast your system will render a movie. That is down to the aforemenioned PC components.
HAve just checked your omputers spec. It is better than mine and mine works fine so you should have no problems on that score.
Happy editing

[screwball2]

Thankyou for all your advice - will do exactly as suggested.
Regards
Kevin

[sjj1805]

You are using XP Pro therefore you're best bet without having to create a dual boot system is to keep your video files on the new hard drive.
Now set up a "Video Editing Profile" as outlined in this link:

---> Click here <---

[mitchell65]

What a brilliant idea! Can I just make one suggestion. Instead of making a screenshot by pressing "Print Screen" then having to crop the image and copy and paste again, if you press "Alt+Print screen" this will give you a screenprint of just the active window. No cropping necessary!

[sjj1805]

Good point - however I wrote that article 3 and half years ago!

[mitchell65]

Steve
I will fully understand if you just delete this post as it really has nothing to do with VS.
I have started to put your idea of a Videoo Editinf Profile into practice. I have got as far as the Final Step. My problem is the startup folder is empty or at least it shows no entries., not even a desktop.ini file. I have done a search for this file and it comes up in three other folders but not "Startup". I am running XP Pro SP3 and I have run my registry cleanup software. If you could help I would appreciate it but as I said I will fully understand if you would prefer not to get involved in Windows problems.

[sjj1805]

Please repost here
http://forum.corel.com/EN/viewtopic.php?t=13950
otherwise we are hi-jacking someone else's thread.

[mitchell65]

OK have done.
Thanks

[2Dogs]

I fully endorse Steve's advice for setting up a video editing profile. In my experience, I've found it to be most beneficial on single core pc's, but less so on a P4 with Hyperthreading.

Unless you do lots of searches on your pc, I recommend that you turn off disc indexing. It can speed things up noticeably. In "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer", right-click on a drive letter and then click on "properties". In the box that comes up, uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disc for fast file searching". When prompted, have it do this to all sub folders.

Also, click on "Start" then right-click on "My Computer" and then click on "Properties". Click on the "Advanced" tab, and then on the top "Settings" button in the "Performance" section. Then check the radio button of "Adjust for best performance".

Those two things will usually give you a useful boost in speed.

Just about all pc's from the Tier One manufacturers - HP, Dell, Gateway etc - will have a space available for a second hard drive, so if you only have a single hard drive in the pc, you should install the second one internally rather than have it hooked up externally. That will result in better file transfer speeds - unless you use the eSata interface for an external drive, which is still a bit of a new kid on the block.

The advice to add RAM is generally good, but note that you will see virtually no increase in encoding speed with increased RAM. There are many other benefits of course, such as shorter program load times and so on, but encoding will be unaffected.

When I/O operations become a bottleneck, you will see a significant speed increase if you read from one hard drive and write to another. I find it most noticeable if you Smart Render a DV Avi file - which you might do if you wanted to join or trim clips and archive them in DV avi format, for example - but that might not form too significant a part of your workflow. You might still see a slight speed increase when encoding DV Avi to Mpeg2, and you should also see a good gain if you Smart Render mpeg2 to mpeg2 - as you might do for example if using the "suggested workflow". In that case you would need to have the mpeg2 clip or clips that form your project on one drive, and output VS to the other drive.

If you want to store video clips on the second drive, you might then point VS to output to the first drive to get the advantage.

It's probably worth checking your system performance with a utility (free) like Sisoft Sandra Lite - it can check your hard drive speeds amongst many other parameters.

As someone suggested, your 160Gb drive is probably a 7200rpm unit, which used to be almost essential for video editing work. Since the advent of "perpendicular recording" technology, however, hard disc platters have much higher data density, and you will find that the trend is for 640GB and higher drives to run at "only" 5400rpm, whilst still giving higher data transfer speeds than the older, smaller drives.