“special request”

[bill in pa]

This goes by way of a “special request” to the Admin here on message
boards. Recently I received a mail from a younger user on another group.
He was answering a question I had posted about Video work in general.
More to the point about the tools used by Professional Editor who are looking
for “gamers”. You need a unit with a high-speed graphics card with its own
“onboard ram” or lots of just onboard ram.

Meaning, if you are using 4G of ram you should have it doubled at least.
This goes for any video card. Obviously, a lot of ram is used by your
Video Program. My question is what is the best between the two uses? Either lots of
on board ram or extra ram on the video card itself.
.
Thanks to those that can answer,

bill in pa
db1433@gmail.com

[Davidk]

I'm asked a question very similar to this often in my video class. Particularly, what sort of PC do I need for video work?
Basically, rather than describe the various parts, I simply suggest that they buy the most capable gaming PC with the fastest cpu they can afford - the requirements for gaming and video stress both computing capacity and display equally, and computer salesmen understand what a gaming machine is/needs. cpu clock rate is a really good indicator of speed, and gamers talk about 'overclocking' - making a cpu go faster than normal - to get extra oomph from the hardware.
A bit further, some extra tips
1. use solid state drives wherever possible - they speed up so much that is just drudge waiting for normal HDD units. For example, I have 4 disk drives/2Tb on my main 3.7ghz PC, one (C:) is (since late Jan 2019) SSD. A virus scan of the whole lot used to take 54minutes when all 4 were HDD. Then I replaced C: with an SSD unit, and now the whole scan takes just 22 minutes, which is just an indicator of how much 'wait' time was incurred by just one HDD.
2. max out your motherboard RAM before adding anything to a display card memory. Motherboards generally have RAM limits in the hardware, and every app on the system can use it. More RAM makes VS2019 work better, and it has hardware acceleration options in it for an intel cpu, and/or an nvidia display card, but testing I've done to date on those acceleration options doesn't indicate any realistic improvement using those.
3. After 1 and 2, then think about boosting RAM on the display adapter, but note my comments about results there - you may not see any improvement doing this.

[bill in pa]

Hello David,
Thank you for your return. As per usual, I got into describing
the problem and comment, without giving the whys and wherefores
of how this all came about. I run Win 7 Pro with an older CPU and only
4 Gigs of ram. Now with that said I also felt some over-powering need
to upgrade the program to Ultimate 2018.

The program runs but ………………………………….today I did a video that timed out
at 1hour and 42 seconds. I took some production notes and chapter markers,
loaded a DVD and started off. Start to finish the DVD took nearly 4 hours to
burn! Watching my resource meter, I saw that I was using 85 to 95 % of the CPU
and about 70% of the ram. I started looking for a new computer right
after that heart-breaker.

What I saw was impressive and so was the pricing! I was dragging my feet
over moving up to win 10 but in the end, I will be forced into it anyway. Microsoft
likes to keep things moving and once they end their support of an OS, it isn’t
long until it falls by the wayside. Easing into it slowly at this time, I’ll stand a better chance of
survival if you know what I mean. A newer machine would
have about 12 gigs of ram, a graphics card and a much faster processer than
my current model. Over clocking a system puts a lot of strain on the motherboard
People do it though I wonder if the extra strain on the equipment is worth it. Cooking
a board is not my idea of fun and then there is all that reloading! I can do
without all of that. Thanks again for the return, it was good hearing from you.

Regards,

bill in pa

[asik1]

Don't rush to dunp 7, you will be able to run it for many years after MS kill it as long as your hardware will.
Your system is poor in relation to video work I don't think ram will help you that much.
Is this DVD thing is your on going projects and you will do one per week ?

[Davidk]

The time of upgrading the OS when a new version came out went to the dinosaurs a long time ago. If the hardware will support it, and there is no compelling reason to update, then living with the old OS is generally not an issue. MS may not support it - meaning, no further security patches and the like issued once a month - but that does not mean it won't run properly. And some versions last longer than others - XP3 still has a measured usage world wide, whereas Vista has just gone and windows 8 is barely more than XP3. The most compelling reason to update the OS I know is that your hardware failed.
I have 3 Pc's - a system build desktop and 2 laptops - all running win7 and I don't plan to update any of them until the electronics break.

[Desertsweeper]

Just a warning related to this topic. If you are going to upgrade to a 7th Gen CPU with iGPU it will not work with VS HW Acceleration - crashes every time on both 2018 and 2019 versions. If you are a die-hard Win7 fan (like me) go for a top end 6th Gen CPU to solve this issue, or buy a dedicated GPU.

[bill in pa]

I wanted to thank: Davidk, asik1, and Desertsweeper. Your points of advice are well taken. I have no great desire to move
to Win 10 either but up-grading to a new machine would promote the
idea. While I haven’t as yet lost any projects, on a busy week I
sometimes get behind ye olde 8-ball. VS Ultimate runs just as
slow as VS 10 did on the same machine. So, I really didn’t gain
anything upgrading. I had talked a bit about this before but
let me give you an actual time line from my last project.

The film was one hour and seventeen seconds overall. It
took the machine five hours and 20 minutes to complete the burn.
I don’t know at what speed you folks do your projects but
I think this is a bit slow. While a new machine may/my not
help this situation, I think we can all agree it won’t
hurt anything but my wallet. And it just might get me
away from that desk quicker. We have two desk tops, 1 Ipad and one
laptop, all except the ipad, running Win 7 and all sharing information. From
what I’ve seen of Win 10, it won’t be able to share anything. I’ll just
have to across that one when it comes up! Thanks again for your input
it’s always much appreciated, I’ve learned a lot from the folks on this group
and I appreciate the time people give to share their knowledge with me.

Regards,
bill in pa

[tletter]

VS Ultimate runs just as slow as VS 10 did on the same machine.

"VS Ultimate" has been around since at least X8 so perhaps you're referring to VS2018 Ultimate. In any event, the Ultimate version of VS doesn't deliver faster rendering rather it includes more 3rd party add-ins such as Mercalli.

The film was one hour and seventeen seconds overall. It took the machine five hours and 20 minutes to complete the burn.

VS has never been a speed demon and some of the filters, e.g. Noise Reducer, can increase rendering times by up to two orders of magnitude. Unfortunately VS makes limited use of the GPU and doesn't always maximize use of even the CPU.

From what I’ve seen of Win 10, it won’t be able to share anything.

You can share a folder with Windows’ built-in sharing options and you can access it on an Android device, iPad, or iPhone.

tletter
https://www.youtube.com/user/tletter

[bill in pa]

Hello tletter,
Thank you for responding to my query. Yes, I am now running Ultimate 2018.
I did not realize so many versions of our program are available or on the
market even at this date. I thought I was approaching my problem with the
classic, “bigger CPU-add more ram” approach was best but after reading more
comments from others on different groups this may not be the case. In fact
one member told me its possible that after laying out money for a soaped-up
gamer computer, I may not notice that much difference are all!

I wanted to also thank you for the link/tip about the file sharing issue. We have
all of our Passwords listed on Excel Spread sheets which saves a load of time and
yet is perfectly secure or as secure as you can get in this day and age.
Again, many thanks, it was nice to meet you.

Regards,
bill in pa