Advice for longer project

[blaze591]

Hi, new user so be gentle.

I am trying to build my first project in Videostudio. I'm up to about 4 minutes in length, 4 or 5 distinct sections so far and a mixture of templates with photos and videos. Things are starting to slow down a little and I an wondering if I should create and render the project in several chunks and then combine them all together in a final edit. The computer is now quite old but was a relatively high spec, i7-4790K, 16Gb Ram, GTX1650 and a 1 Tb SSD.

Thanks for any advice!

[Ken Berry]

Welcome to the forum.

I would hardly think of a 4 or 5 minute project as being long. For many people, that would be a very short project. That being said, your computer might be a bit old these days, but it is still not too bad and should be able to handle a much longer project without any division of the project into several chunks. I would, however, make sure to save the project very regularly (I do it every two or three minutes.) You might even want to think about saving the project with slightly different names every so often. That way, and with the regular saves, you should be able to go back just a little if you run into a project, and resurrect your project more easily.

One important factor here, though, is what format you are wanting to produce. If you are producing a 4K one, for instance, you would probably be best to use SmartProxy on your 4K video clips in the project. (That produces lower quality standard video which is easy to edit, and with the edits only applied when you render the whole project.) That will also probably be advisable if you are using or producing H.265 video which is excellent quality but demanding of computer resources.

However, if you are just producing a HD video, then continue as you are, saving regularly.

[tletter]

I'm up to about 4 minutes in length, 4 or 5 distinct sections so far and a mixture of templates with photos and videos. Things are starting to slow down a little and I an wondering if I should create and render the project in several chunks and then combine them all together in a final edit.

Your project is very short and there is no reason to break up this short project into "several chunks".

What exactly is "starting to slow down"? Is it rendering or editing? If editing is slowing down, then turn on SmartProxy and ensure that the proxy files have been generated. As well, your source clips should be on your SSD, vice a HDD or flash drive. You don't say what version of VS you're using, but rendering can certainly slowdown depending on the complexity of the filters that you are using so have a look to see if Smart Render and Hardware Encode Acceleration are enabled.

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

[blaze591]

Thanks both for the advice. I will stick with it and save more regularly.

To clarify, by "slowing down", I meant specifically editing and navigating the timeline. I have made use of some templates for photographs, and they all seems to come with lots of overlays and titles. The process of scrolling up, down across the tracks and side to side was becoming a bit less responsive. Perhaps more patience required. I have Smart Proxy turned on apart from a few clips where I wanted to Freeze Frame, and having had issues with resolution dropping on the images, have turned it off for those clips. Video quality is 4K, with almost all of the media sourced from a GoPro.

Lots of other questions but I will post separately.

[asik1]

It's not the length of a project but the complexity of it.
4K is not ez for any system and you add all those FX's, overlay's and trans... well , it screams HELP !!

[Ken Berry]

Depending on the GoPro model you have, the last couple also use the H.265 codec I mentioned, and that is even more demanding...