Emc10 Seems Slow At Editing Video - Or Is It Just Me?

[psbecker]

Hi,

 

I am new to video editing using RMC10. I decided to try to use VideoWave to edit an existing file of a TIVOed TV program (1 hour, about 1.2 GB) and found performance to be abysmal. All I wanted to do was to delete a few commercials before I archived the file for future use. My PC is a homebuilt with an Intel 6300 dual processor @1.86 GHz and 4 GB of memory. It has an ATI Radeon 2400 Video card and over 100GB of available disk space to play in.

 

Performance is terrible. I takes about 30 seconds from the time I click on the file name for VideoWave to even recognize it. It then took more than 10 minutes to import the file into VideoWave. The system was so unresponsive that I was unable to use the scroll button on the preview screen to move the cursor to the area that I wished to delete some commercials. Likewise, trying to move the indicator of where the program was accessing the file was impossible because the lag time can be measured in minutes. In short VideoWave is unusable on my system to edit video. Moreover, the rest of the system is very slow while RMC / VideoWave is running. I started Process Monitor and found that VideoWave was constantly using 65+% of available CPU cycles and was frantically reading from disk. It had logged over 10 MILLION reads while opening the file and continued to read the disk at a rapid rate.

 

Note that I was not running any other applications. I had even shut down IE and Outlook, although I did have CA antivirus and antispyware running.

 

Question to those of you who are RMC veterans. Is this slow performance due to an underpowered system or is something else the problem? Hopefully, it is the latter and someone of you can suggest what the problem might be.

 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

Phil

[Jim_Hardin]

You set up about the worse situation possible! Here is why…

 

TiVo files are as far from Standard video files as you can get so a great amount of time is spent converting them into a standard file that EMC can work with.

 

A 1.5ghz cpu is the minimum processor and yours is barely above that. Doesn't matter if you have 10 of those 1.86ghz processors bolted to your PC, it is still 1.86!

 

Your 1 hour recording was converted into an standard AVI file which equals about 13gb. Since you don't have that much RAM, a lot of disc swapping is going to happen and it shuffles along. That takes a lot of cpu cycles.

 

Welcome to the wonderful but demanding world of video!

 

Besides RAM and a faster CPU you may find that under Tools – Options – Render, setting it to Software may speed things up. This can be set in VideoWave or MyDVD. Give that a try and let us know.

 

[ronkleim]

What about getting a "Stand - Alone" DVD recorder?

They are like $60 bucks now.

They are good for making DVDs from analog signals from a VCR or I assume a TIVO.

Yeah, it records 'real time" but sometime simple is better.

You can always re-edit the dvd using ROXIO.

 

 

[psbecker]

Thank you for the quick response, although your observations are a bit discouraging. When I built this PC about 18 months ago, I thought it was pretty pwerful....

 

Anyway, a couple of follow-up questions:

 

1. I can do some limited upgrades to my PC without going crazy. (I define "crazy" as swapping out a motherboard, which is both expensive and rather painful to do.) My current board supports Intel Core2 processors up to 2.66 GHz and I can easily double my memory to 8GB. Would either or both of these offer noticeable improvement? BTW, I would really prefer to go the memory route due to cost and ease of installation.

 

2. While I was initially working with TIVO files, I do have a small converter program called "Direct Show Dump" that converts TIVO files to .mpg. Seems to work quite nicely, although the resulting file does not work in Microsoft MovieMaker, but does seem to work everywhere else. Weird. Unfortunately, using the .mpg version in VideoWave didn't seem to help much. I was surprised to see that you mentioned that RMC VideoWave converts the input file to AVI which apparently explodes file size by a factor of 10. If I preconvert my input file to AVI, would that improve things?

 

I have not your implemented your suggestion to switch to software rendering, but will try that today.

 

Again, thanks for the quick response. If anyone has further thoughts or comments, please let me know.

 

Phil

[gi7omy]

When you go to make a video DVD, file size becomes irrelevant - it's duration that counts.

 

Now if your program increases the file size when converting to avi it won't matter - it still equates to one hour of video = one standard DVD at good quality (more for DL DVDs of ourse)

[ggrussell]

My current board supports Intel Core2 processors up to 2.66 GHz and I can easily double my memory to 8GB.

Video render is VERY CPU intense so the only thing that would really help is upgrading the CPU to a faster one. 4GB RAM should be fine. Make sure you have plenty of free hard drive because Windows needs plenty of room for temp files. You can also redirect some of the temp files that are created by Videowave. There are a few folders that you can change that under TOOLS/ Options.

[JamesTw]

Thank you for the quick response, although your observations are a bit discouraging. When I built this PC about 18 months ago, I thought it was pretty pwerful....

 

18 Months is a long time in computing, but don't dispair just learn to use the PC in a different way. Render your video at night time or set it away when you know a few hours are available.

 

If its any consolation, my setup which I built in Feb this year, Q6600 2GB Geil 800mhz, 8800GT is already showing signs of being dated.

 

Software these days is full of bloat and non essential functions but takes up cpu cycles whilst doing nothing. Just waiting in case ???

Progress? I doubt it.

 

However, having said that. The average user probably only uses 5% of a computers capability, so I've still got a bit of slack to play with.