Help speed up our home movie studio

February 20, 2009 3:06 PM

Will a reasonably priced upgrade to my system substantially improve video encoding speed? n00b question continues below . . .

My wife loves to shoot and edit home movies. She is now the unofficial school, neighborhood, and family videographer, and she loves the role. Since the arrival of the 1080p camcorder, she spends an inordinate amount of time waiting on her computer to encode video or convert video files from one format to another. Her rig is pretty fast: Q6600 quadcore, 8 GB RAM (which we are not using because we backed down to a 32bit OS for other reasons), 7600 GT video card. I am wondering which--if any--of the folowing upgrades will best justify their cost, and decrease her wait time.

1. Reinstall 64 bit OS to use all 8 gb - cost = $0
2. Buy a much better video card (which?) - cost = $?
3. Buy a Core i7 920 processor, motherboard, and 6 GB RAM - cost = $800 or so

Specifically, how much real world improvement will option #3 give us for the $800 invested? Would there be a better way to spend that money?

posted by Crotalus to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Wow, that's a helluva machine already. Does the camera record in AVCHD?

I'm using a 1080 camera, recording in AVCHD, on a Macbook Pro with 4gb of RAM, and I don't spend much time at all converting or rendering.

Would you mind describing how long she considers an "inordinate amount of time"?
posted by nitsuj at 3:12 PM on February 20, 2009

Do yourself a favor and profile the computer in action. You want to monitor: disk access / throughput, cpu load and RAM burden.

A lot of video editing works with files much larger than 4GB; you simply can't work on it from RAM, so you end up hitting disk for this stuff instead. The fact that you haven't mentioned disk speed suggests it's the neglected factor here. But we can't know for sure unless you observe the profile as it's processing.
posted by pwnguin at 3:14 PM on February 20, 2009

Response by poster: Encoding media to burn on DVDs, Prepping video files for YouTube, etc. These things all take time. I'm not sure if this affects things, but she has one 30" monitor at 2560x1600, and one 24" monitor at 1920x1200. I don't know if that ultra high resolution would slow things down. I am also willing to concede that we're not that savvy when it comes to our software.
posted by Crotalus at 3:15 PM on February 20, 2009

The monitor size doesn't matter much here; instead it's the resolution that the camera is recording in: 1080p (1920x1080). If DVD and Youtube are the target outputs, 1080p is massive overkill. But if that's what you've got that's what you've got to work with.

For the moment, lets assume something can be done to improve the encoding time. When it's encoding, bring up the task manager and observe how many CPUs are being used,and whether there's any page file activity. If you're on Vista, there's some more advanced tools to monitor disk as well.
posted by pwnguin at 3:27 PM on February 20, 2009

RAM is probably not the bottleneck here. Generally, a quad core CPU is a better investment unless modern encoders (x264) don't peg your CPU use to 99% or all your available memory is in use by the encoder. If your RAM use is lower and you're not taxing your CPU buy faster hard disks.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 3:35 PM on February 20, 2009

Your encoding software is what's going to make the big difference here. You've got four cores of power there, but a lot of software isn't necessarily smart enough to use it all. Quite a few of them will just use one.

Proper encoding packages (eg, Discreet Cleaner XL, Episode Pro) will split an encoding job into chunks and distribute that amongst the processors. You'll still rarely get 100% performance, but at least you'll be utilising more of your power.
posted by sektah at 3:36 PM on February 20, 2009

Er, now it's Autodesk Cleaner. Been a while since I've bothered checking out that package ;) For what it's worth, we use Episode Pro at work, and it's fairly good at using multiple processors. It's available for Windows and a trial is available, so it might be worth giving that a download and running a few test encodes for speed comparison purposes.
posted by sektah at 3:38 PM on February 20, 2009

For video encoding it is unlikely to have anything to do with RAM size or HDD speed. It's going to be all about the CPU, or the graphics card, but only if you have a GPU enabled encoder. As others have said, check your CPU utilization in the task manager. If all four cores aren't pretty near 100%, then you need to look into using different encoding software first.

If that's still not fast enough, look into a newer generation vid card + an encoder that can run on the GPU. That would probably be the biggest bang for your buck.
posted by Good Brain at 12:09 PM on February 21, 2009

If the software is not the issue then basically I would look at benchmarks of the core i7 vs the core 2 quad and decide if it looks like the performance bump is worth it. I agree with the others that a video card or ram probably won't help unless the editing app takes advantage of the gpu.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Core-i7-Nehalem,2057.html

From what I read from the above link it sounds like the core i7's are quite a bit faster. If I were you I'd probably hold off for a while and let the prices drop. HD encoding just takes a while on even the best machines. I'm sure it'll be fast for hardware in a couple years.
posted by meta87 at 12:12 AM on February 22, 2009

Ahh I forgot to respond about the 64 bit os option. From what I've read you might see a minor speed bump, but nothing to substantial. Still it might be worth trying before you buy a whole new system.
posted by meta87 at 12:13 AM on February 22, 2009