Question re video editing and HDD speed

ajf · 4 Apr 2012 at 10:48

I have never really done any video editing so hopefully someone here can help.

My Dad is using Power Director to create a video and has been importing multiple clips and photos etc from various folders on his PC.

He has noted that at times when trying to preview the video it starts to stutter or even freeze and loose its place.

He thought it might be HDD speed related when it is trying to pull together all the different clips?

The disk is Samsung 1Tb F1 drive so I assume is 7200rpm?
The PC has 8Gb RAM and a Phenom X4 3.2Ghz processor with Win7 64bit.

RaV · 4 Apr 2012 at 18:31

Is the the preview of files in a separate preview window, or clips he has just dragged on to the timeline, or a sequence of clips that have already been rendered?

ajf · 4 Apr 2012 at 18:41

I have had a word with him.
It's in the time line and from what I understand the problems actually start to occur more when he either tries to move clips around or when fast forwarding through the time line to different parts of the video.

RaV · 4 Apr 2012 at 20:53

While I have only used Power Director a few times. The only time there should be lag or jumping is with un rendered video clips in the timeline. Moving clips around shouldnt cause much lag or problems.

Sirrel Squirrel · 4 Apr 2012 at 22:14

Best bet it to buy a 2nd hard drive and store all of the video files on that.

ajf · 4 Apr 2012 at 23:39

Thanks for the comments.
Would the sedond drive work in a similar was as a scratch drive in Photoshop?
Maybe a small SSD would be worth looking at for it?

Sirrel Squirrel · 5 Apr 2012 at 07:52

You could buy an SSD and use that for Windows/applications and then use the HDD as a scratch disk for video/Photoshop

ajf · 5 Apr 2012 at 12:12

In this instance would it not be better to have the SSD as the secondary drive to store the video clips so the they can be accessed faster?

Nexus · 5 Apr 2012 at 12:23

ajf said:
In this instance would it not be better to have the SSD as the secondary drive to store the video clips so the they can be accessed faster?

You'd probably be better suited using the SSD as the system drive to optimise it. Then use a fast SATA drive as a scratch disc, which are of course much cheaper for a large size than an SSD will be.

I'm also lead to believe that while SSDs are great for speeding up programs on a system drive, they aren't that well suited to reading/writing large sequential video files.

The biggest gain you will get is just from moving the video files you are reading/writing from your system drive to a scratch disc.

Another thing I'd add is optimisation of the video files he is editing.
Some codecs aren't great for editing with and it's best to optimise the video all to one format first.