Optimising & upgrading PC...

[Armistice]

So this relates more to video than audio as I don't record audio on the PC at the moment, but have just started attempting to do a YouTube video of the band..

My poor PC is struggling to deal with the video preview function as I assemble the video, so I can see what I'm actually doing (using Sony Vegas if that helps). End result - things I thought were synced, are not synced...

So, to extract more grunt from this PC for this task would adding more RAM (easy) help? How about the USB thing - every time I stick a USB stick in I get some "would you like to increase the PC's performance" option -(also easy)? Or are we talking processor (v. hard) or video card (not worth the trouble...) being the likely bottleneck...

The PC easily outspecs the minimum system requirements for Sony Vegas, but it's still hardly a champ - a year old, fairly basic.

It's also a general purpose PC. What things can I do to optimise it to free up as much grunt for this video stuff? I presume this is a common enough thing to have to do for audio on PCs, and I probably should do it anyway. It's Windows 7 BTW...

Thanks for any help....

 

[Chili]

I'm pretty sure video is CPU intensive, especially if it is HD and/or AVCHD. More RAM might help, also a faster hard drive for streaming data, but when you start adding in effects, fades, multiple clips, you really start tasking the cpu.

I've had the syncing problem before because of a slow CPU. One trick is to not add any effects until you are nearly finished with the video. i have since upgraded to a DualCore cpu (yup, not a quad like everyone else) and it hums along nicely, even with AVCHD.

You can also resize the preview window to be smaller and choose Draft speed, this might make it harder to sync audio and video, but your cpu won't work as hard. You can use the waverforms to align clips.

These are just suggestions... ymmv.

 

[Armistice]

Thanks Chilli - towards the end of my first attempt I figured out the best way to sync was via audio - given that we're miming to the actual MP3 being played, not too hard to audibly line up the real track with the camcorder mic track... I think I was deleting excess audio streams too early as I was trying to reduce the number of things the machine had to deal with, then deciding it wasn't quite in sync and moving the video back and forth.... whoops.. good call on the effects at the end thing though... didn't think of that.

Live and learn!

Now, I just need a plug in that corrects for eyes wandering away from the camera at the wrong time... makes us look soooo shifty.....

 

[gecko zzed]

All the stuff that Chili says.

But you might also need to look at your source material too. I've found that when I've imported video files into Vegas from elsewhere, and which I've had to convert to AVI, they too can cause slow preview updates and other performance issues. I discovered that this arose in the conversion process and the compression used, and the answer was to force keyframes every 25 frames or so when I do the initial conversion.

 

[RWhite]

My poor PC is struggling to deal with the video preview function as I assemble the video, so I can see what I'm actually doing (using Sony Vegas if that helps). End result - things I thought were synced, are not synced...

So, to extract more grunt from this PC for this task would adding more RAM (easy) help? How about the USB thing - every time I stick a USB stick in I get some "would you like to increase the PC's performance" option -(also easy)? Or are we talking processor (v. hard) or video card (not worth the trouble...) being the likely bottleneck...

Its rather strange that you would get that message from a year old PC. That message usually means you have plugged a USB2 device into a USB1 port. But every motherboard out there for the last few years (at least that I know of) has all USB2 ports.

 

[Armistice]

Its rather strange that you would get that message from a year old PC. That message usually means you have plugged a USB2 device into a USB1 port. But every motherboard out there for the last few years (at least that I know of) has all USB2 ports.

Interesting - that makes sense actually - I discovered that of the three USB ports, one is still USB1, for reasons to do with cheapness, I would assume. Was stunned when I discovered it, but when you see three ports on a laptop, you naturally assume they're all USB2 these days... well that's one mystery solved...

Cheers

 

[Armistice]

Its rather strange that you would get that message from a year old PC. That message usually means you have plugged a USB2 device into a USB1 port. But every motherboard out there for the last few years (at least that I know of) has all USB2 ports.

Thanks gecko - I'm actually using media imported from a Sony Handycam that I've filmed myself as the source material, so it's in whatever the native format is... actually, that's not quite true, I import the film from the camera to the PC using the software that came with the camera and then reference (or in Vegas - File/Import Media - which I assume doesn't move anything but just references it) from wherever I stored it into Vegas - should I be doing something different?

I'm an absolute newb with this stuff.

Cheers