Speeding up photo/video editing

Hey guys! I've recently gotten more into video editing, and was wondering about upgrading my computer. It handles photoshop + lightroom just fine, however premier can sometimes get bogged down. Here's my current setup:

Antec 650w PSU
AMD Phenom II X4 965
MSI 870U-G55
Radeon HD5570
2x4gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3

My first step is to replace my HDD with an SSD I want to run Windows + Adobe off my SSD, and use my HDD drives as storage. Does this affect my video or photo editing at all?

After that, what would speed up my performance most? New GPU? More RAM? I was thinking of grabbing 8gb more of ram since it's cheap. But would I see noticeable improvements in speed? Or would the money better be spent in upgrading my GPU?

Thanks!

Open up task manager when you are working on your work and see what is getting utilized the most. Click on 'resouce monitor' to see how much the disk and RAM are getting hit during your work also.

Basically see what is getting pegged at 100% and what is sitting idle or at low usage. Upgrade whatever is getting pegged.

My guess would be CPU or GPU and then RAM. However, it depends on how Premier works.

HDD spindle speed can affect throughput...

Stick with at least 7200RPM drives.

Yeah you have to look at what's limiting using the tools windows provides. Get screenshots of CPU, RAM, and disk activity after you've been doing something that shows the problem. Open the monitors before you start, they'll give a history.

What's the problem? A sluggish interface? Slow batch speed?

I'm going to take a few guesses, which are pretty pointless without the windows stats really:
- More RAM would be a big help, to cache more stuff in RAM.
- SSD would help, but starting windows and the software quickly's pretty pointless. You need either your data on there, or your swap file on there, maybe both. I don't know much about video.
- Video editing uses graphics cards, how modern is yours?

In order for Premier Pro to work at its best and deliver real time playback of basic edits you need the following:

A 64bit OS.
16GB of RAM
A quad core CPU (ideally an i7)
An Nvidia Graphics card.

In your case the biggest improvement you could make would be replacing the Radeon card with an Nivdia one and adding more RAM.
Moving to an Intel i7 CPU would be your next biggest improvement, then add things like an SSD for the cache.


NOTE: Not all of the Nvidia cards are fully supported, read this for details on which ones are, and how to edit a file to make some extras work. http://www.studio1prod​uctions.com/Articles/P​remiereCS5.htm

I use a GTX670 with a hack from the above and everything is much faster, playback especially doesn't need to be rendered first, the card is able to render it on the fly far faster than any CPU can.

Going from 8-16GB of ram also made a huge difference, and editing HD files I often see RAM usage go over 12GB.
Moving to 32GB of RAM would be small step in performance, but I have heard it is noticeable, especially if working on multiple cameras in the time line.

Your motherboard only supports SATA II, newer SSD's will suffer a performance hit if not running on SATA III. You could use an add in SATA III controller, but would probably be better off spending that money upgrading your motherboard/processor.

The HD5570 clocks in around a GeForce 240 GT performance wise, it probably has 1 gig of 128bit DDR3, fairly outdated at this point. That's a low level 3 generations old card performance wise.

If you are editing large video files you may be getting a performance hit by forcing heavy page file usage. You should be able to see this in Task Manager or hear your hard drive churning away.

Go for i5 rather than AMD Phenom.
i5 is much faster and better performer than any recent AMD products.
Yes SSD will definitely help you to increase the performance.
I don't know much about SSD but many people say that don't install anything in your SSD except for your OS.
For GFX Card go for atleast 6*** series rather than 2 generations old 5**** series.
Radeon 6670 or 6770 will definitely improve your performance.

invinci wrote in post #15007519
Go for i5 rather than AMD Phenom.
i5 is much faster and better performer than any recent AMD products.
Yes SSD will definitely help you to increase the performance.
I don't know much about SSD but many people say that don't install anything in your SSD except for your OS.
For GFX Card go for atleast 6*** series rather than 2 generations old 5**** series.
Radeon 6670 or 6770 will definitely improve your performance.

Did you not read what I posted?

Adobe has it well documented that an ATi/AMD Radeon card WILL NOT help with video editing under Premier.
IT DOES NOTHING.


It is also well documented that the i7 is better than the i5 as Premier makes good use of Hyper Threading.

Oh no, Moppie's angry... quick someone do something!

Maybe this will help...

Wow, this thread took a turn for the strange.

Thanks for all the helpful replies! I originally built this computer on a really tight budget. I used my friend's old case and power supply, and had only around $500 to spend on it. It was extremely noisy, and turns out one of the fans on the PSU wasn't even running o_O. Needless to say, that was the first thing I replaced. I also got a much roomier case (found a great deal on a Lian-Li PC-P50 Armorsuit). I think next up will be to replace my GPU and get more RAM. If that speeds things up enough, I'll hopefully be able to stick with my CPU for awhile.

Any recommendations for best bang for your buck GPUs?

Ainoko wrote in post #15010520
Any recommendations for best bang for your buck GPUs?

Youre kinda limited if you want to stick with the CUDA processing ones supported by Adobe. Pick up a used GTX 570.

Do some research about GPU assisted video editing. Moppie is right, the easiest and best thing you could do right now is get an Nvidia video card that supports Premiere, it makes a huge difference.

Edit: whoops, I mixed up gpu and cpu in your last, but what I wrote is still the truth, gpu assisted video editing makes a huge difference.

Ainoko wrote in post #15010520
Any recommendations for best bang for your buck GPUs?

The officially supported cards are quite expensive, but you don't need a high end card with lots of grunt.
A mid range consumer card from even 2 generations ago will do the job, but you will need to follow the instructions on the page I linked to, to make it work.


Moving to an Nvidia card made the biggest difference, when you enable GPU Hardware Acceleration in Premier you will see 3 colours above the timeline.
Red means it needs to be rendered by the CPU, Green is rendered and Yellow means it will render live using the GPU.
90% of my timeline is now Yellow, meaning filters and effects are rendered by the GPU in real time during the playback.

hmmm well I just ran Adobe Premiere with my resource manager running, and during playback it never spikes more than 4gb ram used. I have 8 total, and I checked my preferences in Premiere, and have 6.5 set aside for editing. Is there something I'm missing? Playback is generally fine when it's yellow, but really choppy during red. In yellow my CPU is running at ~50%, and in red it's spiking up to nearly 100%.