"Rendering Required Files"

[Tao-ming Lin]

I'm working with Premiere Pro 1.5 with a 3.2 ghz processor and 2gb RAM, all alloted to scratch discs, but every single edit takes forever to process, and then when I want to play the timeline I have to watch almost a minute of "Rendering Required Files". Is there any way I can make this work faster? Editing is taking forever this way, with every little adjustment dragging on and on.

[Tao-ming Lin]

Each little change, even just a cut or quick ripple edit, takes a minute and a half to process, and then preview the resulting edit requires close to another minute of "rendering required files", resulting in each little thing taking about three minutes in all. It's maddening. I know it used to take much longer; I learned to edit on a Steenbeck table, but in today's environment, it seems like there's something wrong and I'd like to be able to do something about it.

[Mike Teutsch]

You definitely have a problem somewhere, but I'm not the expert on this.

In order for the more knowledgeable to assist you, you need to give more information on your set up. You mentioned scratch disks, but not how you have them allocated. What footage are you editing and what are you adding to it. When did this first start........etc..

Best of luck---Mike

[Tao-ming Lin]

My scratch discs, all listed at a maximum of 70.1gb, which is the available space, are all pointed at my 400Gb F: drive, and the footage, all mini-Dv captured at 720:480 from a Panasonic DVX100, is spread through three different drives, including some on the F: drive. Premier is installed on my OS C: drive. I am not adding any new footage, just editing the existing project. The problem started intermittently not long ago, but has become more serious after I combined my three sub-projects into one 2.5-hour timeline.

Also, don't know if it's related, but when I tried to render a small section, exporting as DV-AVI, it gave me an export error "Error compiling movie, unknown error".

[Mike Teutsch]

Originally Posted by Tao-ming Lin

My scratch discs, all listed at a maximum of 70.1gb, which is the available space, are all pointed at my 400Gb F: drive, and the footage, all mini-Dv captured at 720:480 from a Panasonic DVX100, is spread through three different drives, including some on the F: drive. Premier is installed on my OS C: drive. I am not adding any new footage, just editing the existing project. The problem started intermittently not long ago, but has become more serious after I combined my three sub-projects into one 2.5-hour timeline.

Also, don't know if it's related, but when I tried to render a small section, exporting as DV-AVI, it gave me an export error "Error compiling movie, unknown error".

Like I said, I'm no expert, but I would not put my video for the same project on three different drives. I could also be that your drives are very fragmented and you might want to defrag them. That might help your speed.

I put video on one drive, audio on another and my OS on another. I do not understand your statement about pointing the other drives at your F drive.

Mike

[Tao-ming Lin]

None of the footage is on my OS drive. I have about 400gb of footage, and it didn't fit on one drive when I was capturing it. Perhaps I should switch out all my old drives for larger ones?

As for the scratch disks, as I understand it those are virtual disks Adobe creates to let you edit and preview more quickly, and it takes memory from your empty space on your drives. I have the most empty space on my F: drive, 70gb, so Adobe uses that space for my scratch disks.

[Mike Teutsch]

Originally Posted by Tao-ming Lin

None of the footage is on my OS drive. I have about 400gb of footage, and it didn't fit on one drive when I was capturing it. Perhaps I should switch out all my old drives for larger ones?

As for the scratch disks, as I understand it those are virtual disks Adobe creates to let you edit and preview more quickly, and it takes memory from your empty space on your drives. I have the most empty space on my F: drive, 70gb, so Adobe uses that space for my scratch disks.

NO no! The scratch disks are not virtual! They are separate physical disks and that is probably why you are having the problems you are. When you assign your scratch disks, place your footage on one physical disk and your audio on another for example.

If you have your footage on several disks, you need to divide it up so that you are working off of only one drive at a time I think!?!? That may make it run smoother!?!?!

If you just made partitions on your F drive for the scratch disks, that will not work. They need to be actual physical drives, or you would be much better off just putting it all on the single drive.

Mike

[Tao-ming Lin]

Ok, if that's the problem should I buy at least a 500gb drive and put all the footage on there then? Or should I get a 750gb or 1tb drive to leave room for project saves and the like? Is 2gb of RAM enough? I'm not sure my board will accommodate any more than that.

[Mike Teutsch]

Originally Posted by Tao-ming Lin

Ok, if that's the problem should I buy at least a 500gb drive and put all the footage on there then? Or should I get a 750gb or 1tb drive to leave room for project saves and the like? Is 2gb of RAM enough? I'm not sure my board will accommodate any more than that.

Get an external USB type drive, the biggest you can afford. 1tb's are not that expensive here now, about $350.00 for a Western Digital.

Keep all of your footage on it, I would say.

How many drives do you actually have on your computer? Three should be very good. One for OS, one for captured audio and one for captured video. That is what is recommended usually.

Good Luck!

[Tao-ming Lin]

I will look into it. Hopefully that will help with the problem. Thanks for your advice.

[Brian Brown]

Originally Posted by Mike Teutsch

Get an external USB type drive, the biggest you can afford.

FWIW, I prefer the eSATA drives, since the throughput is a lot faster than USB. Sometimes, all that's needed on a PC is a bracket that takes a regular SATA connection on the motherboard and turns it into the eSATA variant. They also sell PCI and PCI express add-on cards for the same purpose if you don't have a free SATA port on the mobo.

You can find external drives that have eSATA, or you can purchase an eSATA enclosure for less than US$50 that will take any 3.5" SATA drive. I have a 500GB SATA drive in my eSATA enclosure. I also have a PATA and SATA internal rack in my PC (fits a std. 5.25" bay) for internal storage. These are not hot-swappable like the eSATA enclosure, but are pretty quick to pop in new storage (or bring in an old project stored on the shelf).

HTH,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions

[Tao-ming Lin]

So I reduced the quality of the preview window, which had no effect on the rendering time. If I get, say, a 750gb or 1tb drive to put all of my video clips and projects on, will that get rid of the delay whenever I edit? It's the fact that the footage is spread over multiple drives that's causing this problem? Would trying to get more RAM or a faster processor help? I just want to be sure before I take my computer in.

[Mike Teutsch]

Originally Posted by Tao-ming Lin

So I reduced the quality of the preview window, which had no effect on the rendering time. If I get, say, a 750gb or 1tb drive to put all of my video clips and projects on, will that get rid of the delay whenever I edit? It's the fact that the footage is spread over multiple drives that's causing this problem? Would trying to get more RAM or a faster processor help? I just want to be sure before I take my computer in.

How many actual drives do you have? Not partitions, drives?

Mike

[Tao-ming Lin]

I have 4: two 400's, a 120 and a 60. The 60 is my OS drive and has 35gb free. The 120 has some footage and other stuff, one 400 is full of footage and the other 400 has some footage and other stuff as well as about 140gb free. The footage itself is about 500gb worth.

[Tim Bickford]

Pardon me for stepping in. This post has caught my attention. Mostly the external USB and eSATA drive discussion.

I suppose the technology has passed me. I recently saw some eSATA external hard drives at the local BestBuy. I was told by the technical help that the drives would not be good for editing video. I presently have a USB2 400 GB external drive. I've always assumed that it would not be good to use for editing video.

In other words... I've always believed that I can store video to an external drive. However, since the drive was not 7200 RPM that it would not be suitable to edit and capture directly with p-pro.

Am I wrong in assuming this?