Hi all,
Hoping for some help. Here at my company we've started doing some newsy "deadline" oriented shooting for our website and time is of the utmost importance.
Currently I'm editing on a Dell Optiplex 745, full ATX case, Intel dual core 6700 @ 2.66 ghz, 2Gb of ram, single 7200rpm HD, Windows XP.
Most of the pieces we've been putting up have not been deadline intensive, but this is changing as we learn how to do this stuff....
Yesterday in Premiere Pro 2.0 a 7.5 minute HDV video exported as a wmv file took over 20 minutes to render.

I'd like to speed up the index/conform rate and the export/render time...any suggestions would help!!!

Thanks!

That rendering time seems pretty normal. Your CPU and RAM seem okay, based on what the experts say.

From what I've read, you get some performance gains by adding big fast HDDs. Ideally 10,000 rpm system drive, Premiere on D, project and imported assets on E and destination drive F. All separate physical drives. I think seek/read/write times are the issue.

At least that's what Adobe says. Check out these articles:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/PremierePro/3.0/help.html?content=WS6FD6C7B1-11DF-45c4-9703-4288DDE57377.html

A better solution would be to aggregate the performance of multiple drive in a Raid. While the old separate drive paradigm made sense at the time, raid hardware is much cheaper now, already in most PCs. By centralizing to a single volume, each possible process can expand to utilize the full available performance when it is not competing with other processes. 4 Drives in Raid 0 are 4 times faster than 1 drive. Instead of assigning four tasks to one drive each, assign them all to a faster combined volume, since you rarely use all task simultaneously, the extra performance will increase their speed. If you do happen to use them all at once, you should be no worse off then having dedicated drives.

I don't think RAID or separate drives can speed up RENDERING any noticeable amount. Editing, for that matter, is something completely else and will be sped up significantly with fast disk array.

thanks for the answers....what about a dedicated vid card? something like the matrox RT.X2? Although I'm not sure that version would work with my machine...what about doubling the ram (to 4GB)?

My earlier post was to recommend against dedicated drives, but a Raid will have little effect on web encoding times. There are dedicated encoding cards available, depending on how serious you are about speeding things up. I have no idea about prices, but people I know use solutions from Digital Rapids for realtime WM9 encodes I believe.

A Cineform codec should help speed up renders with your existing system. Native HDV is very processor-intensive. The Matrox board would help, too, as long as you stick to their real-time effects, correction, etc. A quad-core Intel might only help a little bit on native HDV.

HTH,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Video

Unfortuneately, most of the processing time in exporting to WM9 is spent on the encoding end, not on decompressing the source. Cineform or uncompressed intermediates will be of little benefit to increase speed, but faster CPUs most definitely will be helpful.

That makes sense, Mike. I stand corrected on Cineform.

Nice blog, by the way.

Brian Brown
BrownCow Video