Some video editing

Hey,

For one of my modules for uni I have to record some video in HD and edit it all together. I have Premiere Pro on my laptop but its struggling to play the files skipping etc when I am trying to play it back. Any tips on how to speed it up a bit?

Its an acer aspire 5733z
Windows 7 64 bit
6Gb Ram
500Gb Hardrive
Intel Pentium 2.27GHz processor

I do have an external monitor plugged in but dunno if that would make much difference?

I can go an edit in the labs at uni but its just more convenienet if i can manage it at my flat.

So yeah if any one can think of little things thatll speed it up fire away please!

Also have a 2TB external drive on a USB 3.0


Edited by Adam_Iron_Horse - 02 April 2013 at 4:10am

shagnasty wrote: What codec are you using? Whilst that spec of machine won't handle un-compressed HD you could be crippling the machine if it is doing too much work with de-coding the video.   My advice, drop to 480p, decide what you want to do, make a cut list and then drop the 1080p back in and produce the video, that way you won't need to view any HD video in P Pro.   HD Video Editing on laptops is a nightmare as you invariably have slow HDDs unless you go SSD

Sorry not entirely sure what a codec is?

The files say they are in AVCHD format.

Im totally useless at this tbh we haven't really been told much about that just told to record some videos and edit them together in P pro

how would I go about doing that?

slaz, you are a bit off with the "no need for GFX card", as a GFX card with hardware AVCHD decoding is actually quite essential to make working with 1080p content on slower machines at least remotely feasible..

You have 2 major bottle-necks when working with HD content:
1.) CPU power (for decoding/encoding) and 2.) storage/memory throughput.

When hardware supported decoding (from GFX) is thrown into the mix, or your CPU has balls enough to handle it all fluently in real time, then the only thing that remains is the storage/memory throughput (as already mentioned in the post by shag above).

Anyways, what's lacking most in your speciffic case is your CPU and no GFX hardware decoding support whatsoever, so your best bet would probably be (as sheggers already suggested) - do all the editing in 480p, and change to 1080p just for the final export.

Creating a RAMdrive (to temporarily put the source material on) could also considerably improve the whole editing process, but is not essential.

hey

lmao ok to go back a bit and explain some of what they've brushed over:

You get lots of different image formats: jpeg, gif, png etc etc, and you get lots of different audio formats: wav, mp3, ogg, etc etc. In the same way you also get lots of different video formats, mpeg1, mpeg2, divX, Xvid, h.264, avi, mkv and so on (though the last two are actually just containers for other formats).

They're essentially just different ways of writing the information down, sometimes giving you better compression ratios sometimes being quick and easy to work with, but for each one your computer needs a little translator file so it understands it and can reconstruct the video out of it to display on your screen. these little files are called Codecs.

As your trying to edit the computer is having to use the codecs to translate the video information back to normal to even display it on the wee preview window, and this takes a fair bit of processing power (big video editing machines often have the codecs actually hardwired into specific chips that do the decoding for them, but you dont have that!)

Also, as your working at a high resolution you'll need a very high data rate, which you wont get from an external hard drive and even your internal one may struggle.

So your best bet as someone said is to make much lower resolution copies of your files and get them onto your internal drive, this should make editing go a bit smoother. then once your happy with everything do a trial export and see what it looks like. Make any last minute changes and when your totally happy, relink to the full resolution versions of the files and do your final export.

k

Ok so I'v pretty much just about finished now and was checking out the brief I have to hand in in 3 different formats

1 - 1-off video clip for playback on a portable device of your choice.
2 - 1-Off video clip for playback via web streaming.
3 - 1-off video clip for broadcast in HD video format.

any suggestions what I should do for these?

codec = compression/ decompression.

Edited by waterhouserock - 03 April 2013 at 6:35pm