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I use Adobe Premier 5.5 to edit my videos. I have always seemed to have slow editing. I upgraded the PC which now has

8 Core
16gb of DDR3 2333mhz ram
1gb 460 gpu
6 hard drives, 1 is SSD

So, I think that it's my hard drives which are slowing everything down. I wonder if the amount of HDD's I have that is slowing it down, even whilst on my SSD it's still visibly lagging.

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If you have a 8 core CPU I'd bet it is a fast one too, so that shouldn't be a problem. 16 GB is more than enough for HD, and DDR3 should ensure the speed. The GPU shouldn't have much to say as long as it's not crap.

If you have 6 slow harddrives, it would be a bottleneck. You should have at least 7200 rpm disks!

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  • humm i'll have to double check the speeds on the drives. Interesting point though, the bottleneck exists? that sucks if there is one. Makes me think i'd need to get one of those pcie hard drives – Jamie Hutber Mar 14 '12 at 11:11
  • Yes, you should definitely get some good hard drives. When you work with HD you are working with really big files that flow from the hard drives all the time when you play them. If they're not fast, then that would be a bottleneck.. – Friend of Kim Mar 14 '12 at 12:03
  • ye, but i wonder is the bottleneck to do with individual speeds or the mother boards bridges handling the data? As in if i have the data on the SSD which has no spinning speed and is obviously the fastest drive out there, it would in theory be quicker you would think – Jamie Hutber Mar 14 '12 at 12:13
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    I think that you should get a RAID system if you want to have 6 hard drives and a SSD. Because then you would have a dedicated processor to handle all the data while your computer can focus on the video editing. – Friend of Kim Mar 14 '12 at 12:30
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    depends on the RAID config, read up on RAID 0 through RAID 6. – filzilla Mar 14 '12 at 19:03
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Drives are definitely the answer. My miniDV setup worked fine with 5400rpm, but HD playback looked like internet video from 2004. Upgraded to 7200rpm internal SATA drives, and ~most~ of the time, I've got good results. While I've never done any work with SSDs, I suspect those would be the ideal circumstance.

For external drives, I've used 5400rpm USB2.0 and FireWire (ieee1394) with DV just fine, but even with external drives, there may be bus speed issues on top of drive speed issues.

One thing that I have had good luck with is DSLR footage. I shoot 1080i on CF cards and 720p on SD Cards. I've got an internal SATA card reader, and I've been very impressed with throughput directly from the cards.

I've found that most editing lag these days is more related to drive speed than anything else. Most people doing video editing are savvy enough to at least know to ask "Will video editing need a more robust machine?"

RAID 10 is something I'm exploring right now. It supposedly combines striping (for faster access) with mirroring (for reliability) on a 4-disk array. Some IT professional friends of mine say that it's stable enough that they're putting the OS on the same physical drives as the data. An interesting thing to consider.

Hope this helps...or if nothing else, helps corroborate other information and ideas you're hearing.

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  • yup agreed. I will be looking into raid for sure now. Also i wil check the speeds of my drives, i am even tempted to try a usb drive with usb 3... exciting times. Although i am certain i don't buy drives unless they are 7200rpm. – Jamie Hutber Mar 19 '12 at 0:18
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A common problem for a slow edit is incorrectly setting the codec of the sequences.

Unless under very specific circumstances (of which I'm not sure of), you should set your sequence codec (when you create the new sequence and Premiere asks you what preset it should use) to be identical to your footage.

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