Editing seems slow, as the program does a lot of disk swapping. I wish the program would use more of the available DRAM, (I have 12 Gig in my i7 computer, but memory monitor shows Studio 12 never uses more than 2 Gig).

(The time to wait for computer to unfreeze after edit reduced from 3 sec to 1.5 sec when I changed from WD green HDD to Velociraptor for paging file). Russ G.

Studio 12 is a 32-bit program, and cannot directly access more than 4 gig.  I think that the "general consensus", at least through Studio 12, is that you're right--anything over 2G is "wasted" on a dedicated Studio system -- in other words, changing from 1>2G yields big payback, but changing from 2>4 (3G addressable on 32-bit systems) doesn't seem to change much of anything.

 

 

 

(The time to wait for computer to unfreeze after edit reduced from 3 sec to 1.5 sec when I changed from WD green HDD to Velociraptor for paging file).

You changed from a slow-but-efficient 3.5" 5200 RPM hard drive to a physically smaller (hence faster average seek time) 10,000 RPM hard drive.  I would HOPE that it would page faster.  If the Velociraptor is a "new drive" and not a "replacement drive", you can gain further speedups by offloading swap to a physically separate drive (e.g. 1 drive for "mostly OS", 1 or 2 drives for "mostly data", and one drive for "swap, and NORMALLY not much else").  Defining dedicated swap storage on the drive in one contiguous block can help as well, as it keeps the average seek time lower still.

Hmmm...I wonder what would happen if you disabled swap whilst editing.  If you find that you MUST have swap, I wonder what would happen if you defined and swapped to a large ramdrive?

It seams like the latest version Studio 14 is also only 32 bit,   (didn't see 64-bit advertised in the features list or Forum search).

 I tried the SSD drive for swap space, (also has Win7 OS and Studio 12 program), but writes are slow (needs to erase blocks to make room for new writes).  Velocirapter seems to make a better Disk Swap location (A really big SSD is fairly expensive at the moment).

 I'll try a RAM disk program to use on Win7 now.

Thanks

Russ

rgibbons:

 

I tried the SSD drive for swap space, (also has Win7 OS and Studio 12 program), but writes are slow (needs to erase blocks to make room for new writes). 

Check out the SSD articles in the Storage section of AnandTech.com.

There have been improvements in the drives, and some are certainly better than others.  Some have improved firmware, others you need a new drive.  Anand has become a strong believer of SSD drives, and often recommends it as the best upgrade where you'll actually feel the improvement.  (And the AnandTech site is not afraid to be critical of hardware either, including underperforming SSD drives.)

Thank you, the Anand Tech article is good,  I read them a few months ago, and on their advice got the OSZ Vertex SSD, which I use for the Win7 OS and the Pinnacle Studio 12 program.

Last night I installed the Qsoft RAM disk,  it made a pleasant improvement on speed, by making 7G of my 12G DRAM into paging file space; the speed to move around the story board is no longer so painful (but could be better if Studio was a 64 bit program, and didn't have have to copy files from one part of DRAM to the other).

The fast Velociraptor is just used to hold the raw AVCHD files I'm working on for 2 hours of Blue Ray disk (Still slow -about 10 minutes-  to open/load the project when I startup Studio;  and since Studio 12 crashes a few times a day, I spend way-to-much time waiting for those reloads).

The cheaper 1Terabyte WD green drive is used for Archives.

The video editing is now about 5 times more responsive, compared to when I only had the WD 1T green drive and SSD drive, neither of which was fast for paging file space

Thanks,

Russ

rgibbons:

Thank you, the Anand Tech article is good...

Last night I installed the Qsoft RAM disk...  The video editing is now about 5 times more responsive, compared to...

Thanks,

Wow!!  I'm glad I could help.

I hope you know I'm jeajous.  I'm holding off until I build a new system, but it keeps getting pushed back.  Someday, though.  Someday...

rgibbons:

Last night I installed the Qsoft RAM disk,  it made a pleasant improvement on speed, by making 7G of my 12G DRAM into paging file space; the speed to move around the story board is no longer so painful (but could be better if Studio was a 64 bit program, and didn't have have to copy files from one part of DRAM to the other).

 

Russ

So in your opinion its better to run with a memory based swap?/paging/"virtual memory in W7"  file than to run with no swap?/paging/"virtual memory in W7" file at all?

Any theories as to your experience compared to the "no swap at all" option? ............... that IMO (and experience too) should be the fastest on a W7 x64 machine.

 Have you actually logged the swap space usage on a W7 x64 machine with Studio doing its thing?

 

First let me say I'm not an expert in paging files, nor in Studio;  I came to this forum to learn, and share a few experiments I didn't see other posts on the subject during a limited 2 hour search here.

After a few more hours of checking other forums about paging files, it appears some systems can crash if one is missing.  Since my wife makes my life miserable when the computer crashes on her,  I spent a few hundred extra dollars to make the system very stable (big power supply, monster cooling fans,  and don't over clock even though my DRAM speed & motherboard easily support it).  So I can't comment on speed with no paging file.  But it is very fast on RAMdisk (3 banks, at default i7 speed settings); my wife also does editing on studio, and her comments went from "we wasted our money, this thing is so slow it must be broken" ---  to "I'm happy, it's fast now".

 I don't know how much space the file would optimally use,  When Win 7 was allowed to use whatever it wished on the hard disk, it used about 18Gig of disk space.  I currently have the only paging file set to 7Gig of DRAM, and it is fully used; (7G is the amount of my 12G of memory that was never used, I constantly monitor memory and CPU usage the past few months)  I suspect more would be better, since I'm editing 4 hours of AVCHD (~20Mbps, 30p, 1920x1080), and skipping around (and waiting) a lot.  If I was only editing from Standard Definition video (As we've done for hundreds of hours with Studio 11, to make dozens of hours of final video product), then I wouldn't bother with changing paging files.

I'd be grateful to learn from what you've done, please share. 

P.S.  I'd also like to put in a plug for SSD,  used to take 30 seconds to load studio12 from Hardisk (no project),  with SSD takes about 5-6 seconds.

Russ.

 

.

rgibbons:

First let me say I'm not an expert in paging files, nor in Studio;  I came to this forum to learn, and share a few experiments I didn't see other posts on the subject during a limited 2 hour search here.

After a few more hours of checking other forums about paging files, it appears some systems can crash if one is missing.  Since my wife makes my life miserable when the computer crashes on her,  I spent a few hundred extra dollars to make the system very stable (big power supply, monster cooling fans,  and don't over clock even though my DRAM speed & motherboard easily support it).  So I can't comment on speed with no paging file.  But it is very fast on RAMdisk (3 banks, at default i7 speed settings); my wife also does editing on studio, and her comments went from "we wasted our money, this thing is so slow it must be broken" ---  to "I'm happy, it's fast now".

 I don't know how much space the file would optimally use,  When Win 7 was allowed to use whatever it wished on the hard disk, it used about 18Gig of disk space.  I currently have the only paging file set to 7Gig of DRAM, and it is fully used; (7G is the amount of my 12G of memory that was never used, I constantly monitor memory and CPU usage the past few months)  I suspect more would be better, since I'm editing 4 hours of AVCHD (~20Mbps, 30p, 1920x1080), and skipping around (and waiting) a lot.  If I was only editing from Standard Definition video (As we've done for hundreds of hours with Studio 11, to make dozens of hours of final video product), then I wouldn't bother with changing paging files.

I'd be grateful to learn from what you've done, please share. 

P.S.  I'd also like to put in a plug for SSD,  used to take 30 seconds to load studio12 from Hardisk (no project),  with SSD takes about 5-6 seconds.

Russ.

 

.

Lots of extremely technical discussions are allover the web and its just not the place to get to grips with here.

 

Let me say this:

Creating a RAMDisk in memory does exactly that - the RAMDisk software hijacks the amount you willing to sacrifice and set up a disk in that space - whether or not the space "actually gets used" as in some info gets moved to/from there is irrelevant - the allocated memory is effectively lost to the operating system as well as any other application willing/able to use more than the apparent 2G so many 32bit apps seems to be fixated on .................... and this is a real pain when you run in a 64bit environment and are chasing overall speed and not just only wanting to cater for Studio's idiosyncrasies. You are effectively forcing any and all applications as well as the OS  to be ineffective memory users.

I have been running Studio for yonks without a swap/pagefile on XP based on experiments to extract max performance from it and certainly have never crashed Studio or any other app as a result of that. Any app insisting on a swap/page file being present should and do simply tell you about it on a properly setup system ................ and so far I have only ever found Photoshop to be pedantic about that - all other apps I have are quite willing to live life with no page/swap file present. On W7 x64 I dont think anthing has ever insisted on a page/swap file.

As for a stonking big RAMdisk and actually using the space for video file storage rather than just paging/swapping:

You need to somehow get the video file's contents into that RAMDisk space before you can use it - its all fine if you eg capture directly to that space, but if not you need to move a file there from a magnetic/SSD disk anyway. Lets say you have done that and you now either switch off the machine or it sleeps/hibernates - that info on the RAMDisk space in memory cannot stay there magically - the OS/Ramdisk software manager usually copies it all to a physical disk somewhere temporarily on system shutdown and on system startup it needs to retrieve that huge chunk of data and stick it back in memory so your RAMDisk software can act as if its happy ........................ juts guess how long it takes a 7G file to be transferred to and from a physical disk an how that impacts your system startup/shutdown/sleep/hibernate times? ............. and that happens EVERY time any of those happens.

I would suggest you get a decent monitoring tool like Taskinfo and do a proper investigation of the paging/swapping activities on your machine both with and without a dedicated swap/page RAMDisk present - you will be surprised I guarantee you. When you have Taskinfo going also monitor the file access rates (disk read write rates) while Studio is running ................... you will be amazed to find that on a properly setup system, that Studio rarely if ever exceeds around 5MB/s - all way within capabilities of even 5 year old magnetic disks. I am also pretty sure that the actual gain ito render time reduction you will see from using either SSDs or Raid0 getups when compared to eg 3 dedicated single magnetic disks is so small that you should rather spend your money on wining  and dining the old ball and chain and gain browny points.

All of this off-course assumes money is a factor - if its not and you simply want the latest and greatest, then chuck it all out the window and ignore.

Anybody with a recipe to demonstrate the opposite of my experience please post down-loadable source files, a recipe and project render times and we can compare notes based on real-life experiences on our own hardware/setups and not only talk in generalities

Lawrence: I tried your experiments,  the speed during edits and for loading the project is about the same for no page file, as it is with Page file in RAMdisk, (only becomes slow if page file is on hard disk).  As long as I have more DRAM than the 32 bit programs ask for,  it seems a page file doesn't make any difference in normal use, and the system is stable. Since I had hibernate files and startup images turned off, the RAM disk carried zero penalty that I could notice to startup,  RAM disk was only used for swap files.

My RAMdisk is too small to store all the project files (75 Gig of raw AVCHD per BluRay Disk).  Transfer rates while loading the project are 25MB/s from the normal HDD, and 65MB/s from the fast Velociraptor.  These rates are more important to me than render times since I load the project many times, and render only once.  The most important speed numbers to me are delays during edits; as suggish response in editing can waste a few seconds on thousands of occasions, while I'm sitting and waiting; compared to render times (which most people seem to be more concerned about), which don't cost me much wasted time, because I can do something else useful during that time, (rather than waiting and wishing Studio was coded to use system resources more efficiently).

Russ

Russ - glad to see age old experience still holds true wrt the swap's presence and Studio's dependency - I would therefore suggest killing the swap and RamDisk altogether as their management is a non-profitable operation ito system performance just as you have demonstrated

Do you run with background rendering enabled or disabled?

If you run with it enabled and do some serious plug-in application to many/all of the material on the time-line, I can see how you will get seriously frustrated by that till all of the background rendering has been completed. If you could have a SSD dedicated to the temporary files of Studio that would sure help a lot with the "editing experience" and delays. Due to pathetic design (IMO only), Studio also insists on creating the audio waveform for the clips on the TL at a measly 5MB/s only  ................... and at that rate (irrespective of anything and everything else happening on either the machine as a whole or Studio in particular) it takes "forever" for Studio to complete that little task ............... and as a result any editing actions during that period is imo bound to suffer from real serious delays - thus when opening/starting a project, your editing responsiveness index will dramatically increase once the audio waveform for all clips on the TL is present. 

Somehow I don't feel comfortable with those figures you quoted for drive rates with Studio opening a serious project. Are you comparing apples with apples? - a fairly complex 40G AVCHD project here gets me disk access rates of around 55MB/s during project opening with real cheap 16M cache 500G and 300G Samsung drives ...................... you sure that disk fragmentation (if nothing else and the system is properly optimized/tuned) is not the real problem with your setup? AVCHD by nature is huge files and I cant remember when last I saw modern magnetic drive that couldn't read at at least 50MB/s over the whole of the disk.......................

 

 

None of this all will cause/make better use of the system's memory, but there you go - sometimes life is a female dog.