SOLVED! Optimizing PD13 for editing on a laptop. Unusable editor preview = difficult video editing

GTP

Newbie Joined: Feb 10, 2015 22:01 Messages: 2 Offline

Solved by

Mar 07, 2015 15:09

I'm finding the preview during editing is very choppy on my brand new lenovo z50-70 I7 2.8(turbo)ghz 8gb ram 1TB 2GB dedicated nvidia video card laptop. I really can't edit 1080p video from my EOS-M or EOS SL1 on it successfully because the preview freezes for several seconds while the sound plays constantly.

All drivers and PD13 updates are up to date and hardware acceleration is on. I'm running windows 8 64 bit and have PD 13 running in 64bit. I believe the single hard disk which is running the OS and PD and the media storage is the problem. If I put a second hard disk in the laptop, how can I get PD13 to use the second disk for the preview files, shadow files, etc? I can't find any settings for setting where PD13 works from.

If I put an SSD in the laptop along with teh 1TB 5400 disk, I would need some way to tell PD13 to use the new drive for working files. I can upgrade to 16gb ram easily but I don't think that will help at all based on the resource monitor. I've tried turning down the preview quality all the way to medium and it doesn't help. I have shadow files on by default. I also used the old nvidia drivers linked to by cyberlink -- no improvement (at least during editing) so I switched back. I'm working with about 75 minutes of footage in 12 minute clips X 2 cameras but this happens with less media loaded as well.

Any other suggestions? Thank you,
Joel

Processor
4th Generation Intel Core i7-4510U Processor (2.00GHz 1600 MHz 4MB) (2.8GHz turbo)
Operating system
Windows 8.1 64
Display
15.6" FHD LED Glossy Wedge (1920x1080)
Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce 820M 2GB
Memory
8.0GB PC3-12800 DDR3L SDRAM 1600 MHz
Hard Drive
1TB 5400 RPM
Optical Drive

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Mar 13. 2015 01:20

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Mar 07, 2015 18:05

Hi GTP. Your post is fairly common. Everyone wants to have their preview fly along in real-time to make editing easy, but even with high-end hardware it's not always possible to do that. Things will always get slower whenever you add effects, change the video speed or make any significant changes (lighting, cropping, motion) to any of the clips in your project's timeline.

With your machine, you mention have Hardware Acceleration on and you should also have Shadow Files turned off. The preview will run a little smoother if your project's frame rate is the same as your source clips and also if you set the real-time preview quality to High (rather than either of the HD options).

For critical previewing, you can temporarily increase the preview resolution or try using non real-time preview which will play the clip smoothly even if it takes longer to run. Note that non R-T preview mode mutes the audio, so be sure to use a medium resolution preview quality whenever you need to check the audio sync.

The best way to check the finished quality of a section of your project is to highlight the area of interest in the timeline and choose Produce Range. PD will produce the highlighted section in full quality using the Produce settings, and then you can watch the imported clip in full HD or in an external player.

As for upgrading your system, the best possible outcome would be if you could add an SSD and reinstall Windows and all your programs to that new C: drive. A 5400rpm drive is pretty slow these days to be a main drive but it's perfectly fine to keep your media on because the drive can still retrieve data from your HD clips faster than their bit rate (HDD rate is around 50Mbps and HD clip bit rates are typically 28-35Mbps).

PD automatically creates the cache and preview files in the folder where your project's media is located, so despite what I just said, if you were to get a new SSD it's possible that you'd see better editing performance if you had enough room to move your source files to a temporary folder on your C: drive for editing.

However, I bought the machine spec'd below 1 year ago ($3k for all SSDs a top-end CPU and GPU) just for PD and there are very few instances when I can do any editing with one or two monitors if the preview is set to HD. Full HD res is a dream unless it's straight clips and no FX, etc.

Basically, I feel your pain and frustration and the best things I can suggest are the workarounds/techniques outlined above.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Mar 07, 2015 18:10

I should mention that it may not be practical/possible to change your new laptop's HDD over to SSD. If that's not an option, it would definitely help to have your media on a second physical drive (e.g. not just a second logical partition on a single HDD) because each drive could be accessed independently and you'd eliminate your current bottleneck of having everything running off the same drive.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

SoNic67

Senior Contributor Joined: Sep 27, 2014 14:14 Messages: 1308 Offline

Mar 07, 2015 20:18

1. Laptops, even "high end" are just toys when is about video editing. Deal with this fact or get a real tool - full size desktop. With full size vide cards.
2. For laptops, you can install a hybrid SSD+HDD (called SSHD - SSD is caching the HDD data transparently, with no OS intervention), similar with those:
64GB SSD + 1TB HDD => http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178384
120GB SSD + 1TB HDD => http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236642

They won't improve the video editing too much, the limiting factor is not the HDD speed.

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at Mar 07. 2015 20:23

GTP

Newbie Joined: Feb 10, 2015 22:01 Messages: 2 Offline

Mar 12, 2015 15:15

Guys, thank you very much for the advice and feedback. I tried everything I could including performing the editing from a high performance usb 3.0 external drive.... No significant improvement. However:

SOLVED! I just finished the migration of my 1tb standard hard drive to a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo Sata III SSD. This upgrade cost me $180 and wow...what a difference. I can now edit my project on high preview resolution in real time with no lag in video or sound and much better stability when moving in the timeline. I could not be happier with the improvement. The hard drive was absolutely the bottleneck. The SSD is fully optimized which is really important to performance.

Now to get some work done!

Thank you,

Joel

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Mar 12, 2015 15:24

That's great news! It's always gratifying to see someone get past such a big obstacle, and I'm happy we were able to share some useful info

Could you do us a favor and add a great big SOLVED in front of the word "Optimizing" in the title of your original post? That way, anyone searching for a way to fix their system with similar issues will know how you got it working.

Happy Editing!

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Mar 12. 2015 15:28