Hey folks,

I recently built a new PC to serve as my home storage machine (replacing a slow little NAS) as well as give my editing more horsepower. I'm normally color correcting and cataloging still photos, but I do more and more video as I shoot basic stuff with my digital cameras or my little cheap polaroid action cam.

I was editing this stuff on a 3 year-old iMac (running windows 10) with 12 gigs of memory and only the stock hard drive holding everything, and it did an OK job with the typical 720, 29.xxx MOVs I get off the polaroid. I'm hoping to do much better with the new machine. Full specs from dx.diag attached to message.

Brief rundown: core i5 skylake, SSD on an m.2 slot for system/software. Storage on a windows storage space (mirrored) of 2x2tb seagate barracudas on SATA. 32 gigs of RAM, lower-mid-level graphics card.

Upon getting the machine set up, everything has seemed super fast to me. Amazingly fast.

Except for Powerdirector. I opened it up and put a single, 3 minute film clip from that polaroid (720p), waited for the shadow file to produce, and I got major screen lag just trying to drag it onto the timeline. Mouse indicator would move, file wouldn't. After a few tries, it got to the timeline, and when I tapped the maginifcation/zoom buttons on the timeline, I got major lag, several seconds before anything happened, then the blue swirly mouse, along with the taskbar (NOT set to autohide) going missing, the whole screen upscaling to fill the space (poorly), a white "PD is not responding" message, and then, some seconds later, the UI would come back OK.

Needless to say, I was sort of surprised. This is something the prior, much less capable rig, could have handled without a problem.

I uninstalled and reinstalled, and things seem to be OK trying the same clip, but I haven't had a lot of time to try again.

Assuming things will otherwise be normal, are there setup tweaks (save locations, temp/scratch sizes, locations, etc.) that anyone would recommend? Most of my work will be simple: crossfading 10-20 minutes worth of 720 clips with some music tracks and fairly plain titles.

I read through the magic + pd post and was impressed, but I'm not sure I want to head that route until I first get things optimized for my existing resources.

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