Good work to do during the covid-19 pandemic.

PD allows up to 99 tracks on the timeline, so I'm not sure why you had audio trouble with the 17th track.

It's posible there was an issue with that specific clip or with something about how your project was configured, but upgrading your hardware won't make any difference with regard to adding more usable tracks.

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°

A friend who is a professional video producer and editor contacted me. Although he doesn't use PD, he suggested the bottleneck may be my hard drives. He wrote:

"I would say your hard drive throughput is bottlenecked with all 26 video streams. It can't read all of that data simultaneously. I would also guess that your big internal drive is a standard 7200rpm spinning drive?

A 7200RPM drive on SATA3 has about 133MB/s maximum read speed. Depending on the size and bitrate of each video file, I think you could easily max that out with 26 simultaneous clips (133/26 = 5.11MB/s maximum bitrate per video file). Plus, with it trying to play all of the clips simultaneously, the needle head on that poor hard drive is bouncing all over the place trying to deliver sequential data.

An SSD on SATA3 has about 500MB/s maximum read speed, and I don't know if you've seen or know about the fancy newer M.2 SSDs, but they will do up to 2200MB/s. Yes you read that right. They're insanely fast. The best part, no needle head trying to keep up.

What most people don't know is that for video editing your hard drives and RAM/memory are the biggest bottlenecks to video editing, not the CPU or GPU (until it comes time to render the final project out)."


What he writes sounds correct. I have an SSD for my OS, and stored all my work on a 7200rpm SATA drive. I am going to explore installing an additional SSD drive for future projects that have more than 5-10 tracks and see how that goes.

There are plenty of drive transfer speed topics on the forum, and while it's possible for hard drives to become a bottleneck with dozens of simultaneous clips when you're trying to preview the project in real-time, that isn't an issue at all when producing. The only things that will happen is that the producing time will increase as PD has to wait for all the data streams to arrive.

If your issue was only encountered when trying to preview your project, then using an SSD should help, as would using shadow files for editing, which greatly reduces the video bandwidth needed.

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°

Quote What most people don't know is that for video editing your hard drives and RAM/memory are the biggest bottlenecks to video editing, not the CPU or GPU (until it comes time to render the final project out).

Often true in a professional editor as they often work with uncompressed streams during editing. For PD, a significant amount of computer resource is needed to decode each stream simultaneously be it CPU decoding or GPU decoding during timeline playback. Decoding can be rather intensive computationally as well as read bw.

What I've done when one wants to display say 25 clips in a 1920x1080 frame, down sample each one to be in the ball park frame and bitrate wise and use those for editing. Massive reduction in resource needed. Very similar approach to shadow file optodata suggested but more user control.

Jeff

Hi Toby
I'm very impressed with your video, well done! And even more impressed that you managed to sort things out in just a couple of days!

i'm currently doing the same thing with a bunch of singers. Not all the videos are in yet, so far I have 9 singers, and things are going well... but I'm a bit worried now that as I add more, things will slow down. Can you tell us how you managed to overcome your problems with the audio?

I don't want to hijack your discussion, but can you tell me how you got all the videos to the same dimensions? I hadn't anticipated that, with videos coming in from various sources (iPads, smartphones, PCs), the clips would be of varying resolutions and orientations (landscape, portrait). So, I have been zooming and cropping, and re-sizing each clip by guesstimating.


I'd appreciate a quick walkthrough of your workflow - I think that this may be the first of many such projects, us musicians need to be with others!

OK, I eventually looked at the comments below your YouTube video, and am now reading your blog!

Here's my final video

https://youtu.be/sOlbV2K2re0

not as well-done as Toby's, I'm afraid, but I was up against the deadline of today, Easter Sunday. And learning PD while going along, so there was a lot of guesswork involved - and a lot of rough edges in the video. If I'd known at the start what I now know, I would have planned better! For example, when I got to 18 tracks, like Toby I found that PD was falling over every couple of minutes - so I took his advice and broke it into smaller sections, combining them at the end.

im sure my choir will be doing more of these Virtual performances, so looking forward to the next one!