"I can not be bothered getting into a slanging match with you or anyone else But I have been editing video for som 25yrs

and I know what I'm talking about

as I said the harddrive is causing a bottle neck one harddrive on an edit system is just asking for trouble."






Strange, I only have one hard drive (C: drive) and I've been editing successfully with both PD12 and PD14. I guess I'll have to submit a trouble report...

Quote I can not be bothered getting into a slanging match with you or anyone else But I have been editing video for som 25yrs

and I know what I'm talking about

I'll come back to that.

Quote as I said the harddrive is causing a bottle neck one harddrive on an edit system is just asking for trouble

And 20 years ago I would have trusted you on that, when everyone was using mechanical drives that had to accellerate and decelerate read/write heads as they worked on several files that were spread out over the disk area, which caused horrible random access performance. SSD solved that for good and with M.2 and the new NVM cards parallel access to several files is once more optimized.

Quote now go watch some tutorials and come back when you learn something

True, I've never watched any of those. So let's look at the first three that Google spits out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-xCVQ6HuQ8 - They edit higher resolution content (4K/1080p) and use one SSD that's connected via SATA together with a regular HDD (for the big files I assume). In case of PowerDirector we would be working with shadow files on the SSD.) They claim that the CPU is the most important part of any video editing computer, which supports what I said above. The graphics card can be anything in the mid-range. They also use 16 GiB of DDR4 RAM and consider it a "decent amount for 4K resolution". As for RAM upgrades they projected the following numbers...

Rendering 4K video with different amounts of RAM, with 16 GiB being the base:

32 GiB: +15% to +20%
64 GiB: +30%

They go on and claim that for video editing the difference of SSD vs. HDD isn't really that important. I see how that is likely true for the rendering tasks, but jumping in the timeline and actually working in the editor should be more snappy with an SSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxI-LvwtkHM - "Memory is also very important for video editing machines. Definitely if you're working with 4K footage. We're suggesting a minimum of 16 GB, but if you can please think about going to 32GB or even 64GB if you wich to stay away from the limits." - That again would suggest that for Jeremy's 720p 16 GiB is plenty.

"Some people will tell you it's the graphics card, but in reality you want to spend most of your budget on the CPU. Having multiple cores will increase your rendering power as well. The graphics card is less important […]" - Between the lines you may read that multi-core CPUs will improve rendering, but for the editing itself it depends on the quality of the software if it can make good use of many cores. Otherwise a high clock speed is more important.

"[…] for storing your video files, even a normal hard drive would be enough." - Again the same claim as above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaNZRz0E8XY&list=PL0EHp46PT0fGKdc4kjIOAXYMwvH1sKgR5 - Uses 32 GiB of RAM and two SSDs. The build is "centered around" the 8 core AMD CPU. One SSD is used as the C: drive, the other larger one as the scratch drive. The introduction assumed some prior knowledge on photo/video editing PCs, so did not explain why the components were chosen. It also wasn't clear what kind of video his client would work with.

The bottom line is, none of the tutorials supported the idea that multiple SSDs are necessary for video editing for performance reasons. The CPU was always considered the weak link or most important part by far.

Quote I answered the post to try and help I'm not wanting a slanging match with someone whom thinks one harddrive is sufficent

And I would have answered the question the exact opposite way: Forget about extra RAM and disks, focus on the CPU frequency. If you really want to help poeple, be open to new information even if it contradicts your experience. We all are prone to confirmation bias. In other words, if the experience is 20 years old, maybe it is time to start from a clean slate.

Quote simply you don't have a clue with statements like that

end of story

have a nice day

Tom G

I wish you a nice day, too. Sorry for the wall of text.

Quote

Quote I can not be bothered getting into a slanging match with you or anyone else But I have been editing video for som 25yrs

and I know what I'm talking about

I'll come back to that.

Quote as I said the harddrive is causing a bottle neck one harddrive on an edit system is just asking for trouble

And 20 years ago I would have trusted you on that, when everyone was using mechanical drives that had to accellerate and decelerate read/write heads as they worked on several files that were spread out over the disk area, which caused horrible random access performance. SSD solved that for good and with M.2 and the new NVM cards parallel access to several files is once more optimized.

Quote now go watch some tutorials and come back when you learn something

True, I've never watched any of those. So let's look at the first three that Google spits out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-xCVQ6HuQ8 - They edit higher resolution content (4K/1080p) and use one SSD that's connected via SATA together with a regular HDD (for the big files I assume). In case of PowerDirector we would be working with shadow files on the SSD.) They claim that the CPU is the most important part of any video editing computer, which supports what I said above. The graphics card can be anything in the mid-range. They also use 16 GiB of DDR4 RAM and consider it a "decent amount for 4K resolution". As for RAM upgrades they projected the following numbers...

Rendering 4K video with different amounts of RAM, with 16 GiB being the base:

32 GiB: +15% to +20%
64 GiB: +30%

They go on and claim that for video editing the difference of SSD vs. HDD isn't really that important. I see how that is likely true for the rendering tasks, but jumping in the timeline and actually working in the editor should be more snappy with an SSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxI-LvwtkHM - "Memory is also very important for video editing machines. Definitely if you're working with 4K footage. We're suggesting a minimum of 16 GB, but if you can please think about going to 32GB or even 64GB if you wich to stay away from the limits." - That again would suggest that for Jeremy's 720p 16 GiB is plenty.

"Some people will tell you it's the graphics card, but in reality you want to spend most of your budget on the CPU. Having multiple cores will increase your rendering power as well. The graphics card is less important […]" - Between the lines you may read that multi-core CPUs will improve rendering, but for the editing itself it depends on the quality of the software if it can make good use of many cores. Otherwise a high clock speed is more important.

"[…] for storing your video files, even a normal hard drive would be enough." - Again the same claim as above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaNZRz0E8XY&list=PL0EHp46PT0fGKdc4kjIOAXYMwvH1sKgR5 - Uses 32 GiB of RAM and two SSDs. The build is "centered around" the 8 core AMD CPU. One SSD is used as the C: drive, the other larger one as the scratch drive. The introduction assumed some prior knowledge on photo/video editing PCs, so did not explain why the components were chosen. It also wasn't clear what kind of video his client would work with.

The bottom line is, none of the tutorials supported the idea that multiple SSDs are necessary for video editing for performance reasons. The CPU was always considered the weak link or most important part by far.

Quote I answered the post to try and help I'm not wanting a slanging match with someone whom thinks one harddrive is sufficent

And I would have answered the question the exact opposite way: Forget about extra RAM and disks, focus on the CPU frequency. If you really want to help poeple, be open to new information even if it contradicts your experience. We all are prone to confirmation bias. In other words, if the experience is 20 years old, maybe it is time to start from a clean slate.

Quote simply you don't have a clue with statements like that

end of story

have a nice day

Tom G

I wish you a nice day, too. Sorry for the wall of text.

There seem to be enough NO-ALL's on this forum so I will butt out

editing true 4k video say 1hour or two hours with one HD it must be a very large HD ?

PD just could not do that heck even Premiere pro coughs

think about what you are saying with all the cuts/fades/adding graphics/text/audio/ on a one hour 4k video with one HD

total BS

but it is true if you are only doing 5mins of 4k thats ok but not a full hour of footage with one HD

total BS and if its tried or some say they have done it with 4k then their system must have been crawling if they were using PD

and thats a fact

have a nice day and happy Pagan festival

Tom G

There seem to be enough NO-ALL's on this forum so I will butt out

The word should be 'Know it All'.

The big bottle neck of editing video is the speed of the CPU. The more effects and video enhancements you do, the slower the rendering is.

Powerdirector does use a lot of space on the C drive for scratch space. So if your hard drive space is low, that could slow the rendering. Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Hi All,

Thanks to everyone who contributed but I think this thread has covered a lot of ground and its time to close it off before we lose the good stuff and the thread becomes too messy.

It shows how difficult it is to be exact about offering advice and helping others reach a solution, in practice I suppose nearly all solutions are a mixture of quantifiable hard fact and subjective operating acceptability.

It's great that members can swap ideas and enter into constructive discussions without it getting too aggravated, especially when there are significantly differing views.

Thanks again to all who posted, it's what the forum is here for.

Cheers

PowerDirector Moderator

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