two gigs of ram for capturing and encoding??

[onetrueday]

Hi!

my current setup is a p4 2.4c/abit ic7/1 gig of crucial ram pc2700/scsi HD/2 ide HD's.

I am thinking of upgrading to 2 gigs of ram. I use firewire to transfer my video and right now I'm using pinnacle studio 8 for editting, although that might change soon.

would i see ANY benefit?

(I often encode two movies at the same time using differant programs.)

[housepig]

you might see a small benefit, but you'd see more speed by going to a faster processor.

[txpharoah]

You're not using all 1 GB of RAM as it is.

[Vejita-sama]

You only really need a 300Mhz machine to capture (uncompressed) video at 720x480 (running real time codecs requires more). Encoding is speed is pretty much directly related to cpu (and filters).

The software also makes a huge difference. CCE is about 4x faster than TMPGenc. Mainconcept is also much faster (I've never used Ulead but people seem to like it as well).

Since I've been involved in digital video work I've had a K6-2 500, Tbird 1.2Ghz, and my current 2200XP. Each CPU upgrade made a huge difference. With my current CPU and CCE I can encode in CCE at ~0.7x source runtime per pass. With the 500Mhz it took ~42x the source runtime per pass

[txpharoah]

The software also makes a huge difference. CCE is about 4x faster than TMPGenc. Mainconcept is also much faster (I've never used Ulead but people seem to like it as well).

... though the speeds are based upon settings, filters, CPU, RAM, etc, etc... what one person may find to be "faster" isn't true for the next person.

Fast processor with sufficient RAM (no more than 512MB) and programs used properly is the trick to fast encoding.

Having more than 384 on some systems can cause more harm than good. More is not always better. I've seen systems encode faster after taking OUT a few sticks of RAM.

[MrKGB]

onetrueday,
Even 0.5 GB is more than enough for video.
You can check your memory consumption in "Windows Task Manager" (right click on task bar -> Task Manager)
I never saw any Video application taking more than 70 MB of memory.
Upgrade your CPU if you want to burn your money.

[thor300]

I havent noticed any difference between 256 and 512MB, and in some cases too much memory will slow down the system, so theres a big chance your pc will be faster with 512MB than with 2Gigs of RAM. 1 gig is more than enough (or too much)

[vance43211]

download free mem pro so u can moniter your ram

www.sysopt.com/freemem/

txpharoah is right 512 should be sufficent

anything else is overkill

a friend of mine have 2 gig of ram on a 1200 processor

i have 512 on a 2.4

my video chores are way faster than his

also ifoedit and especially pinnacle expression work better with 512 than 256

pinnacle expression really don't work with 256ram

[Cecilio]

i have 512 mb of ram, and i dont feel it to be sufficient. plus there is a difference in 256 and 512 way big difference. oh and when i encode with CCE it uses about 300 MB of Ram and other aplications combined are four hundred something which slow down my computer and well yea i can use it, but the 1 gig would be great. i have a 1.6 GHZ AMD 1800xp. boy i wish I had money for a 3.06 Ghz P4 2 Gbs of ram, and about 180 gb of memory.

[LanEvo7]

Get a gig, then spend that extra money on a better processor. You'll see more difference that way.

[rhegedus]

Get a gig, then spend that extra money on a better processor. You'll see more difference that way.

I absolutely agree. You're probably won't use 1Gb fully eithet, but at least it means you'll be able to multitask. At the end of the day, CPU speed is probably the biggest factor in encoding times.

[vance43211]

if u have freemem pro minimized in the task bar telling u have much ram u are actually using

u will find that for most application 512mb is sufficent

there is a big difference between 256 and 512 however

i took a 256 stick out of my comp and added to my wife so she too would have 512 mb of ram

as i didn't get no better performance with 768 than with 512

freemem pro actually helps u free up ram too

on a dual processor chip
maybe more ram will help

[reason21]

Whats this CCE program??? wer to get it from...you felas say its faster than Tmp. thanks sry for the jump on topic.laterX

[thor300]

Didnt know CCE could be that memory-loving, 300Megs is quite much. Most i seen on TMPGEnc is just over 100, when converting DivX4 to MPEG. I need 512 (or more) when doing projects like C++ with SQL servers and other stuff, then it happens 512 is not much. Still the original question was about encoding and capturing, and 256 was no problem for me, even with 2 TMPGEnc sessions running, still i would have resources available for doing my other things. CCE is obviously a different story.

[disturbed1]

i have 512 mb of ram, and i dont feel it to be sufficient. plus there is a difference in 256 and 512 way big difference. oh and when i encode with CCE it uses about 300 MB of Ram and other aplications combined are four hundred something which slow down my computer and well yea i can use it, but the 1 gig would be great. i have a 1.6 GHZ AMD 1800xp. boy i wish I had money for a 3.06 Ghz P4 2 Gbs of ram, and about 180 gb of memory.

CCE/TMPG will use the amount of RAM available.

CCE uses upto 520,000K on my system https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=146002

TMPG uses a little more
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=151411

Scroll to my posts to see the screen shots.

A faster CPU will usually give faster encodes. Unless there is a bottle kneck with the RAM subsystem. Either use fast DDR, or RDRAM. 512 is barely a min. I wouldn't build a computer with anything less than 768. Your basic OS with IE, or Explorer running will eat 128mb, that would leave 512 for encoding.

With 2gig RAM, you could run a 1gig ram drive. If your files are 1gig or less, you can load the file into the ram drive for some ultra fast processing times.

[onetrueday]

what an incredible amount of information!!

thanks!

I currently have 1 gig and was considering upgrading to 2 gigs.

I have a p4 2.4c that's currently running around 2.8, but I've only had it a week.

For me, tmpgenc will run a double pass VBR 50min avi in about 30-40 minutes. I'm making up some flyers now to enter into the vhs/camcorder to dvd-r conversion business.

So, speed is important.

thanks!

[housepig]

I have a p4 2.4c that's currently running around 2.8, but I've only had it a week.

For me, tmpgenc will run a double pass VBR 50min avi in about 30-40 minutes. I'm making up some flyers now to enter into the vhs/camcorder to dvd-r conversion business.

man, I'd love to see speed like that - I'm here at work, and my computer at home is chugging through the other half of the material I set up to process last night! Hopefully it'll be done by the time I get home.

About 3 hours of input - I'm estimating 14-16 hours processing time with 2-pass VBR in TMPGenc.

I need to get a faster processor...

[bugster]

[quote="disturbed1"]

With 2gig RAM, you could run a 1gig ram drive. If your files are 1gig or less, you can load the file into the ram drive for some ultra fast processing times.

Sorry, shouldn't really hijack a thread like this, but how do I set up Ram Drive in XP?

[Alan69]

BUT you have to think about what they're doing with the extra ram. The answer is nearly nothing.

These are processing intensive tasks. Once the program has enough ram to have X number of frames ahead and behind to look through to encode without having to go to the drive, then it makes very little difference. Who cares if you read in 512 megs all at the start, or 20 frames at a time as you need them? There is so much time spent processing each frame that there's little likelyhood of a program ever getting ahead of the read. You could likely read the file in 100 times faster than it's being worked on, the HD isn't the bottleneck..

The few places might be when you have a lot of filters etc going on. Then some programs may use enough ram to keep all the intermediate frames for each step, and that may do it a bit faster. I still doubt many cases would extend beyond 512 megs unless you're running a lot of other programs etc..

Capturing is a different story, because of Windows crap. It can do some very screwy things that take a long time, and an 8 meg buffer on the HD just gives it 4 times more time to get back to the program and position before it drops a frame. If Windows managed it's own caching well, it wouldn't matter much, but it seems to stop doing some mundane things like that when it decides to do something else now and then. Just like it stops moving the pointer and a lot of other things at times that it really shouldn't do. Go play on an old Amiga for a while and see how a multitasking system should feel, Windows is just barely useable even now..

Alan

[Cecilio]

[quote="bugster"]

With 2gig RAM, you could run a 1gig ram drive. If your files are 1gig or less, you can load the file into the ram drive for some ultra fast processing times.

Sorry, shouldn't really hijack a thread like this, but how do I set up Ram Drive in XP?

i didnt type that, what you quoted

[jennyandgreg]

Save the money and push the 2.4 overclock. I have my 2.4C running at 3.2Mhz solid (that's a bus speed over 1,000!). If anything put the $$$ into a raptor drive!

[bugster]

[quote="Cecilio"]

With 2gig RAM, you could run a 1gig ram drive. If your files are 1gig or less, you can load the file into the ram drive for some ultra fast processing times.

Sorry, shouldn't really hijack a thread like this, but how do I set up Ram Drive in XP?

i didnt type that, what you quoted

No you didnt, sorry, my edit messed up, it was disturbed1

[thayne]

I noticed a big difference going from 256 to 512MB, but I have't seen my memory use over 400MB so I think more is overkill. Maybe a gig, but I think 2 gigs would be a waste

[vance43211]

give that free mem pro a try

it a handy tool to have

u can moniter your ram 100% of the time