CPU vs. RAM

[btieleman]

I've searched down a number of posts and articles, here and on several other sites, and seem to find conflicting opinions concerning the role of CPU speed versus RAM quantity.

Not that I can easily/inexpensively do anything about it (my RAM is maxed at 1Gb, and my CPU is my CPU - P4@1.8GHz), but I'd like to better understand what part of the video creation process favors more RAM over faster CPU, which vice versa, and why?

Most, but not all, information I've read seems to indicate that encoding favors CPU, while rendering favors RAM. Have I got this straight? Are there other phases that favor one over the other?

I'm sure that eventualities such as the presence of hardware versus software codecs and etcs. color any given situation, but a general rule of thumb and rationale would be very enlightening to me.

Thanks very much for your time and consideration.

Bill T.

[ZippyP.]

Windows generally operates optimally with 512 MB of ram, anything more does not usually speed up single processes. If you have several programs running simultaneously (multitasking) and switching between them, then it can help to have lots of ram so that Windows does not have to swap the files from ram to disk. It's really only an issue if you're running several progs at once.

[holistic]

There are a lot of NAFA's out there each with their own "opinions"

Some info :
CAPTURE : very hardrive intensive if doing analog captures. Not an issue if using DV (3.7 MB/sec)
NLE (non linear editing) : This will depend to the type of editing you have planned. For example : Premiere 6 can 'access' up to 180 minutes in its timeline. This is indexed (for want of a better word) an referenced when scrolling the time line. My upgrades over the years from 256Mb of PC133 to 512 DDR (running @420) have seen very small time differences in my access times to the timeline.
Different editors may behave differently, but the idea of you thinking faster than the machine in doing your cutting and joining is absurd.
For real time transition previews with large files however you will see a performance boost (if of course you have your memory/swap file set up correctly)
ENCODING : CPU ....cpu ... cpu ... nothing else .The faster the 'calculator' the faster the encode - pure and simple.

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