Does a Solid State hard drive help the performance of editing software?

[True Colors]

I do a lot of high definition video editing on my computer. These files are large so therefore they require a lot of processing power.

Most of my source files are mpeg2. My PC does fine when I make the output files MP2.

However, when I try to convert MP2 files to h.264 MP4 files then my PC struggles. It takes a long time to complete the jobs. And according to my system task manager, it uses up about 95% of my CPU power.

I know that Solid State Drives(SSD) are able to boost computer performance. So I have been thinking of replacing my regular SATA II drive with an SSD. Will this help? If so, how much?

Here are my full system specs

computer: Dell core 2 duo - 3.0 Ghz processors
OS: Windows 7 professional
memory - 8 gigs of SD2 ram
video card - Nvidia GeForce GT440

Thanks!

TC

[jagabo]

Yes, the software will start up in 1/10 second rather than 1/3 second. Rendering time will be unchanged. Unless you're working with uncompressed video the disk I/O time is negligible. If you are working with uncompressed video you can't afford big enough SSDs.

[smrpix]

An SSD might give you a moderate performance boost, but your bottleneck is likely the processing power needed to decompress H.264. If you convert your files to an i-frame and/or less compressed format before editing --such as pro-res, dnxhd, huffyuv, lagarith and store them to a non-system drive (you are doing that aren't you?), your performance will increase dramatically.

edit: misread your post -- jagabo has the right answer.