Choosing an optimum setup for HD Video-Editing in VideoStudio
The minimum system requirements for good quality results when editing HD video depend on your operating system.
For Windows XP you willl need about 2Gb RAM.
For Windows Vista or Windows 7 you will need about 2-3Gb RAM.
For 64-bit operating systems it may be worth adding more RAM for Windows to use, as they can make use of up to 8Gb of RAM. VideoStudio Pro X3, however, can only use 2Gb of RAM no matter which Operating System you use.
You will need 512Mb of RAM just to run Windows XP. For Vista and Windows 7, allow 1Gb just to run the Operating System.
On any system you will need a good processor, graphics card and enough hard drive space to store your videos.
The processor should ideally be at least an Intel Core 2 Duo or an Athlon X2. VideoStudio Pro X3 has been optimised for the Intel® Core™ i7 Processor so it will run much faster if you have this processor.
For the graphics card, an ATI or Nvidia card with 512Mb RAM or better is good enough. The new HD graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia will provide good HD playback as well. VideoStudio Pro X3 has been optimised to take advantage of Nvidia CUDA™.
Whichever graphics card you have, please make sure that the driver for it is up to date. You can download drivers for Nvidia and ATI cards here:
Nvidia: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-uk
ATI: http://support.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDSupportHub.aspx
If you have a card from another manufacturer or you cannot find a suitable driver on these sites, please contact the manufacturer of your computer. They should be able to provide you with a suitable driver.
Onboard graphics, where you have no separate graphics card, are not recommended for video editing as the memory is shared with Windows.
The hard drive that you use should be an internal hard drive with a speed of 7200 RPM or faster. Having more than one hard drive to increase available storage, or having a dedicated drive for video editing is a good idea.
External hard drives are good for storage, but copy files to the internal hard drives to edit and render projects. The USB and Firewire connections used by external hard drives are not fast enough for editing and rendering video.
Hard drive space: You will need from 40GB to 410Gb of space per hour of video depending on the resolution and data rate. The higher the resolution and data rate of the video, the more disc space you will need.
Switch off all other programs when editing. The best option of all is to create a new administrator profile in Windows with no other programs apart from VideoStudio Pro X3 installed.
You can use the SmartProxy option in VideoStudio Pro X3 to speed up editing the video if this is still slow. It won’t have any effect on the speed of the rendering, however.
SmartProxy creates a low-resolution version of your video file which you can edit. When you come to render your project to a disc or to a file, the edits, effects and other changes will be applied to your original file.
Choose an appropriate format for the video or disc that you want to create. One which can be played back by the software that you have. If the format doesn’t need to be changed, choose the option to keep the same format as the first clip in the project.
Once the project has started rendering, leave the computer alone, if possible, until the rendering has finished.
Even on an ideal system like the one described here it may take several hours.
Once the video has finished rendering, test the video by playing it back in a video program that supports HD, such as WinDVD Pro 2010. Other programs may not be able to play back HD video or may play it back at a lower resolution.
If you play the video back on another system with a lower spec graphics card, processor, or less RAM, the playback quality may not be as good.
Install Service Pack 2 for VideoStudio Pro X3 and the latest version of Quicktime.
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