$3000 machine can’t edit HD

[Mike Velte]

SSD drives can be troublesome with rapidly degraded performance. They need to be erased periodically to restore performance.

Here is a link to this:

https://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?s=d6566c8a1e7e3a6362973853c553f81f&t=81492

[Jake Mannion]

Thanks, I will examine that down the road. As for now, the SSD’s are only eight days old.

I’ve seen them hit 280 Mb/s read and write on large file copies with a sustained effort around 180 Mb/s, but the most I’ve seen Premiere Pro CS4 be able to muster out of them is around 10 Mb/s.

[Vince Becquiot]

If these are MLC drives, forget about using these for anything else than the OS. They have a very limited amount of write cycles and will die in no time if used as any type of file swap environment.

For HD playback, you will also need a RAID system. At least 3 drives set in a RAID 0 array, or 4-5 drives set in a RAID 5 array. Preview and footage (with proper backups) will reside there.

Don’t use the onboard integrated RAID as it will likely depend on your system CPU. Everything else in your system looks great, assuming the BIOS was properly configured.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Jake,

You didn’t say what kind of footage you are editing, that can make a difference. HDV, P2, AVCHD, uncompressed? Any capture card involved?

Also, you said “project media” is on the C: drive, typically you don’t want any video assets on the same drive as the OS, as Windows needs to access the drive and may interfere with throughput of video editing.

Also, I’ve not heard of editing video off SSD drives before. I understand they’re supposed to be very fast boot drives, but I don’t know about video editing performance.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Joe Moya]

The problem is likely that you need to spend another 2 thousand-ish dollars on a multi-RAID system… I use groups of RAID 0 striped setups with an ADAPTEC raid controller to find my best bang for the buck in caching speed increase.

What you want to do is break through the I/O bottleneck caused by drives. Most RAM and CPU chips aren’t the problem when it used for editing(…however, if you are compositing with a layer compositing stucture like AE uses… in which case you want a really fast chip and LOTS of RAM… I use the intel i7 3.2Ghz chip and it still doesn’t help that much with AE compositing speed… but, then again that seems to be a AE 32 bit application limitation).

The raid controller choice can make a big difference as well as the HD you decide to use… I use the e-sata Fujitsu 15k rpm HD’s with Adaptec Raid controllers. This combo significantly helped with using/editing HD video in an uncompressed format.

[Jake Mannion]

Good catch, thanks. The footage is all H.264 encoded .mov files off of Canon SLR cameras. No capturing or capture board.

I agree, the footage “shouldn’t” be on the application drive, but I thought it was a better choice to put it on the SSD (200+ Mb/s, instant seek) than keeping it all on the SATAII storage drive (100 Mb/s, 9ms seek). I will try putting all the project media on the storage drive and see if that improves things.

[Jake Mannion]

I think the MLC lifespan worries are myth. Maybe it was a concern back in the 1990s when the technology was still being refined, but not these days.

And it’s not like they’re in a web server or something thats going to get hammered with data 24/7. The biggest offender for constant writing will be virtual memory usage, if I had to guess. As long as I get 3-4 years out of them I’ll be plenty happy, and I think they’ll be up to the task.

Now as far as performance, I specifically got these over RAID. I didn’t have a lot of room for the build, and could not foresee myself putting a half dozen SATA drives into the machine.

And that’s where I hope I didn’t make an expensive mistake. But on paper (and in the rest of my applications) the SSD are a dream, even stacked up against RAID configurations. I’ve seen them hit close to 350 Mb/s write and read, and the seek times are virtually non-existent.

[Jake Mannion]

That sounds like an awesome setup, don’t get me wrong. But when I built this machine I was looking at it from an “advanced hobbyist” sort of perspective. I didn’t want the space nor the power consumption of RAID setups.

Plus my budget is now shot, so hopefully I can figure out a way to make the most of what I have.

Basically what I can’t understand is, let’s say I have a 30 second clip (1080p, H.264 .mov) on the timeline. I press play.

Premiere then starts to draw:

• 7-15 Mb/s off of the SSD#1 where the media is stored
• 1-2 Mb/s overhead where the application is stored, SSD#1
• 1-2 Mb/s off the scratch disk area, SSD#2

After about 12-15 seconds, the first line item (media data) drops off completely, as the file is completely in memory. But it still plays terribly, like, not even 1 or 2 frames per second at times. The SSDs can read/write sustained over 200 Mb/s. Even once the media finishes loading it chugs through the playback. I simply don’t get it!!

[Eric Addison]

“The footage is all H.264 encoded .mov files off of Canon SLR cameras.”

That’s your problem…CS4 doesn’t handle that format native very well. There is talk that CS5 will, but until then I’d recommend converting it to another format. I’ve heard that some people use Adobe Media Encoder and convert it to DVCPRO HD or P2 format and that yields a file that PPro should edit quite easily.

—Eric

[Jake Mannion]

you’re right. dammit! I thought h.264 would be be fine, for some reason. I should have guessed it was the encoding. Thanks