What should I do for improving my desktop?

[Sandra EG]

Hello everyone,

I really need your advice.

6-7 months ago I upgraded my graphic card: MSI GeForce® RTX 3060 Ti VENTUS 2X OCV1 LHR 8G and it made a huge difference! But now, I'm working with heavy files (between 16-25 GB) and I'm having difficulties to see what I did, I mean fast rendering is so slow, it is freezing all the time.

I'm confused about how I can improve the performance. A tech guy told me to upgrade CPU, the other one said increase RAM. I share specs of my desktop, I would be grateful if you can share your advices, thanks!

Motherboard: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. B450M PRO-M2 MAX (MS-7B84) J816679181 2.0
SSD: TOSHIBA-TR200 and KIOXIA-EXCERIA 500 GB
GPU: MSI GeForce® RTX 3060 Ti VENTUS 2X OCV1 LHR 8G
Ram: Team Group Kit 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4 3200MHz Zeus

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-core processor

[Mylenium]

There's nothing to improve. All that's required is spending some time straightening out potential driver problems and optimzing your workflow. If the frame look-up in your files is slow it can mean they may need to be converted to a different format or chopped into even smaller sections. Decoding e.g. a 30 minute 4k file just to work on some segment in the middle will auf course cause AE to decode the whole file or at least some of it. AE is not an editing app, after all. Again, there are no magic buttons, you need to adapt the way you work with it. 

Mylenium

[Sandra EG]

Hey Mylenium, thank you for your response. For example, sometimes I use .mov stock footages at the background, and using text animations, shape layers etc. and my video project is something like 4-5 min. Do you think that .mov files may be the reason? I'm having slow performance when I'm applying Keylight (1.2) effect in other projects too.

[Ishan Y]

Hey Sandra,

Welcome to the community. Could you let us know what type of source files and effects you're working with? Please also share your sequence resolution and average duration. This will help us get a better understanding of your project. We can share workarounds to help you reduce preview time. 

Thanks,

Ishan

[Sandra EG]

Hey Ishan,

For example, last week I was working for the project below:

I applied Keylight 1.2 effect & Lumetri Color to one mp4 video. That was the main video (a speech video) that I was showing during the 4 min composition. During this footage, some b-roll videos (mp4 and mov file type) were coming, and sometimes I used fast box blur effect to this broll videos and added animated texts. All docs are totals 7-8 GB. I don't think that this is a huge file but still when I push play to see what I made was so painful. 

Frame rate: 30

Duration: 4 min

Resolution: 1920x1080

What do you think what causing this? Sometimes I'm keeping my project files on Google Drive, and directly working on it. But I saw some conversations that this is not good. So I kept the files on my harddrive but still sometimes it is working sooo slow.

Thank you for your help,

[Warren Heaton]

Hi Sandra:

Adjust your workflow so that you are using a video editing application like Premiere Pro first to cut your main video, b-roll, temporary graphics (text that will eventually animate), and the audio mix. That is very likely to be real-time working at 1080p30. If not, you can try lowering the Playback Resolution, setting Video Previews to a lower frames size, or switching to a mezzanine CODEC like ProRes 422 LT (ProRes is a format that can be its own preview file in the Premiere Pro Timeline).

Since this is a speech video, you'll likely find the text-based editing option in Premiere Pro to be helpful as you assemble your cut before adding b-roll and temporary graphics.

Once you have locked the picture (that is, you will not make any more changes to the editing), send the cut over to After Effects for keying, color correction, and motion graphics.

Depending on your audio mix, you might be able to finish in After Effects. After Effects supports mono and stereo audio, but it's best suited for reference rather than mixing.

From what you have described, I would make a duplicate Sequence after locking the picture, select all of the Video Tracks, then right-click and choose Replace with After Effects Composition. This will send all the picture to After Effects while leaving a Composition in the Video Tracks and the audio in Premiere Pro. The After Effects work is likely to be slower, but it doesn't need to be real-time for 4 minutes because you've locked the edit. You can use the Work Area to Preview shorter durations as you work through the effects and animated text.

To finish the audio mix, you have a few options: work in the original locked Sequence and copy and paste to the duplicate that was sent to After Effects; work in the duplicate Sequence, but performance is likely to lag so you may want to hide the Video Tracks until you're ready to export; export a ProRes 422 LT movie from After Effects and import that into Premiere Pro, placing it in the duplicate Sequence above the After Effects Composition.

The video editing does not have to be done in Premiere Pro.  That just gives you the most flexibility.  Editing in Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, Resolve, iMovie, or Sony Vegas, but the round trip to After Effects takes some more planning.

-Warren

[Warren Heaton]

To improve render time, upgrade to a Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 with more cores.

To gauge how much of an improvement you can expect, download the After Effects multi-frame rendering benchmark project, render that Comp , and compare the results to what others have posted.