When the big guns need help, our lead tech is standing at the ready. Trust me, the dude is awesome (also hilarious!) Recently, he posted a set of tips internally that I thought were important to share with the community. I hope you find them useful.
He wrote:
Speeding up your system doesn't really require much in the way of secret sauce, however, this question comes up a lot. First of all, it's important to know about your workflow because getting a performant system for someone that works with H.264 as their dominant acquisition codec is not going to be the same as for someone that uses ProRes, or XDCAM HD 422.
For H264 and HEVC workflows, having a system that supports Intel Quick Sync is super important. For non-H264/HEVC workflows, that doesn't matter at all.
Here is a list of performance upgrades that will help all editors:
- Fast hard drives - use SSD or NVMe for best results.
- Set your cache directories to a secondary fast local drive (SSD or NVMe).
- 32 GB of RAM minimum and the more the better.
- Set your RAM preference for </= 32 GB to 70/30 (70% for Adobe apps, 30% for everything else) for </= 32 GB (64 GB or more) set the memory pref to 80/20 (80% for Adobe apps, 20% for everything else).
- You may have a tendency to think that because you have a large amount of installed RAM that you should give it all to PPro. Not true! You'll end up choking performance because the OS and other apps can't get enough RAM to efficiently operate.
- Pay attention to the system compatibility report. If it says your GPU drivers need updating.... update them.
- Buy a GPU with 2-4GB or greater VRAM for HD, 4-8 GB VRAM for 4K, at a miniumum. If you have long timelines, a lot of GPU accelerated effects and/or scaling, or "out of GPU memory" issues, add more VRAM.
- Pay attention to GPU core count. More cores are better than fewer.
- Balance CPU clock speed with CPU core count. The faster your clock speed the better, but you still need at least 8 cores.
- More CPU cores are better, but that generally comes at the cost of slower clock speeds.
- Don't install a bunch of apps on your editing system. Try to keep it clean.
- Make images of your system in a pristine state so that if you do install something nefarious, you can quickly get back to a clean state.
- There are a few other things that can help like a second GPU, but they don't help that much. Keep in mind that you can quickly start investing in items that have diminishing returns for editing workflow.
- Focus on your workflow to avoid obvious known post production bottlenecks.
I hope these tips help those of you trying to optimize your computer system.
Regards,
Kevin
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