Tweaking Win7 & CS5 for video editing
 

Hi folks,

I've got a new 64bit Win7 + CS5 system - fairly new to the OS and the CS5 suite.

Came from XP-Pro and CS3.

Is there any good articles yet for "stripping down" Win7 so that it runs the fastest it can?

I remember in WinXP I did this by "adjusting for best performance" in the advanced settings. Disabling network cards in Hardware Manager, and turning off all unneccessary Services (like Themes, Netbios, etc) Manually setting swap-file to another disk....

Tips, tricks appreciated! ;)

Look for Harm Millard...
He's got everything you need...

If not here, then at the Adobe forums...

Harm has indeed written some very comprehensive posts about this over on the Adobe forums. Note that Win 7 does have a radio button for "Adjust for best performance" which shuts down Aero and a lot of other unnecessary stuff.

Just for fun, I went through and disabled everything that was suggested on two different websites and ran the Premiere Pro Benchmark both before and after; results were identical. So on some systems it may be a lot of work and some potential risk for no apparent benefit.

Hi John,

Check out the "Black Viper" site too.

Harold

If you do the recommended Black Viper tweaks, let us know if you can measure any improvement in speed or stability. That was one of the lists of recommendations I followed, and they had no effect at all.

I don't think its needed these days. Windows 7 x64 is a very good OS and if you have a decent PC with a good amount of RAM I wouldnt change anything. However if your PC isnt up to speed then switching off aero might be a option.

John,

In addition to the articles I wrote about tuning your system on the Adobe Hardware forum, you can make it easy on yourself by going to Control Panel / Programs and select Turn Windows Features on or off.

Depending on what you need, it may look like the attached screen shot. Now, if you have done all that and followed the advise in my articles, do not expect a performance increase by more than 20 - 30%. It may be only in the single digit range, but all small bits help, and they help all the time.

It will lower the footprint, the number of handles and threads, memory usage, overhead, etc. It is not a magic way to double your performance.

Adam has not seen an increase in performance on the http://ppbm4.com/Benchmark.html , but that can well be attributed to the measurement accuracy used in the test. It measures the time between creation and modification time stamp, which under Windows is only recorded in whole seconds. Now the actual time before tuning may well be, say 11.34 seconds and after tuning, say 10.71 seconds, but both are recorded as 11 seconds. It shows no difference, but actually the performance gain may be around 6% in this example.

I have been rather meticulous in tuning my system and despite the fact that I do not have the fastest hardware anymore, there are systems that ought to outperform mine by a sizable margin, but they don't do so yet. For the time being my system, i7-920 @ 3.7 GHz, outperforms an i7-980X @ 4.2 GHz and an i7-920 @ 4.2 GHz, despite the much faster disks in the last case (F3 versus my F1's).

I know, my days are counted to keep the top rank, but it shows that every bit helps to get the most out of your system.

For some more background info, look here:

Adobe Forums: Guide for installing and tuning a Vista...

Windows 7 Service Configurations by Black Viper

John,

Depending on your disk setup, it may be worth considering to set your TMP and TEMP environment variables to another disk. In my case (simplified for illustration purposes) I have four disks, C: for OS & programs (100 MB/s), D: for page file, temp and media cache (200 MB/s), and E: for projects, media, previews (850 MB/s) and a separate export disk.

Another thing that may help it removing all the superfluous material that in installed with CS5 and duplicated for each application, license agreements in 43 languages, speech recognition modules, and all that stuff. If you don't need Armenian, Afghan, Chinese, Hungarian, Finnish, Romenian, Korean, Greek, and a lot of other languages, you can clean up over 2,000 files and 1,600 directories. There is one drawback to be aware of, the current installer will trip over if you have removed let's say the Korean speech recognition module when installing a patch.

The installer is so bad, that you may have to start from scratch and then after installing, redo the whole removal process by hand again. I have suggested to limit the installation to only the language of the OS and the regional settings and leave all the other crap out, like Microsoft does.

Just a suggestion, I have several disk drives in my computer. I run XP one one, Vista on another, Win7 32 on the third and Win 7 64 on aonther. When I boot up I can choose which OS I want to use. On the Win 7 64 drive I only have CS4 & CS5 installed, no anti-virus or other clogging up applications, it runs like wild fire (I do not browse the internet with this OS). I keep all the other OS's going for software reviews and compatibility etc. I suggest that you also have a drive dedicated to video editing for a speedy workflow, you can always use the other drives as scratch disks.

A question for Harm Millard.

As mentioned, I have both CS4 &CS5 installed on my Win7 64 drive. CS4 is still active until Matrox releases drivers for RTX2 and CS5. I have to use CS4 for most of my editing at the moment, but under Win7 it wont import avi or my Sony EX files, I get Unsupported Media error messages. Any idea how I can fix this?

CS4 runs fine under XP and Vista - another reason why I still hang on to the older OS.

Check the following:

Create a new project in CS4. Do you have the presets for AVCHD, HDV and XDCAM showing up as choices or are they greyed out?

If they are greyed out, you have been bitten by the 'revert-to-trial' bug. A number of people have been bitten by this bug after updating to 4.2.1 and there is only one sure solution, but it is cumbersome and time consuming.

Here are the steps to resolve it:

1. Deactivate CS4
2. Uninstall CS4
3. Run Clean Script CS5 and remove everything CS4
4. Reboot
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4
6. Repeat steps 3 and 4
7. Install CS4
8. Activate CS4
9. Update to 4.2.1

AVI is just a wrapper that can contain all kinds of stuff. Use GSpot or MediaInfo to figure out the codec used within that wrapper. Maybe this points to the reason that this AVI file gives you trouble.

Create a new project in CS4. Do you have the presets for AVCHD, HDV and XDCAM showing up as choices or are they greyed out?

No, they are not greyed out. I just get the message "Unsupported Media type" when I try to drop or bring in the EX or AVI clips, havn't tried any other file types.