AVCHD on a PC - quick question

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cdavison2009

Member
I am about to buy and install Adobe CS4 (production premium) on my PC and am wondering what I might do to free up system resources, etc, to try and cut down on lag time. I have an HP Pavilion notebook running Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit) with Service Pack 1, dual-core AMD 2.0GHz processors, with 2GB of RAM.
I know that the PC runs any number of automatic background processes that eat up CPU cycles and so I’m wondering which ones I can safely end/close and also what other things I might do in order to enable smoother/better HD editing on my PC.
Any and all advice much appreciated!
 
Click start, type (in that search box at the bottom) msconfig, then go to the startup tab and disable as many entries as you know you don't need.

If you're not sure what something is, you can look it up at http://www.processlibrary.com

Obviously the best thing you can do is a fresh install of Windows, but I realize not everyone is in a position to do that.

Other things, free up as much HD space as you can (try to keep it at least 20% free), run a defrag, download and run CCleaner to empty your Windows caches (which frees up a few more gig, typically).
 
Thanks Allen, really appreciate it! One quick question: in your experience, which processes can be safely closed out in Vista? Also, CCleaner looks like a really great program, bet it will remove a good deal of junk from my hard drive.
 
Yeah, CCleaner is amazing. Just scan through the settings before you run it - it likes to wipe out things like your "recent documents history list" and little histories/caches like that. If you like the squeaky clean feel, that's fine, but I recommend at least scanning the tick boxes so you know what's being purged. If you've already run it, no worries.

The good things to get rid of are programs that launch and chill in your taskbar that you don't want/need. A lot of programs (OpenOffice, Quicktime, iTunes, Adobe Acrobat) like to launch a little shadow copy of themselves at startup so when the time comes to use them, they can launch faster. This is at the expense using more of your RAM and a longer bootup time.

Common things you don't want to disable include your display drivers (probably Intel, ATI or Nvidia), any security software you have, and if you're on a laptop, any drivers for your touchpad (otherwise you can't do things like tap to click, scroll by dragging your finger at the edge of the trackpad, etc).

Aside from those generalizations, just look everything up on process library. If something rings a bell as "Oh, that's that program I installed last year and never use", it's a prime candidate for un-ticking.

Finally, there's a neat program called EndItAll I highly recommend if you're interested in pushing your machine to it's max. Google for it, it's a free download. When you run it, it will offer to close or kill every non-critical process running on your machine. (Disconnect your internet before running it because it shuts off your security software).

Sometimes after running it you may notice bizarre behaviors (like your trackpad not working right on a laptop), but you should have an epic amount of RAM free and it's definitely worth trying AVCHD under those conditions. If it works like a charm, then you know software is to blame. The next step is to reboot (brings back all of your programs), and then only killing some of your processes... try to narrow down which one (there may be a few) are really causing the problem.
 
Thanks much, makes sense on things like AcroTray getting ready to quick-launch Acrobat Reader but I want to free up as much RAM as possible before attempting to edit anything HD, will definitely be un-ticking as many programs as I can.
 
i'd recommend against using Premiere at all. funny how so many Premiere users have gone down this path with CCleaner and EditItAll!! and in the end, Premiere still drags and crashes.

if you can't get it to perform to your satisfaction after all that, then you might really want to consider using another NLE, like Edius or Vegas. They're built much better, cleaner, more stable and don't seem to suffer from all the codec/config/resource issues that Premiere does.
 
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