Looking for Windows 7 tweaks to run CS6 Production Premium

P

pifemaster

Well-known member
Hello everyone,

I have ordered a new computer to run Adobe CS6 Production Premium. As I wait for the computer to be built, I would like to research the best way to tweak/optimize windows 7 and Adobe CS6 so that once it arrives, I am ready to start working.

Any links to tutorials that would help???

Thank you,
Robert Pfeifer
Pifemaster Productions
www.pifemaster.com
 
Have an SSD for boot\OS drive? Here are some great tips: http://blog.ocztechnology.com/?p=178

Also, you're coming from a MAC, correct? Before you install any non-Microsoft software ensure that you install the latest drivers for all your hardware components and run full Microsoft updates (you can ignore the Language packs, things that say "Bing" or "Live!" in them).

Use Microsoft Security Essentials for your AV\AM. It's free, low on resource-usage and maintained by Microsoft directly.

Resist the urge to install iTunes on your PC... it's such a resource hog and a very unpleasant experience if you're used to using it on a MAC. I use Winamp for all my music needs. Don't forget to download Quicktime though! Just dont make it your default player, use VLC for that.

Right-click your taskbar and go to Properties. Set it to the location of your choice, and set it to auto-hide (this way your apps will use the full resolution of the main screen the taskbar is located on).

Launch your Adobe Apps so that their icon appears in the taskbar. Right-click the icon and "pin to taskbar" to create a permanent shortcut there. Alternatively you could make a "New Toolbar" that points to your Adobe Start Menu folder.

IE9 is fine (IE10 will be even better), but I'd download at least one alternative browser (either Chrome or Firefox).

Download the latest Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, and Java Runtime. Also WinRAR and MagicISO.


Check these out:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/cs6-creat...imize-after-effects-cs6-for-high-performance/
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premierepro/cs/using/WSF08BCDDB-FCD7-40a2-8290-8872EE725E6B.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/...nce-adobe-premiere-pro-and-after-effects.html
http://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/improve-performance.html
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/543440
http://www.video2brain.com/en/cs6
 
Last edited:
refocusedmedia said:
Have an SSD for boot\OS drive? Here are some great tips: http://blog.ocztechnology.com/?p=178

Also, you're coming from a MAC, correct? Before you install any non-Microsoft software ensure that you install the latest drivers for all your hardware components and run full Microsoft updates (you can ignore the Language packs, things that say "Bing" or "Live!" in them).

Use Microsoft Security Essentials for your AV\AM. It's free, low on resource-usage and maintained by Microsoft directly.

Resist the urge to install iTunes on your PC... it's such a resource hog and a very unpleasant experience if you're used to using it on a MAC. I use Winamp for all my music needs. Don't forget to download Quicktime though! Just dont make it your default player, use VLC for that.

Right-click your taskbar and go to Properties. Set it to the location of your choice, and set it to auto-hide (this way your apps will use the full resolution of the main screen the taskbar is located on).

Launch your Adobe Apps so that their icon appears in the taskbar. Right-click the icon and "pin to taskbar" to create a permanent shortcut there. Alternatively you could make a "New Toolbar" that points to your Adobe Start Menu folder.

IE9 is fine (IE10 will be even better), but I'd download at least one alternative browser (either Chrome or Firefox).

Download the latest Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, and Java Runtime. Also WinRAR and MagicISO.


Check these out:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/cs6-creat...imize-after-effects-cs6-for-high-performance/
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premierepro/cs/using/WSF08BCDDB-FCD7-40a2-8290-8872EE725E6B.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/...nce-adobe-premiere-pro-and-after-effects.html
http://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/improve-performance.html
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/543440
http://www.video2brain.com/en/cs6
Click to expand...
AWESOME! This is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. I have bookmarked alot of the info.

Although I was considering ordering a Mac Pro, I have always been a PC guy. This new computer will be used exclusivly as a video editing machine, so no iTunes, media center, etc. I agree with using Microsoft Security Essentials. It has been my anti virus choice for about a year now and I have been very happy with it.

Thanks again for the great information!

Thank you,
Robert Pfeifer
Pifemaster Productions
www.pifemaster.com
 
Personally I have Windows on my spinning hard drive. I have a 256GB SSD which I use for the current project's files, including previews, plus the media caches.

If you do this, don't forget to go into settings and set the media cache location for EACH of the CS6 apps:

* Premiere
* After Effects
* Media Encoder
* Prelude
* etc.

Each of them has its own idea of where it will cache media; I put them all on the SSD.

Finally, make sure that Premiere is using your graphics card to accelerate playback. If your card is an "Adobe certified" one, it should be OK, but if it's an "other" CUDA card, you can probably add it manually, which will make a huge difference: http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

Good luck!
 
AtticusLake said:
Personally I have Windows on my spinning hard drive. I have a 256GB SSD which I use for the current project's files, including previews, plus the media caches.

If you do this, don't forget to go into settings and set the media cache location for EACH of the CS6 apps:

* Premiere
* After Effects
* Media Encoder
* Prelude
* etc.

Each of them has its own idea of where it will cache media; I put them all on the SSD.

Finally, make sure that Premiere is using your graphics card to accelerate playback. If your card is an "Adobe certified" one, it should be OK, but if it's an "other" CUDA card, you can probably add it manually, which will make a huge difference: http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

Good luck!
Click to expand...
Thank you for the feedback. I am still researching the best way to setup the hard drives that I have ordered. As far as the graphics card, I should be good there. I ordered the nVidia GTX 580.

Thank you,
Robert Pfeifer
Pifemaster Productions
www.pifemaster.com
 
There are a lot of Windows services that can be disabled or set to manual.
You will need to figure out which ones you need a don't depending on what your preferences are and what your doing.
I have several programs that like to "call home" every time I start them.
Block the ones that you can.
 
pifemaster said:
AWESOME! This is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. I have bookmarked alot of the info.

Although I was considering ordering a Mac Pro, I have always been a PC guy. This new computer will be used exclusivly as a video editing machine, so no iTunes, media center, etc. I agree with using Microsoft Security Essentials. It has been my anti virus choice for about a year now and I have been very happy with it.

Thanks again for the great information!

Thank you,
Robert Pfeifer
Pifemaster Productions
www.pifemaster.com
Click to expand...

Robert if this New machine is to be exclusively an editing machine, why not keep it off the Internet? Use your old PC for Internet. One of the many potential slowdowns in editing can be antivirus-ware due to scanning of the HDD/SSD and stuff being written to/from it.
 
tom_wise said:
One of the many potential slowdowns in editing can be antivirus-ware due to scanning of the HDD/SSD and stuff being written to/from it.
Click to expand...

Microsoft Security Essentials doesn't really do this. I've run it ever since it came out, and there's practically no difference with default settings. Avoid McAfee like the plague, and make sure you don't have two Anti-Virus softwares running at the same time, which I have seen before.
 
Microsoft Security Essentials is pretty invisible when it's running passively, but if you do a scan, it'll slow everything down. Just don't do a scan while you're working.
 
tom_wise said:
Robert if this New machine is to be exclusively an editing machine, why not keep it off the Internet? Use your old PC for Internet. One of the many potential slowdowns in editing can be antivirus-ware due to scanning of the HDD/SSD and stuff being written to/from it.
Click to expand...

I second that - non of our workstations has any physical connection to the net, you can turn of a ton of BS that slows you down + pace of mind deluxe.

Frank
 
Postmaster said:
I second that - non of our workstations has any physical connection to the net, you can turn of a ton of BS that slows you down + pace of mind deluxe.
Click to expand...

My desktop Windows 7 machine has always been connected to the Internet and even doubles as my gaming system (I don't own any consoles, but I play pretty much whatever I want via Steam). I've never had an issue with either of these two facts causing my machine to go down. In fact, the only time my station is down is when I'm tinkering with it (about to go down again soon as I have a very nice SSD drive just setting here, so time for a revamp).
 
Hi
Lots of excellent advice on this thread. I will try to add a little to it. First what you want to do has a large effect on the best machine design. Large 4k raw files vs. small but highly compressed files. Large files require lots of bandwidth and small ones lots of CPU cycles. Which brings up the next question: How many streams of video at once and how many real time effects. Many other factors.

So here is some very broad general advice for "most" cases. Use Intel I7, with 6 core (12 including virtual, a virtual core is roughly worth about half a real core). Lots of memory - it's cheap. Go for lots of memory rather than the fastest if its a choice. Go for fewer sticks while dealing in multiples of "channel" (Ie. dual channel, tri channel, quad channel). Biggest change is RAIDs used to be a general solution. If you must, use RAID 5 or better and hardware controller. Best to seriously rethink RAID. SSD drives have tremendous throughput. I recently had a client who called me 1.5 years after I built him a machine saying it now didn't work. 2600k 8GB, and two 7200RPM drives running CS6. Turns out he now was trying to multicam edit 5-7 cameras of MXF and AVCHD. Not the single cam editing he bought the machine for. I gave him 8GB more memory and a 240GB Intel SSD and made some tweaks and he now edits 7 streams while writing out an 8th. Beats putting in an expensive, hot, power hungry RAID that can be finicky to configure and troubleshoot. Make sure you know what drive contollers you have and put the SSD on the 6GB controller. I reccomend putting the video you are working with on the SSD up to maybe four or at most five streams, this really varies with the video type, SSD and controller. Then either add a second SSD or distribute the remaining streams elsewhere. Don't forget your scratch drive, program and OS - they need homes as well. Point is few people need RAIDs these days.

Do use Security Essentials and check what other applications and SERVICES are running.
If you must use spinning drives and want to play here are a couple of hints for those who like to play. Set your sector size on video only drives to 64KB. You can run into gotchas with this. Defragmenting programs can sometimes choke and sometimes it just won't show up correctly on the OS. The other hint is to short stripe your drives. Good speed up for large reads (video).

Hope I have added a little. Good luck.
 
Blit said:
Set your sector size on video only drives to 64KB. You can run into gotchas with this. Defragmenting programs can sometimes choke and sometimes it just won't show up correctly on the OS. The other hint is to short stripe your drives. Good speed up for large reads (video).
Click to expand...

I really want to set up a RAID 0 system for a work drive setup, ideally with 2 Velociraptor drives.
 
Hi Gary
You mention for work but that could be desktop to run office, Server, video editing station. Purpose, OS (operating system), size of drives needed, is defragmenting needed, size of largest, smallest and distribution of files inbetween, reliability...

But with the information at hand: Software RAID (redundant array of independent disks) takes up your CPU cycles, hardware RAID costs$$ and is something else to break. RAID 0 with hardware controller has twice the failure rate of a single drive. Velociraptor drives http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100006519%2050001306%2040000014%20600003273%20600003344&IsNodeId=1&name=10000%20RPM are about half the cost but twice the capacity of SSD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...E&N=100008120 600038500&IsNodeId=1&name=240GB You can play with sizes and prices. SSD is now more reliable than spinning drive, let alone spinning drives (2) with twice the failure rate.

So you can approach SSD speed with RAID 0 Velociraptor (2) but you have to spend dollars on hardware controller or give up CPU cycles, you have to set them up and maintain them and if you have either one fail you are off to find backup. Depending on exactly what you want to do Velociraptor RAID can be a viable solution.

I think my suggestion was that for the average video person who is not a computer geek it is attractive to plug into a 6GB SATA a 240GB SSD and move your project onto it as a working drive for maybe four streams, have blazing reliable operation and then store your stuff somewhere else and move your next project onto the working SSD. It is a safe, fast, reliable workflow solution that most people can implement. It certainly is not for everyone or the only solution.

Now to answer your question which is implicitly asked by the quote you showed about 64K Sectors (didn't believe I was ever going to get there did you...). I have installed and used 64K sectors. The Win defragmentor would not defragment them. I hear that other defragmentors will not either. But I don't know that. I assume you are familiar with the reason to use 64K sectors - you strike me as a person up to speed on computers. But many others are likely reading this, so this is for them. NTFS (New Tecnology File System the current standard file system for Win7) stores data in 4KB chunks. It keeps track of it that way also. So if you store a huge file like a video Win7 breaks it up into 4KB chunks. If we told Win7 or other NTFS system to store the video in 64K chunks that is only a fraction of the chunks compared to 4KB it needs to keep track of. Theoretically it will speed up your IO (input output). The downside can be small files take up a minimum of 64KB instead of 4KB. For a video drive that's okay, most videos are MUCH bigger than 64KB. Defragmenting can be a problem if you persist your files. IF you load, work with, and delete files they will never have enough use to get fragmented. Also you are looking at far fewer files. You can defragment if you want manually by writing your disk out to another disk, deleting your files and then writing them back. Todays disks, even spinning disks are getting so fast that the large sector sizes are not relatively as important. Hard drive IO is not the bottleneck it once was. Especially if you use SSD. Hope this long winded response offers something for people. When you start drilling down into the details so much just depends on the specific scenario you are addressing. I think the power of hardware and software available today is wonderful.

Best Regards
 
Blit said:
You mention for work but that could be desktop to run office, Server, video editing station. Purpose, OS (operating system), size of drives needed, is defragmenting needed, size of largest, smallest and distribution of files inbetween, reliability...
Click to expand...

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

But with the information at hand: Software RAID (redundant array of independent disks) takes up your CPU cycles, hardware RAID costs$$ and is something else to break. RAID 0 with hardware controller has twice the failure rate of a single drive.
Click to expand...

It wouldn't be a software RAID. Newer motherboards can support RAID 0/1 without requiring software or the need to add a controller card. I've run one on my ASUS board before for a primary system drive. I also think the "twice the failure rate" argument is severely overstated. Do you know how many single drive work drives I've seen? From internal drives, to G-Drives and Western Digital Passports, a lot of people work off a single drive that can fail just as easily as a RAID 0 setup. The reason it has twice the failure rate is that it only takes one hard drive to go bad to take the whole system down, but guess what? With those single drive solutions it still takes only "one" drive failure to bring the whole system down. It's only a risk if you don't treat it as such. Keep backup copies, and keep them updated as often as possible.

I think my suggestion was that for the average video person who is not a computer geek it is attractive to plug into a 6GB SATA a 240GB SSD and move your project onto it as a working drive for maybe four streams, have blazing reliable operation and then store your stuff somewhere else and move your next project onto the working SSD. It is a safe, fast, reliable workflow solution that most people can implement. It certainly is not for everyone or the only solution.
Click to expand...

Your solution has caveats attached. First, in no way could I work off of a 240GB SSD. I have a single project that would take up all of that space, and I usually have more than one project going at a time. Two 600GB Velociraptor drives in RAID 0 would give me 1.2GB of space at a read speed approaching a single SSD. That's more of what I find comfortable to deal with as far as space is concerned (right now my work drive has 535GB of projects on it). Anyone shooting AVC-Intra, hacked GH2, external recorder footage, or just plain transcoding would find 240GB to be very limiting. On top of that, how reliable are SSDs over traditional disks? What are the hard numbers? I know you can wipe out your drive just doing a firmware update on it, let alone anything that goes wrong. It's still a risk.
 
Hi
Thanks for your reply. "work drive setup" in your post didn't specify video workstation, I didn't want to presume.

Harware RAID on your motherboard was not stated in your post, I didn't want to presume. Sorry if I should have ssumed more.

If any single drive causes loss of info on all "video" drives then a RAID of 2 drives has exactly mathematically twice the chance of failure. Same video stored on 2 single drives would lose 1/2 the video if 1 drive failed. Sorry, that's a fact not an opinion. Now for an opinion, others faced with that might go to RAID 5 where a drive failure can be recovered. Obviously you have reasons not to go there in your situation.

In no way am I asking you to work off a 240 GB SSD. I simply made a suggestion for the information I was offered. I felt that I made a big point of saying that there are many scenarios. My suggestion does not appeal to you. Hopefully our discussion will be valuable to others and maybe even caused us both some thinking.

I am still going to stand by my thought that simply plugging in 2 or more single drives is a viable solution for people who want to keep it simple and safe. Point is the days where you had to have RAID has passed for many, not all people. I am trying to point out that some new thinking is appropiate for a good sized poprtion of the people reading on this thread.

I appreciate your feedback and comments as well as other posts of yours I have read.
Best Regards
 
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