Tips for editing hour long videos

[randomname]

I recently started a gig editing a series of Ted-type talks for a local conference, each are about an hour long and this is the first time I've edited anything nearly this large. I started the first one and frankly, it's been a nightmare so far, anytime I stop playback it can take from 5-10 seconds to actually get it running again. Granted, I was probably doing everything wrong, I edited the entire thing on one timeline and was just editing the footage off of a passport drive the client gave me, are those two major bottlenecks for performance? Anyway, I was hoping I could get whatever tips you guys have to offer to make this process go as smoothly as possible. What's the best format to edit these in? (I'm using premiere), what are some tricks I can use to speed things up? Any other general advice?

 

[Pickthorne]

Without having any details, I can say you should have the footage drive connected via Firewire 800 at a minimum. If you can't do that, you are better off just dumping the footage onto the system HD.

Also when performance is sluggish, take a look at your computer's resources. With the project running, look at how much RAM and HD space are free. If they are maxed out all the time, you may need to get more.

Regards,
Craig