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Experience with multicam Editing on single SSD anyone?
  • fatpigfatpig

    Hello guys,

    And merry Christmas to all of you ;) My question is as the title suggests- I am considering buying a SSD for temporary storage of multicam Projects.

    Can anyone comment on the performance in live preview? (specifically, Sony Vegas with GH2 Stock Settings Footage) But any experience will be nice to know.

    Thanks guys :)

  • 7 Replies sorted by
  • balazerbalazer

    Depends how many cameras and on how fast your PC is. You will just need to experiment. In any case, your CPU is likely to be the bottleneck, not your hard drive. There is no need to buy an SSD.

    For multicamera editing in Vegas, I found lower bit rate MPEG-2 proxies to be the best solution.

  • goannagoanna

    I don't see any specific advantage of an SSD here. Perhaps more as a system drive, if you could somehow get more performance out of Vegas by allocating more virtual memory.

    Still, you're well placed to try out your new SSD drive for your temporary storage idea before you reformat it for its true role as a system drive :-)

  • kavadnikavadni

    My experience is in Media Composer, and I imagine it will be similar with other NLE.

    With Dual 4 Core Xeons, 12 Gig Ram, 4 Way Raid 0 (7200RPM Drives, about 260 Mbs Read) and an average Quadro card:

    I can play back 4 streams of AVCHD in close to perfect real time, bit rate doesn't matter 24Mbs footage or 50Mbs footage, being variable bit rate the performance is erratic, irregular / stuttery. The CPU is the bottleneck, decompressing footage.

    If I transcode and use a constant bit rate codec, prores or dnxhd, I can work with 9 streams at 36 Mbs, stopping playback every 30 seconds or so. I can play back 7 perfectly. With an intra/editing codecs the drive becomes the bottle neck - 280Mbs / 36Mbs = 7.76. One or two layers of 'real time effects' and it becomes erratic, it's the CPU as the bottle neck in this instance.

    On my macbook pro again in media composer, I get the same results working with a 260Mbs RAID0 2 x 2G connected via thunderbolt (It's a Western Digital Thunderbook).

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    I think SSD is very good idea for such task.

    Something like highly regarded Samsung 840

    http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-sata_6_0_gb-2-5-Inch-MZ-7TD500BW/dp/B009NHAF3I/

    It is much more easy to mount and maintain compared to RAID array.

  • fatpigfatpig

    Thanks for the input guys :) I was thinking of putting windows on it aswell, of course. :)

  • tetakpataktetakpatak

    You won't belive how fast will your system start become with the SSD, make yourself that Christmas present ;)

  • zigizigizigizigi

    Just performed a test out of curiosity. A have a 25 track project (GH2/GH1 AVCHD footage) of which I could play 11 tracks simultaneously in Sony Vegas 12 multicam mode on a regular 7200 RPM HDD. Adding the 12th track results in hiccups and stutter. I witnessed same performance playing it off an external USB 3.0 7200 HDD. Then I copied the same project to an internal SSD drive and I could increase the number of tracks up to.... well, 12 and had the machine stuttering on 13.

    So, 10% is not much of a performance boost for replacing HDD with SSD. At least with Sony Vegas.

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