Finding why video editing performance is low

[THX1139]

I have the system specification below. It was suggested that my hardware is the reason why certain video-editing applications perform functions too slowly to avoid dropping frames in real time etc. When I look at GPU-Z whilst creating a RAM preview in Hitfilm Express, I see that the graphics card assets appear to be underutilised. Am I right in thinking that there's no point in changing graphics card because this one is already able to handle everything my PC is giving it? In other words, should the GPU be at 100% for one of its parameters (i.e. memory used, GPU load, memory controller load, video engine load, bus interface load) before a person needs to upgrade? Someone told me that there are specific clusters of transistors/circuits which are dedicated to particular types of calculation - how can I tell if any one such circuit cluster is saturated and holding everything else back?

Mainboard: ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming, board revision 1.04, BIOS v1904
CPU: Intel i7 6700 (6th gen), Stock HSF, Undervolt Offset -0.15 V, LLC 4
RAM: Corsair LPX Vengeance 2x8GB DDR4-3000 (CMK16GX4M2B3000C15)
Graphics: Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 w/ 2 GB

 

[Deleted member 67555]

I don't do that kind of stuff but apparently your system should be able to do 1080p effortlessly and 4k decently...

http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/videoediting

 

[THX1139]

Well it depends on what you're doing. If you're just shunting clips side by side then yeah, it's effortless but if you're creating a "composite" by layering multiple clips each with various modifications like cropping, feathering, brightness/contrast adjustments and more, it's a huge amount of work to do that to produce 25 frames per second so I fully expect it to be taxing even for a better system than mine but like I say, I can't see what part of my configuration is the bottleneck. If I could identify it, perhaps I could resolve it and make something else the bottleneck instead.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Try closing that browser with a bajillion tabs open...

Without seeing a more broad view of system resources, I get the impression that the software may only be single threaded so there's no way to speed it up without a higher-clocked processor (which won't improve performance by much). I'd try to find multithreaded software to use instead.

 

[THX1139]

Try closing that browser with a bajillion tabs open...

How does that make a difference? What resource is the browser using that the video editor needs? I've got 16 GB system RAM. You might as well tell me to tidy my desk...

 

[FordGT90Concept]

RAM mostly (56% used), but websites use JavaScript liberally which is fully capable of preoccupying the CPU.

Still think the main problem is the application is single-threaded.

 

[Deleted member 67555]

Maybe run some system benchmarks to find out where your system sits to compare it to the same model....
You have a really good 8 thread CPU...
Maybe you have a system issue?
Other than that maybe it's the software?

 

[THX1139]

RAM mostly (56% used), but websites use JavaScript liberally which is fully capable of preoccupying the CPU.

Still think the main problem is the application is single-threaded.

How much RAM should be kept free? At what point are you not just wasting RAM? The CPU was definitely not very occupied and the application is definitely multithreaded.

Maybe run some system benchmarks to find out where your system sits to compare it to the same model....
You have a really good 8 thread CPU...
Maybe you have a system issue?
Other than that maybe it's the software?

I used CPU-Z to test the processor but the program doesn't list 6700 - only 6700K and the website does list 6700 but with a completely different scoring system?

 

[FordGT90Concept]

6700K = 4.0 GHz
6700 = 3.5 GHz

4/3.5 = 14.29%
9124/7951 = 14.75%

If nothing is at 100% (GPU, CPU, RAM, VRAM, disk) and the program is slow then the program is very poorly coded.

 

[erocker]

Can you show the task manager with all those apps/tabs running?

 

[THX1139]

Can you show the task manager with all those apps/tabs running?

Which tab of the Task Manager?

 

[erocker]

Oops, processes tab.

Also. Nvidia drivers up to date? I just noticed the very low GPU utilization.

 

[OneMoar]

there is nothing wrong with hitfilm erocker is on the right track my guess is OGL acceleration isn't working nearly everything save for advanced physics based effect simulation is done on gpu these days

but without knowing what footage you are working with I can't help you

and do loose chrome remember it uses gpu acceleration to and i have had it cause some pretty funky issues with locks relating to gpu acceleration

 

[newtekie1]

and do loose chrome remember it uses gpu acceleration to and i have had it cause some pretty funky issues with locks relating to gpu acceleration

Yep, and there is a YouTube video playing in one of the tabs, which is GPU accelerated as well. I bet the GPU load we are seeing is almost entirely from Chrome and YouTube.

 

[blobster21]

I wouldn't let a browser loaded with 40+ actives tabs running during ANYTHING requiring full cpu/gpu juice. Focus your ressources on a single task, rather than spreading them all over, and you will reach the level of performance you are expecting from your rig.

I would advise you to use a side laptop or a secondary rig dedicated to your heavy browsing activities, which you can access through RDP.

You'd get the best of both worlds : get all of the cpu/gpu computation time of your main rig dedicated to your video editing, while retaining the ability to browse as much as you want, with little to no performance hit on your video editing activities.

 

[P4-630]

Try closing that browser with a bajillion tabs open...

Yeah lol!!!

 

[R0H1T]

Yeah lol!!!

Don't forget how notorious chrome is with RAM, even VRAM & gpu usage