"Mortimer" wrote in message
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"G Hardy" wrote in message
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"Mortimer" wrote in message
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I've set the rendering and VIDEO_TS folders to be on an external USB2
disk (and it *is* running at USB2 speed!) so as to lighten the load on
the system disk.

There's your problem. Assuming you can put them on different drives, put
the VIDEO_TS folder on the system disk.

So out the render directory on one drive (external) and the VIDEO_TS
directory on another disk (eg C?

Yes - in essence, always try to read from one drive and write to a different
drive. Note that the benefit is lost if the two drives use the same IDE
cable.



Will that actually help? The time is in populating the rendering folder
rather than the final copying from render to VIDEO_TS folder...

With such large files, you get a benefit by using two different drives
whatever you're doing. Whether the benefit is noticeable is really down to
processing power, because as the PC gets more powerful, the bottleneck
caused by the drives becomes more apparent.

The very first DVD I made (must be 8 years ago!) was on a 800MHz Duron PC
with 128MB memory. The encoding software stipulated that it needed 128MB
_free_ memory, so bunging another stick in there made a HUGE difference to
encoding time (something like 10X). At the time, a second hard drive was
prohibitively expensive for me, but I don't expect it would have changed the
encoding speed much because despite the memory, the bottleneck was still the
CPU power.


Which drive should the raw MPG files be on - the ones that make up the
project? Should they be on the render drive or the VIDEO_TS drive?

I think, by that, you mean internal or external drive? Your particular
bottleneck is the USB cable, so you need to be doing whatever you can to
minimise the amount of data going through the wire.

To be honest, if speed is that important to you, you'd be better off taking
the HDD out of the external drive and putting it onto the second controller
in your PC.


At present all three (source, render and VIDEO_TS) are on the external
disk, mainly to keep the system disk free for any pagefile access. Maybe
there's a better way of doing it. Sadly Studio 10 SmartStart doesn't have
any PDFs of manuals, and the help file doesn't seem to offer any advice on
optimum setup of disks.

Think of the data coming from the drives then being processed, then going
for write to a drive; as being roads wide enough for one car, so they are
controlled by traffic lights. You want your data to flow along the cables in
such a way that the lights on that road can stay on green for the duration
of that operation. The USB road is a slower road so you might consider
putting the least amount of traffic down that one. DVD writers do not use
data as fast as hard drives, if you do put the hard drive from your USB
enclosure into the system box instead, you might consider (if the enclosure
is big enough) putting the optical drive in its place.