"Ed Chilada" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:49:33 +0100, ":Jerry:"
wrote:


"Ed Chilada" wrote in message
. ..
On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:53:08 +0100, "Mortimer"
wrote:

snip
Surprisingly the increased RAM doesn't make any difference to the
rendering
time.

Nor would I have expected it to - or defragging your HDD which is
one
of the biggest white elephants around.



Just to clarify the above remark so that no one gets confused...
Defragging is a white elephants as far as rendering is concerned, but
a very real issue were capture/transfer from tape/DVD play-out is
concerned, rendering doesn't need to be real-time unlike the latter.

Aye yes, to be fair it might help if your HDD is in a ridiculous state
and you don't have much more space available than the tape you're
capturing, but if you've got a decent amount of HDD space available
(so that it's not having to use every available cluster regardless of
location), then I still don't see it being much of an issue.
Certainly, spending hours de-fragging is a waste of time if you're not
getting dropped frames in the first place.


If you use a defrag program like PerfectDisk it won't take hours - I have
several 500gig drives and I don't need to defrag them overnight just a
couple of hours. A badly defragged disc ie with bits of the file scattered
all over will affect programs like Nero if you are burning a DVD to
rendering if the heads are thrashing about. I've worked in several
commercial editing suites and the first thing the techo does before any of
the clients arrive is defrag all hard disk,delete unnecessary files to
maximise freespace. With PerfectDisk the more you use it the less you have
to use it! It does a much better job than M$ even though it is endorsed by
M$. The answer is not just one thing but having everything working well from
the CPU, the quality of the RAM and harddisk. Even noise control of
harddisks (Samsung etc) can have a bad effect on performance - a balance
has to be struck..