How to increase rendering speed?

[Peru]

Assuming plenty of free hard drive space, will increasing RAM (Windows XP MCE SP3 with 2GB RAM) increase rendering speed, or is it more a function of processor speed?

[Chris B]

Check you task manager when rendering. If the processor is showing 100% (or close to) then it's likely that the processor is the bottleneck. It is likely that with 2GB any increase would be minimal. When I changed from 1.5GB to 3GB certain large projects loaded faster and were more responsive - but I saw no significant increase in rendering speed.

[Peru]

Yes, it's %100.
Thanks, Chris.

[Bobby]

How to increase rendering speed?

1) extend arm out straight out to side
2) reach slowly down and back to intersect back hip pocket with hand
3) remove wallet
4) remove credit card
5) spend

[Peru]

Oh, Bobby, this one was the last computer I would ever have to buy. Just ask my wife.

Actually it's working acceptably well, otherwise. I just render in smaller bits and do something else while I render.

[Clayton]

How to increase rendering speed?

1) extend arm out straight out to side
2) reach slowly down and back to intersect back hip pocket with hand
3) remove wallet
4) remove credit card
5) spend

Amen brother.

[Chuck Engels]

Did you know that less than 15 years ago it took days to render 10 minutes of home video.
I know people that had multiple machines to render pieces of video just so they could get 20 minutes of rendering done in 48 hours

Be glad it isn't that bad anymore

[momoffduty]

My old AMD was slooowwww. Upgraded to a Quad Core and what a difference! One thing I still do to speed up the render preview: Add the motion background after I keyframe the photos. Usually I adjust the keyframes a few times to get things just right and preview each attempt, then add my transitions & move the pan/zoom keyframes over, and lastly add the motion background.

[Ken Jarstad]

I don't have the latest Core i7 tech but just got a bare bones system with a Q9400 proc, ASUS MB, case and PSU for about $255 usd.
http://www.smksuperstore.com/product/54I72Q940-51407.aspx
Love it - seeing all four cores render a preview in PRE 2 so quickly now - and at a relative bargain price. I added about $50 for 2 GB RAM and robbed my DVD burner, CPU cooler and Firewire card from the old rig. Oh yeah, two Samsung fast HDDs for $59 a piece for a total of $423. I paid out over $800 to build the old rig four years ago.

I have been watching the processor in CPU-Z and noticed that it reduces core frequency when its not working hard. The Q9400 is rated at 2.66 GHz and idles at 1.8 GHz. So I set the overclocking in the BIOS to 20 percent and now it idles at 2.4 GHz and runs 3.2 GHz under load. I'm very happy with it.