Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7?

[Bob]

Just a quick question. Is PRE8 a 64-bit app? I know Premiere Pro is as Adobe made it clear on their product page. I can't see if Pre8 is? I know Windows 7 will run just fine. More like in the XP-compatibility mode if you install the Win7 64-bit version.

Premiere Elements 8 and Premiere Pro CS4 are both 32 bit applications. 32-bit applications running on Vista or Windows 7 64-bit versions automatically run in 32-bit emulation. The statement on the Adobe product page for Premiere Pro just means that on a 64-bit OS it can run some tasks in a separate process for increased efficiency and to be able to utilize more memory overall.

[DeafBug]

Well thanks. I think it sucks that they won't make it 64-bit... yet. Just how do you make a movie that will consume a dual-layer DVD when Pre8 reads only 3.25GB of RAM? Or making a HD movie on a Blu-Ray? I know it will still do the job but I can't imagine how long it will take and all those pagefile swapping.

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Brad,
I've created a number of dual layer DVDs and Blu-Ray discs with Premiere Elements and Premiere Pro.
They may take a little longer than they would if the programs were 64 bit instead of 32 bit.
But it does work and doesn't take a huge amount of time really.

[SteveG]

Maybe this is a silly question then as I know many people have migrated to 64-bit, but what would be the advantage (going to 64-bit) since 32-bit can only use a max of 3-4 GB memory?

[Chuck Engels]

Maybe this is a silly question then as I know many people have migrated to 64-bit, but what would be the advantage (going to 64-bit) since 32-bit can only use a max of 3-4 GB memory?

I think Bob's response answers that pretty well

on a 64-bit OS it can run some tasks in a separate process for increased efficiency and to be able to utilize more memory overall.

[SteveG]

Chuck,

You missed a few words before that. He wrote that

Premiere Pro just means that on a 64-bit OS

So I still don't see what's the point in using 64-bit for Premiere Elements.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Premiere Elements 8 ....32 bit applications

Long and the short of it is that there is no advantage in running PrElv8 in a 64 bit environment (unless I have missed something - quite likely for me )

[Chuck Engels]

A 64 bit OS has many more resources to handle RAM and other resources more efficiently.
Not to mention that a lot more RAM can be made available to other applications as well as the OS in general.

So running any 32 bit application on a 64 bit system will in effect be able to run more efficiently because the other processes and OS are running more efficiently. It isn't any help to Premiere Elements or Premiere Pro directly, but indirectly. With all the additional RAM available to the system in general it isn't a problem to give 3 GB to Premiere and still have plenty left over for the OS and other applications.

I hope that explains it better. I bet Bob or Bobby could put it into words that we could all understand.

[Bobby]

32-bit and 64-bit processor instructions run on the same processor and at the same processor clock speed. But 64-bit instructions can process more data within one instruction, IF the program is written or recompiled to use the 64-bit operations.

So 64-bit programs CAN process more data faster. In addition, the OS itself (Windows) can possibly be more efficient in managing its data structures and as noted above the OS can support more than 3GB of RAM. Having more RAM for applications will definitely speed things up as there is less paging space and time used.

So the bottom line is that the OS will run somewhat faster, and 64-bit applications can run a fair amount faster, especially if you run multiple applications at the same time.

Offsetting this is the hassle of making sure that device drivers for all your peripherals work on the 64-bit OS. But, hey, 64-bit is here, and here to stay. Go with it...

[jackfalbey]

I can't speak to Elements 8, but Pro CS4 on my Vista 64-bit drive encodes a LOT faster than it does on my XP Pro 32-bit drive (my workstation has 3 separate OS drives so I can triple-boot XP, Vista, and Win7 although I haven't played with 7 very much). Adobe programmed Media Encoder CS4 to spawn multiple instances of itself if the demand exceeded 2GB of RAM, so even though it's a 32-bit program it will use the extended resources of the system if available. Encoding h.264 from a DV-AVI timeline in Premiere uses 6.5GB of RAM and 100% of CPU as shown in Task Manager in Vista 64-bit, which obviously is a lot faster than the same function when running XP.

I don't think this "multi-spawning" feature is available in Elements 8...

[Chris B]

The other side to this is RAM. a 32bit OS can deal with 4GB of RAM at a a maximum. A 64 bit OS can handle a lot more (Motherboards are typically limited to 16-24GB). Windows will use this RAM to "cache" data from the hard drive to make it faster to access. This (in theory) should remove some of the disk thrashing that occurs when you're editing a project. Hard drives are the slowest component of any system these days - for comparison:

An i7 processor has an average memory read speed of around 20GB per second.
An intel SSD drive has a read speed of 240MB per second (0.24GB/sec)
A Segate 1tb hard drive has an average read speed of 140MB/ second (0.14GB/sec)