Improving performance on my laptop for video editing

[john-s]

I have a BUNCH of questions I would like to get answered in preparation for tackling a video editing project.

I have about 10 hours of video, mostly shot in MP4, some in AVCHD, on a Panasonic FZ150 bridge camera. The video files are interviews done indoors and outside, usually with a group of about 10 people attending. The content is important to me; unfortunately one of our group developed pneumonia during the tour and can be heard coughing during most of the interviews, sometimes incessantly. My intent is to edit this material into a 20 – 30 minute video presentation.

I did a preliminary edit which has created a 10 minute extract from the material. This was done using Adobe Premiere Elements 10. I purchased and read through the muvipix Guide to Adobe Premiere Elements 10 and found it very useful. Performance was “terrible” during this work and I am now trying to improve performance to a more workable level.

I have a Dell Inspiron N5010 laptop with a first-generation i3 dual-core Intel chip running at 2.4 GHz, and integrated Intel HD graphics. This is a 64-bit machine running Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1. The Windows Experience Index rates the computer’s performance at 4.5, based on the lowest score which is the graphics performance.

I have recently increased RAM from 4GB to 8GB. I have added an outboard 1 TB hard drive which is connected to the computer via an eSATA port and cable (USB-3 was not available at the time I purchased the computer). I plan to use the eSATA drive to store the video data files and the work in progress. I am considering upgrading from Premiere Elements 10 to 11. I notice in the comparison chart for PrE 11 that 11 supports native 64-bit but PrE 10 does not.

My questions:
1. Is loading the video files on the outboard drive the right approach?
2. Is it true that PE 10 does not support 64-bit directly?
3. Will PrE 11 64-bit support make any difference to performance? Enough to justify the upgrade?
4. I have the combined PrE 10 and PSE 10 package. I notice on-line that the best deal for buying the PSE & PrE 11 package is to buy the full version not an upgrade. Will this create any problems with my existing PrE files created under PrE 10 when I install 11?
5. I notice that after running PrE 10 that it leaves behind Elements AutoAnalyzer, which continues to run and consumes high resources. I have to go into the Task Manager and end the process to get performance back to normal. Is this normal? Will this continue to happen in PrE 11?
6. What, if anything, can I do to edit out the coughing in the audio of these video files? Someone suggested that having a short clip of ambient room sound in each location could be used to mask the sound but I didn’t know this at the time of recording and don’t have it (unless I could find a few seconds in each clip). Can PrE 11 do this editing out? If not, is there software that can tackle this problem (e.g. identify the coughing frequencies and delete them without destroying the rest of the audio), that would be reasonable to buy and use in this situation?
7. Is all of this wasted effort, based on the chip and graphics processor I have? I know that later generations of i3, i5 and i7 chips have much better graphics and speed.

Thanks for any help you can offer.
John S.

[Steve Grisetti]

Wow! That's a lot of questions for your very first post, John! Any chance you could ask just one at a time? Or maybe you should just pick up one of our books. http://Muvipix.com/pe11.php

Meantime, no need to buy the upgrade if the full package is cheaper. Just go for the best deal.

Your camera shoots in AVCHD 1080p, which is a pretty demanding format to edit. You'll likely find your i3 struggling with it. In fact, you may find trying to edit it that footage pretty frustrating on your machine, in my opinion. It's not the graphics speed so much that's the problem. It's that you're working with 50 progressive frames of 1920x1080 AVC-coded footage every second. And I wouldn't attempt that, even on version 11, with less than a very fast i5 or, ideally, an i7 or better.

[RJ Johnston]

I have the the 64-bit version of Pre 10 installed. Don't confuse that with PE (Photoshop Elements) which is only 32-bit.

You can turn off the Autoanalyzer in the Organizer: Edit > Preferences > Media Analysis

I have a lot of my media files on external drives, both USB 2.0 and 3.0. I don't have any complaints. I haven't done any testing recently, but having files on external drives would seem to be advantageous. You would be distributing the workload among multiple hard drives so the drive head of the internal drive won't have to seek as much. Anyway, when a application needs to work on a file, the file gets read into RAM and is cached so it doesn't have to be read from the disc again as often. The more RAM you have, the better.

[john-s]

Thanks RJ. I unchecked the three options for the analyzer in Media Analysis and that seems to have fixed the problem. And hopefully doubling the RAM to 8GB will help. And thanks for the reminder that PrEl 10 is already 64-bit.

[john-s]

Thanks for your comments Steve. Following your recommendation in the muvipix Guide to Prel 10, I am reformatting the MP4 and AVCHD files into DV-AVI before editing.
As for removing the incessant coughing from the sound track, in the muvipix sound forum I found a reference to MAGIX Video Sound Cleaning Lab, which claims it can remove coughing, among many other things. Any experience with this product, for this purpose? Any comments on using it for best effect?

John S.

[RJ Johnston]

I have the Magix Video Sound Cleaning Lab. It does a good job, sometimes better than I can do in Adobe Audition. I haven't tried removing coughing. I'll have to try it out.

[john-s]

Thanks RJ. I'll get it and give it a try.
John.

[RJ Johnston]

John,

In Magix VCL, I believe to remove the coughs, you need to work in spectral view. You locate each cough individually, then draw a rectangle around the spectrum that makes up the cough and press delete. How well it works will depend on how well you isolate the frequencies as well as what other events took place at the same time, such as someone speaking, and how loud the events are relative to each other.