Re: Will Video Editing on a PC ever truly work?

[Brian Louis] "Even if you have Vista 64 and 8-16gigs of ram, Ppro is still a 32bit app and has a memory allocation limit of 2 gigs, on a 32bit system there is more of a chance of that 2gigs being stepped on because of the 4gig system limit particularly if there is a high memory video card sucking up a gig or more of the 4gig allocation and a bloated(untuned) OS contributing also"

Take your 4 Gig XP machine and right-click on the "my Computer" icon (or whatever you named it in a custom install) and select the "General" tab...it will say there are 2.5 Gigs of RAM available...even though there are 4 installed.



Ppro is indeed a 32 bit app (is FCP 64 bit native these days?) and it will ask for 2 Gigs max, but what that assertion isn't taking into account is that a Photoshop and After Effects background app(s) boot with PPro so dynamic link is cued and ready, and with CS4, there is some sort of Media Encoder exporter that is idling in wait as well...

Each of these apps would like 2 Gigs please...

Obviously having the system only recognize that there is 2.5 in the machine leaves you slicing it pretty thin, and every one of those executables is starved for system memory...

Jerry, I think your question about whether moving to "...Vista 64 will make everything run perfectly" is probably a sarcastic one, as we all know that computers and software don't run perfectly...at least not for the most of us who keep pushing these systems beyond their capabilities...but I can say that Adobe has always needed significant RAM to operate comfortably...lots of reasons...

You can call it good or bad, but it's the fact (Final Cut Pro needs some RAM too). You can certainly run Adobe on a Mac if you wish...I've run on both and a Mac works just fine as well.

Vegas is an example of an NLE that scales down for a smaller system with unusual grace for a computer-based video editing package if you're looking for a solution that works that way...



TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,