PLEEZ HELP - Min System Requirements for CS4 Master w/HD editing
by Heather Mason
on
Aug 13, 2009 at 5:33:44 pm
Okay, I'm a graphic designer inside a company and I put together anything from ads, to custom illustrations, web pages, web banners and recently video editing and exporting. The problem is...I believe my current computer system CANNOT handle this type of work. With only Illustrator open, it struggles with the 3D rendering, so you can imagine my delay when editing video within Encore, Soundbooth and Premier Pro. It's been difficult to get answers from our IT dept, so I've had to take matters into my own hands to find out the real recommendations for what I need to get my job done quickly, turnaround video files from our communications dept. in a more timely manner, without rebooting 2 or 3x.
Software I do on a daily basis; InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle. In addition to these everyday projects, about once every two weeks I get asked to edit, capture, convert, export to DVD or upload to a website HD videos. AVIs anywhere from 2 to 9GB, which I then use Encore, Premier Pro, Soundbooth, and sometimes Flash and Dreamweaver to work with.
Please look at my current system and let me know your opinions. Your extensive knowledge is invaluable to me and I would be extremely grateful for anyone taking the time to help me with this issue.
A thousand times thank you!!!
If you need any other info, I will be more than happy to post more images.
Re: PLEEZ HELP - Min System Requirements for CS4 Master w/HD editing by TC Perchert on Aug 14, 2009 at 5:33:28 pm
Heather - You should be able to work with HDV or some other flavor of compressed HD files, not very quickly, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem with that system. One thing I noticed is that your paging file is set really high for your RAM. Paging file size should be about 2.5 times the amount of RAM. It may not have that much effect, but it's worth bringing down a bit.
How many apps do you usually have running at one time? The more open apps, the more paging you'll be doing.
Are you running the footage on the system drive? Or a partition off of the system drive? Because that will really have an affect on performance. You'll want the footage to be on a separate drive, preferably a RAID and preferably not PATA drives.
You may also want to check on what services may be running. You can do this by going to Start, Run, type msconfig. There are two approaches you can take here. You can click on the box to Hide All Microsoft Services, then click Disable All - this will disable all service except Microsoft services. Or you can go through and find the services you don't need, such as Apple, iPod, Java, Office, and others that may be there and turn them off.
One other thing you may want to do is get CCleaner, http://www.ccleaner.com, and run that to clean out all your temp garbage. It will also clean your registry somewhat, there are much better tools for that though.
