Excessive CPU use?

[Peter Jason]

I am collecting some old family movies and editing and adjusting them
in Premiere Pro CS4.

I have Windows7 64bit and 6gb RAM and a i7960 CPU.

When it comes time to export the finished movie the CPU use jumps up
to 100%, and the RAM to 95%! Is this normal? Is this overloading
the system and can I slow down the exporting to make it easier on the
system?

Peter

 

[Paul]

I am collecting some old family movies and editing and adjusting them
in Premiere Pro CS4.

I have Windows7 64bit and 6gb RAM and a i7960 CPU.

When it comes time to export the finished movie the CPU use jumps up
to 100%, and the RAM to 95%! Is this normal? Is this overloading
the system and can I slow down the exporting to make it easier on the
system?

Peter

Um, that's what a computer is for... To be run at 100%.

Some programs, will have a "Preference", where you can adjust how
aggressively they do their rendering. For example, a program
I'm running in the background right now, has a preference for
setting the "number of cores" used for the computation. I don't know
how to use CS4, so you'll have to check your manual or online help,
and see what options are available to "tame" the program.

Task Manager (that old thing we used to get to via control-alt-delete)
has some options. If you click on a task in there, you can "set affinity",
and by doing so, restrict the program to running on fewer cores. There is
also a "Priority" setting, but I would not recommend making radical
adjustments of that parameter. With affinity though, you should be able
to drop Premiere to using only one core if you want.

Paul

 

[Stan Brown]

I am collecting some old family movies and editing and adjusting them
in Premiere Pro CS4.

I have Windows7 64bit and 6gb RAM and a i7960 CPU.

When it comes time to export the finished movie the CPU use jumps up
to 100%, and the RAM to 95%! Is this normal?

Without knowing anything about the program you mention, I can say
that it's unsurprising. Video editing is a memory- and CPU-intensive
operation, and the save or export function must move the entire thing
(typically some number of gigabytes) to some location on disk.

Try copying a folder that contains 3-4 GB of files, and see what
happens to CPU and RAM usage. And a straight copy, which doesn't
involve any recoding, should use *less* than saving a video file.

 

[Char Jackson]

I am collecting some old family movies and editing and adjusting them
in Premiere Pro CS4.

I have Windows7 64bit and 6gb RAM and a i7960 CPU.

When it comes time to export the finished movie the CPU use jumps up
to 100%, and the RAM to 95%! Is this normal? Is this overloading
the system and can I slow down the exporting to make it easier on the
system?

As the others said, it's normal, expected, and nothing to worry about.
Video editing is one of the most resource-intensive tasks you can do.

 

[Peter Jason]

As the others said, it's normal, expected, and nothing to worry about.
Video editing is one of the most resource-intensive tasks you can do.

Thank you all for the replies. I do have a water cooling setup for
the CPU that came with the motherboard, so I may have to install this
soon. And I'll put in more RAM; just in case.

 

[Steve Silverwood]

Thank you all for the replies. I do have a water cooling setup for
the CPU that came with the motherboard, so I may have to install this
soon. And I'll put in more RAM; just in case.

Water cooling will not affect your CPU/memory usage stats. However,
it's like "chicken soup" for the flu: it can't hurt!

Adding more memory WILL improve performance across the board. One
thing to note, though: the 32-bit version of Windows 7 will only
address a little more than 3Gb of memory. To access the memory in
your system to the fullest, make sure your computer will support a
64-bit operating system and install Windows 7 x64. You won't be able
to do an "upgrade," only a full install, so back everything up first!

-- //Steve//

 

[Peter Jason]

Water cooling will not affect your CPU/memory usage stats. However,
it's like "chicken soup" for the flu: it can't hurt!

Adding more memory WILL improve performance across the board. One
thing to note, though: the 32-bit version of Windows 7 will only
address a little more than 3Gb of memory. To access the memory in
your system to the fullest, make sure your computer will support a
64-bit operating system and install Windows 7 x64. You won't be able
to do an "upgrade," only a full install, so back everything up first!

-- //Steve//

Thanks, Already I have the Windows 7 64bit ultimate and an X58
motherboard. I went ahead and bought the max memory (now 12Gb total)
and processing photos seems a bit faster. The Photoshop CS5 (64
bit) is much faster, and its tabbing feature is a great help.