Hi

. . . . Sure enough, it's less than 4GB even when running a project that takes more than an hour.. . . .

The amount of physical RAM used is much more complicated than this.  The amount of memory allocated to the program is controlled by Windows,  the length of the project. has no influence upon this. 

I have MEP 2013 and the memory usage I am getting is:

     -  Blank timeline     152MB

     -  Simple project 1 video clip (HD) 3 mins long       262MB

     -  Complex project 7 seperate timelines all HD video total 2 hours long      355MB

While answering this question Firefox is using 149 MB of RAM

The memory usage does rise when rendering.

Other programs running in the background and Windows itself take up memory.  When a program does not have sufficient memory allocated it makes use of the Windows page file system which stores data which is not required for the immediate tasks being processed on to the hard drive.

Part of the 'speed limit' for software is the amount of page file swapping that Windows has to do and this depends greatly on your hard disc read/write speeds, the amount of RAM allocated and whether the software is 32 or 64bit.

Until MEP is produced in a 64bit version you will not get true 64bit performance, IIRC MEP MX is large address space aware however it will only use the memory it requires.

However there are some things that can be done to increase the performance of the computer: -

Use an Antivirus that had a low memory footprint and is not a resource hog,, turn off Antispyware programs while editing, shut down all other programs running in the background you do not need.

I currently use 2 hard drives - one for the OS and programs, the second for all the data.  Windows currently uses the OS hard drive for its page file.  With the addition of a small SSD drive and the Windows page file will be moved to this drive - this should give a significant increase in speed - time will tell.

HTH

John

Hi,

Close all unnecessary running programs using the program manager but before to work clean your computer using a program like PC Cleaner or RegClean Pro may be any registry cleaner can do the work.

Regards,

YR

johnebaker, thank you for responding, but I'm afraid your answer has left me more confused than I was and am hoping you can clarify a couple of points.

Until MEP is produced in a 64bit version you will not get true 64bit performance,

 

Are you saying that the 2013 version of MEP is NOT a 64 bit version?  The web site says that it is "Optimized for 64-bit systems" and also that "Memory usage on 64-bit systems has been improved. As a result more RAM is made available for Movie Edit Pro 2013 Plus."  I took this to mean that it would put the full 16GB RAM in my system to work to whatever extent it is needed and available.  Am I mistaken in this regard?  Would upgrading do anything to make encoding faster assuming I change nothing else?

MEP MX is large address space aware however it will only use the memory it requires.

 

When you say that MX is large address space aware, does that mean it will use all of my 16 GB RAM as needed (and to the extent other programs leave it available)?  Interestingly, I ran another test today encoding HD video and my total usage averages just 2.8 GB although MX itself only appears to be using about 2 GB.  It seems I'm not even close to maxing out 4GB a lot of the time.

This made me wonder if disks or CPU is acting as a bottleneck.  CPU usage averages around 50% during encoding.  My hard drive is averaging 22MB/sec disk I/O, 15% highest Active Time, and the Queue Length is less than 0.25.  In short, if either of these is a problem, it is not obvious to me.

At this point, I'm really at a loss.  I'm not saying that my system is "too slow," maybe it would be considered extremely fast.  What I am saying is that I appear to have resources to spare in all areas (unless I'm misinterpreting the readings), so why doesn't the system use them to encode even faster?

Hi

Sorry if I confused you.

The point I am trying to make is that MEP will use the memory it needs within the constraints imposed upon it by a combination of Windows,which controls all the applications and hardware running on the computer, available resources, and hardware limitations eg bottlenecks.

The fact that MEP does not use more RAM (not all 16GB because Windows would not allow this to happen) may be due to the fact that the Windows page file is being heavily used.  It may be worth checking how big the page file is with MEP running before and after a project is loaded.

It has often been recommended that when you have a computer with a large amount of RAM - the allowed maximum size of the Windows page should be reduced or even tuned off, I have seen this reduced to zero for 16GB systems, though it is a bit of trial and error to find the right balance.

The idea behind this is to force Windows to use more memory and stop all the read/write to the page file on the hard drive which slows things down.

. . . . Would upgrading do anything to make encoding faster assuming I change nothing else? . . .

That depends on your current computer specification which you have not posted yet.

. . . What I am saying is that I appear to have resources to spare in all areas (unless I'm misinterpreting the readings), so why doesn't the system use them to encode even faster? . . .

It is good to have plenty of reserve - I would be getting very concerned if I was running out of resources, all the RAM was used and everything was maxing out. 

The encoding (particularly HD) is very processor/GPU intensive (if using CUDA), however fast the CPU, GPU and data buses are there will be a limitation in the sytem providing a 'bottleneck' which limits the amount of data that can be shuffled around - the problem is finding the 'bottleneck' - my first port of call would be the page file system settings.

HTH

John

Hi

MEP 2013 is only a 32Bit program and as such, even with the large address aware flag set in the program header (Magix set by default), it can not address any more than 4GB of memory space on Windows 64Bit OS, and 3GB on 32Bit.

As John has mentioned MEP works around this by creating a cache on the disk but I am unsure whether it is possible to trick it into using unused RAM, to create the cache there, by turning off the Page file. 

The Page file is used quite heavily when rendering so an improvement might be gained by putting the Page file on a dedicated disc with a large buffer or using an SSD. I have put my Page file on a 3rd internal disc (that is only used when backing up) leaving it to do its caching / swapping uninterupted by other tasks.

Ss

I reset my page file to a minimum of 16MB and a max of 8GB.  After running multiple HD encoding projects, it has not budged from the minimum size.  As I ran the last one I started loading all sorts of other programs including Photoshop, which I loaded a bunch of photos into. While my overall RAM usage went up dramatically, my page file still never grew about that minimum amount.  So, as far as I can tell, pagig is not getting used to any appreciable degree. 

This still leaves me with no clue why my PC runs MEP at the speed it does.  To all appearances, either the program or Windows 7 simply do not choose to use more of the resources still available.  I'm not even sure how much more effort this is worth, it just irks me that I can't see a reason it doesn't run faster.  It definitely sounds like upgrading to 2013 would be a waste of time.

Since system specs were mentioned, I'll throw those out there...

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core

RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Boot Drive: Samsung 830 256 GB SATA III

Data Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3.0 TB, 64 MB Cache

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX

Video Card: SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16

I think that's pretty much everything, but if you need anything else let me know. 

@josephb - I'm also wondering if there exist a MEP 17 that is 64bit. Some projects are a lot of handle for only 4GB RAM.

Regards,

Andre

Hi

@creativeforge

To date there never has been and  is no 64 bit version of any version of Movie Edit Pro available - whether a 64 bit version will become available is something only the Magix development team can answer

@josephb

. . .  reset my page file to a minimum of 16MB and a max of 8GB . . .

You need to set your page file max down to 1Gb or zero to see any effect - leaving the max at 8GB Windows will continue to use what it needs - you are not forcing it to use RAM.

. . . .While my overall RAM usage went up dramatically, my page file still never grew about that minimum amount . . .

The page file would not go up - you need all the programs loaded to be actively working all at the same time eg MEP rendering, some heavy batch processing in PS etc to put a load on the page file system.

HTH

John