Optimizing video performance

Here are a few tips to optimize video performance:

Viewing your video in on an external DV device will significantly decrease the processor load on your computer if the video stream is a DV AVI file. See Video playback on a FireWire DV device for more information.

If you intend to do a lot of seeking around or looping and editing while a video file is loaded, make sure that your video file has sufficient keyframes. Since each frame has to be computed from the last keyframe encountered, if you have very few keyframes in the video, performance may be slow. To change the number of keyframes, you may recompress the file using the File > Export Video command and specify more frequent keyframes. Choose a suitable video compressor such as Cinepak and change the KeyFrame Rate parameter to a number between 1-5. A value of 1 makes every frame a keyframe, and higher numbers insert a keyframe after that many frames.

Changing the video properties of an AVI file, such as Trim and Start time, can make realtime performance slightly slower. You can make these changes permanent (and thereby reduce the load on your CPU) by using the File > Export Video command, and then re-importing the file.

Playing videos at a resolution (video size) of 320x240 is usually a high enough resolution to monitor the video while you’re composing a soundtrack. You can still choose to stretch the video to full screen at this resolution. You set the video size on the Render Quality tab of the Video Properties dialog box. Using a higher resolution can bog down your computer if you’re processing audio tracks at the same time.

 

See also:

Using the Video Thumbnails pane