CPU pegged near 100% for this project

bwilliamson wrote on 2/25/2004, 10:00 AM

I'm wondering if anyone has seen this.

In one particular project, SB takes about 10 seconds or so to respond to anything I do. I click to move the cursor, and I have to wait 10 seconds to see the result in the preview window (Preview quality video, small window). I split a track, and I have to wait while it completes the task. Playing the video? Forget about it. The audio works fine but the video is totally stalled out.

I can go to the task manager and see that Screenblast is using 98% (or therebouts) of the CPU time, so that explains the delay.

The machine is

fairly new Dell
2.52 Ghz
1GB RAM
120MB hard drive solely for video editing

The video is only about 2 and half minutes long. It does use screen capture video (created by CamStudio) which is 1024x768, most of which is cropped down to 640x480 and below, but I have three other projects with this type of footage and they don't exhibit the behaviour.

So, I''m living with it, but I was just wondering if anyone else has encountered this.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 2/25/2004, 11:01 AM

I could be completely wrong but I'd suspect that it's not Screenblast that's eating power so much as something Screenblast is triggering.

Are you using Windows XP? Have you turned off Indexing?

If not, it's most likely an automatic backup kicking in. You say you have a drive "dedicated to video editing" but it's not clear if that's a second drive or the same drive as you're using for your operating system. If you have only one drive, even on a system as powerful as yours, is trying to read and write at the same time, and that can really draw on the system. Remember, video files are huge!

If you don't already have one, install a second drive where you keep only your video files.

And, of course, keep everything defragged! (BTW, a side benefit of having a second drive dedicated to video is that it doesn't get defragmented unless you put more data on it!) Fragmentation alone could make your auto-backup halt everything.

(You can shut off the auto-backup and see if that remedies the situation.)

bwilliamson wrote on 2/25/2004, 11:12 AM

Yes, this is Windows XP Pro.

By "dedicated to video editing", I meant to say that it is a drive used for no other purpose. That is, it is not the boot drive, and everything besides video editing resides on the boot drive.

By pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, and then clicking on "Task Manager", I can see all the running processes, and how much CPU time they take. The process that is taking almost all the CPU time is 'sbvfact30.exe', which I take to be "Screenblast Video Factory 3.0".

Some more testing indicates that the problem is definitely with the odd-ball screen capture files. When I'm working on video captured from a DV camera, even in the same project, it works fine.

And, it's not just every screen capture video, it's a particular one. There is just something about that AVI file that drives SB nuts.