Maybe this will help others. My setup is an i7-3770, 16GB, 2 SSDs. It performs well on almost any task. I've been video editing for 10+ years and a SMS user for 2+ years
I normally do simple projects - 1-2 video tracks, 1 audio with maybe a little background music, and a few titles, plain and rolling and mild video effects.
Preview has always been at full frame rate, render times decent with SD (MC mpeg DVDA templates) at about 1/2 of the timeline time and HD stuff (MC or Sony 720p) at 1.25-1.5 times timeline time. This using CPU only for renders.
My latest project is more complex - 4 video tracks, 3 audio, cropping and rotating, color correction, etc... My preview was lagging to 1-3 fps in spots!! Final render times were much higher than my previous projects.
I started searching the forums and internet for ways to improve it, tried almost everything and nothing really helped. Even using QSV with Sony AVC only provided a slight improvement over CPU only. I could not find where the bottleneck was. Monitoring showed the CPU running between 20-30%, GPU between 10-15%, memory only at 4-6GB used and disk access at only a few MB per sec. SMS was always "waiting" on a thread.
Just for kicks I went to preferences and changed "Maximum number of Rendering Threads" from 8 to 16. Boom, preview went to full frame rate and renders now get the CPU usage over 90%. The render times are now very similar to my less complex projects!
My CPU has 4 cores + hyperthreading for up to 8 threads active at a time. SMS was not able to keep the CPU busy when renders were confined to it using 8 threads!
So, if your render or preview is slow and your CPU usage is low, try bumping the number of threads!
I normally do simple projects - 1-2 video tracks, 1 audio with maybe a little background music, and a few titles, plain and rolling and mild video effects.
Preview has always been at full frame rate, render times decent with SD (MC mpeg DVDA templates) at about 1/2 of the timeline time and HD stuff (MC or Sony 720p) at 1.25-1.5 times timeline time. This using CPU only for renders.
My latest project is more complex - 4 video tracks, 3 audio, cropping and rotating, color correction, etc... My preview was lagging to 1-3 fps in spots!! Final render times were much higher than my previous projects.
I started searching the forums and internet for ways to improve it, tried almost everything and nothing really helped. Even using QSV with Sony AVC only provided a slight improvement over CPU only. I could not find where the bottleneck was. Monitoring showed the CPU running between 20-30%, GPU between 10-15%, memory only at 4-6GB used and disk access at only a few MB per sec. SMS was always "waiting" on a thread.
Just for kicks I went to preferences and changed "Maximum number of Rendering Threads" from 8 to 16. Boom, preview went to full frame rate and renders now get the CPU usage over 90%. The render times are now very similar to my less complex projects!
My CPU has 4 cores + hyperthreading for up to 8 threads active at a time. SMS was not able to keep the CPU busy when renders were confined to it using 8 threads!
So, if your render or preview is slow and your CPU usage is low, try bumping the number of threads!