It would also help in terms of title and photo animations. Remember that all that stuff takes much more memory in HDV. Plus, the extra gig of memory is pretty cheap right now.

While more memory will always be helpful, only a more powerful CPU will really help with HDV. The MPEG2 long GOP just takes a lot of cycles to manipulate. Think of it this way, the memory you buy for your existing mobo will probably not work in the new one so you are only buying more parts that need to be replaced. I would save your money and get a new mobo, CPU and memory. Go for at least a dual core cpu.

~jr

Price it out. If another gig seems cheap to you and you plan to keep this system for another year then I'd do it. You could probably get away with an additional 2GB making 3 GB total. Generally, you just need to match the pairs, but some motherboards do better with every DIMM matched, which would put you at 2GB total.

Just because you're going to buy a new system someday doesn't mean you'll retire this system. Adding another GB makes this system more useful overall.

Rob Mack

I'm making due with a similar system (P4 3.06 with 2 gig of RAM and about a Terrabyte of hard disc space). When I do upgrade, it will be to a 64 bit system. Running Neo and doing a "selectively prerender video" every so often, it really isn't bad. Just make sure your previews are half sized and not being scaled at all and it will chug along just fine. Smart renders are largely file copies and not so time consuming either. I say, keep making due a little longer and go with an all 64 bit system some time next year.

When you do upgrade, your old system will still be really good for many other uses.

Thanks Laurence.

Um, what's "Neo" and how do I run it?

Also do you mean "pre-renders", not "smart renders"?

Neo is the new name that Cineform is using. I was just talking about using Cineform codec avis. The reason this is important on a slower machine is that because Cineform codec avis smart-render, it really shortens your rendering time.

I was actually talking about both "pre-renders" and "smart-renders". Pre-renders are important for transitions and filters since these are the parts that you're P4 isn't fast enough to handle. "Smart-renders" are important so that you don't waste days on full renders.

Unfortunately, the Vegas "selectively prerender" function doesn't work properly with HDV yet (which is why I have a separate thread complaining about this), but once it does, it will really help aging systems such as ours as well.

YES. Being in your situation I just increased the RAM in my P3.4 from 1 to 2gig and it's a whole new machine baby. Do it.

Just to update, I did buy an extra 1Gb of DDR400 RAM (in 2 x 512Mb DIMMS) and add it, bringing the total to 2Gb. I managed to find Transcend DIMMS that were CL2.5 (all others were CL3) in Singapore. The bill was SGD 64.

I wouldn't say it's a whole different machine but things do seem a bit more stable, especially when I've got a lot of complicated things going on the PC.

Nick, you might also check into slightly overclocking. Make sure the machine is clean with a good fan. A very conservative (not up to it's limits) tweak may make it seem more like a new machine.

I'm getting ready to do that with my P4 3.2 machine. I have a AMD 64 X2 as my main machine, so if I blow the P4 up, it won't be the worst that can happen.

Would adding an extra 1Gb of RAM make any significant difference to the performance, especially in terms of Vegas 7 handling HDV?

I doubt it. RAM renders might be able to encompass longer stretches of video before running out of gas, I suppose. A lot depends on how much background flotsam you've allowed to accumulate. Other than RAM render, I would be surprised if you could actually measure a difference. If you do decide to upgrade, create a test project and measure fps playback and also render time for some short clip. Do the upgrade and try again. I'd be interested in your results. I'd expect very little change.

Of course RAM is cheap, so why not give it a whirl?

Do yourself a favor and download and install a tiny little freeware utility called RamPage. It sits in your system tray and shows you how much ram is not currently in use. Adjust the settings so it updates on 1-second intervals. I think you'll be amazed by how little ram is actually needed for most tasks.

I should emphasize MOST. In my case, I have 1GB sitting in my box, and for most PC uses I show about 500MB idle. Right now I have the last version of my 2 1/2 hour fairly complex project loaded, and RamPage is down to 261MB free. If I load a second instance of that Vegas project then nearly all of the ram will be occupied, but things will still run fast.

If I load a DeShaker project involving HDV clips, then I've found that Pass2 of that routine sucks up about 400MB all by itself. So, if I run two instances of Vegas7 with my big project AND DeShaker, we get into a lot of paging to disk, and that really slows things down. I had purchased an extra 1GB of memory last month, but my system wasn't as stable with it installed (I'm overclocking 30%) so I've temporarily removed it until I have more time for tweaking.

So I guess my opinion would be that you probably don't need extra ram for an XP system. But find out for your own situation via RamPage. Note: I don't see any need for using RamPage to "free up" extra memory. From what I've read, XP does a decent job of ram management all by itself. I use RamPage only to show current ram usage, that's all.