Video Advice Please

[Mikethebass]

I've just started making videos for my songs. The audio was recorded in Reaper so I thought I'd try it's video abilities. I'm impressed.

I'm running a desktop
i5-7500 @3.4 Ghz

24Gb RAM 64 bit win 10 and the latest release of Reaper.

The video project and media I'm editing is kept on a 1Tb internal drive separate from OS and Reaper.

I'd like the system to run a bit quicker and smoother in video editing.

My son has suggested two further improvements;
Firstly a dedicated video card Gtx 1650 or Gtx 1650ti.
Has anyone any experience with these?

Secondly a Solid State Drive to replace the internal drive for the project and media.

Has anyone any comments on these?

As a last point I'm in the UK so availability and priceing is definitely different to the US.

Thanks in advance

[uncleswede]

I posed a similar question recently (about whether to fork out £200+ on a fast video card) - one of the key responses was that Reaper uses the CPU pretty much for all video processing (e.g. decoding, rendering) so having a powerful GPU available would not make a lot of difference

[Allybye]

Most basic response: SSD.

and make sure you have plenty of ram.

No real reason why you cannot have all internal drives SSD and have your 1TB for external storage. If you have two SSDs you can have the same arrangement of drives OS and probs on one drive and data on the second. That will give you the fastest operations. If the second SSD is not a big size owing to cost considerations then use it to act as a temp store of the data you are working on copying the data (video etc you are editing) from the external drive and then back again on completion (or the end of a session)

Hopefully someone will correct me if I am wrong but the reason I suggest keeping you hard drive external is to avoid any slowness in response from slowing up response from SSD on the same interface when one is primary and the other secondary. However I am not sure if that will still apply?

With SSDs it is not as important (normally) to have maxes of ram as swapping is fast compared to a hard drive but for best response it is still better to avoid that by having lots of ram. It depends on the size of video in use (and whatever else you might have open at the same time but I would always prefer more than 8GB. 16 or 32 (if you can justify it and cope with it) will be fine for most activities if you are not a professional video editor standard of complexity!

[Mikethebass]

Thanks for your replies,

I guess I won't be having to spend money on a new graphics card but need to spend money on an SSD, or two eventually.

Having just up graded from 8Gb to 24 Gb of ram the next upgrade may have to wait.

I'd probably use the first for storing the video I'm editing as I notice that on start up the longer delays are when the project is loading videos.

I'm nervous about replacing the main HD and having to reload OS Programs and all my downloaded VSTs.

[Philbo King]

Use Project Settings to set the video resolution as low as you can for doing edits. This only affects editing. You can still render it to the full resolution.

[Mikethebass]

Thank you Philbo, that is something I will take a look at.

[toleolu]

To Philbo's point, if your playback medium is YouTube or something like that, those platforms tend to do their own proprietary compression of video so if you're shooting and working with really high resolution video, after uploading it, it may not playback with the same quality.

If your plan is to use YouTube and such, maybe make a couple of short test videos and upload them and see what they look like.

One of the best tips I ever got on shooting and editing video was to always keep the destination medium in mind.

I'm on an old i5 rig and I pretty much stick with 1080 from the camera to the the final production with no problems, but my video projects are pretty simple hobbyist kind of stuff.

[Mikethebass]

Toleolu,

Thanks for your suggestions.

I'm shooting on domestic digital camera and tablet. I guess they are at HD I'll have to check. Most people will probably see the videos on their mobile phones I guess. I'm pretty old fashioned and tend to watch on my desktop pc and listen on hi fi speakers.

I'm not yet up to making complex videos at the moment they are just videos showing the story of the song.

[Philbo King]

Post a link when you get it done and uploaded. I'm always interested in what other folks are doing. Here's one I did with Reaper a couple years ago, just messing with my cellphone.
(warning: political content)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKrfqFKiB9g

[Mikethebass]

Here is a link to Detox our first attempt at a video for a song. It's also our first attempt at a synth based song. Your comments are appreciated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2UsL1RhTCA

[Philbo King]

Originally Posted by Mikethebass

Here is a link to Detox our first attempt at a video for a song. It's also our first attempt at a synth based song. Your comments are appreciated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2UsL1RhTCA

Wow, pretty wild stuff... Reminds me of some of my early experiences mixing psychedelic drugs 50 years ago. Nice work!

[uncleswede]

Originally Posted by Philbo King

Use Project Settings to set the video resolution as low as you can for doing edits. This only affects editing. You can still render it to the full resolution.

Hi. I produce mostly multi video projects in reaper (eg. https://youtu.be/CPvcK7anles) which can really choke up my pc during editing, if all the video tracks are active. I've found ways to manage it but if I could edit more easily at lower resolution it would help.

But, if i reduce the project settings resolution from 1920x1080 to 640x480 any ZOOMED video tracks (that would fill say 1/4 of the screen - using the Track/opacity/pan/zoom preset) change size... So I can't reproduce the final layout I want at the lower resolution.

Have I got the wrong end of the stick re: your suggestion?

[toleolu]

Originally Posted by Philbo King

Reminds me of some of my early experiences mixing psychedelic drugs 50 years ago.

Wasn't just me then, that's a relief.

Something I do Mike on things like this where there's a lot of effects in the video is I'll produce the video in stages as I apply the effects.

As an example, where you have a combination of slow motion and the changing colors, I'll apply the slow motion first, produce that, then take that newly produced clip and apply the color effects to that.

Part of that may be due to my older rig, but I find if I apply a lot of video effects all at once, editing and what not starts to slow down as I apply more effects. By producing the video in stages, I find the workflow runs a lot smoother.

[Mikethebass]

Thanks for your kind words Philbo.

I've never tried anything other than the occasional joint so I had to use my imagination. How did you manage to get the four pictuers on the screen effect you used when singing the harmonies?

Toleolu,

Thanks for your suggestion. I've just found out that I can open up a new project file while working on an existing project. I'm using this particularly when I want to have two pictures on the screen at the same time perhaps with a transition. I'll then save this as a clip and pull it into the main project. It makes positioning it easier as well.

[Philbo King]

Originally Posted by Mikethebass

Thanks for your kind words Philbo.

I've never tried anything other than the occasional joint so I had to use my imagination. How did you manage to get the four pictuers on the screen effect you used when singing the harmonies?

Toleolu,

Thanks for your suggestion. I've just found out that I can open up a new project file while working on an existing project. I'm using this particularly when I want to have two pictures on the screen at the same time perhaps with a transition. I'll then save this as a clip and pull it into the main project. It makes positioning it easier as well.

I used the 2x2 matrix preset. It was choking my system a bit (11 year old 3 core, 4 GB) so I did those in a separate project, rendered it, and pulled the rendered result in as a single video item. Similar to what Toleolu suggested...

[Mikethebass]

Thanks for that Philbo. When I'm having problems with my system typically when bringing in or moving a video clip Reaper freezes for about 30seconds and shows Buffering in Red.

I'll try the matrix presert.

[toleolu]

Mike;

What you're doing with your videos is light years ahead of anything I do. If any of my suggestions helped, that's great, but moving forward, I think I'll be the one looking for suggestions from you.

[Mikethebass]

Hi Toleolu,

Thanks for the compliment.

I've managed to sort out the 2 x 2 matrix and set it up in a separate project which I rendered then brought the render into the main project.

I may try moving the video files back onto an external USB HDD and see if this helps cure the freezing and buffering errors.

[Mikethebass]

Well it's 2am here in the UK but I'm pleasantly surprised.

I've, moved all my video folders from an internal HDD to a USB 2 external drive and suddenly the buffering and freezing seem to have disappeared. Perhaps it was to do with Data transfer rate?

Lets hope the machine decides to play nicely when I try it tomorrow.

[superblonde.org]

For editing video I have not had any speed problems with external USB disk drives (not SSD) and I have done some massive video projects in Reaper. (Including one recently which was 5 hrs of 1080P mp4 and ProRes) I use a generic USB 3.0 drive on iMac i7 4Ghz with 16GB RAM now but used USB 2 drive previously too. The amount of RAM will always be the first slowdowner for video editing (not graphics card) and normally a video editing machine will upgrade to 32GB.

Render time though is a different story. The Render time of Reaper always seems a bit slow to me, not sure why offline Render times are still in this 'modern' age of computers, only 1x-5x of normal rate. In 1999 with CoolEditPro on a Pentium-II the Render times were 2x of normal rate for audio.. speeds today should be a long ways away from that. I think my ProRes video render speed was around 1x.

Edit speed might have to do with your video decoder settings, the Reaper support helped me with decoder choice one time, when my video playback was choppy. It might be win specific, but anyway, in the Video prefs there is a 'decoder priority' where you can specify which decoders are tried (vlc, or os, or etc..).

I took down most of my multiple-video-track videos but here is one where I did a quick edit with Reaper and several fx plugins to make a Picture-In-Picture effect for an amateur dualing guitar solo jam, this was like a 2-hour project on external USB-2 drive and definitely no speed problems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezua_F13r1g

I have also done the 2x2 video stuff in Reaper and it worked great (quick & dirty, anyways).

I haven't ever used SSD drives because of $$$.

[superblonde.org]

By the way, when you Render, do a quick google for "youtube video bit rates" and check to make sure you are exceeding the bitrate used by youtube for the resolution you choose, that will guarantee the quality will remain steady after youtube transcodes it. (I also pick an output format which has audio using PCM)