SOUND ON SOUND

[garrettendi]

My wife does her own Facebook streams using a DSLR (?) camera and her MacBook. I could borrow that to video me and use OBS to record my screen then tack the two together!

[James Perrett]

If your video editing needs are basic then give Reaper a try - it has a deserved reputation for frugal system requirements for audio though I've not really tried doing video on a low powered machine but the 4GB studio computer works fine for video in Reaper.

[scw]

Upgrading the RAM is cheap and simple but it probably won't make any difference to your video editing efforts.
Graphics card, CPU and the type of video files (SD/HD/4K codecs etc) will all impact much more on your efforts.
My advice would be to reduce the video resolution and see if it makes a difference before spending any money.

[Eddy Deegan]

Upgrading the RAM is cheap and simple but it probably won't make any difference to your video editing efforts.

Actually, it may well - at least up to a point. Not so much due to the nature of the work being done but more from the availability of very fast working space. Video editing gulps memory and CPU power. On 64-bit operating systems especially the availability of larger RAM will reduce the amount of file I/O.

This doesn't scale performance-wise indefinitely for video but I would be surprised if increasing from 6Gb RAM to, say, 12Gb doesn't make some difference. This is a 'diminishing returns' thing, but every little helps, especially on a system with modest specs.

SSD storage would almost certainly make a difference too, but I think that's outside the available budget in this case.

Graphics card, CPU and the type of video files (SD/HD/4K codecs etc) will all impact much more on your efforts.

Some (most, these days?) video editing software will take advantage of the processing power in the graphics card where possible for certain things but CPU is really the 'meat and potatoes' of the process.

A dual core CPU (as cited by Garrettendi) is going to be a bottleneck, but with a clock speed of 3.xGhz it is hardly unusable and should be up to the task for the necessary basics when it comes to editing, albeit with limited capability for previewing effects in realtime. Rendering may take a while but that's what kettles are for ;-)

My advice would be to reduce the video resolution and see if it makes a difference before spending any money.

This is good advice, as long as the resulting video meets the required standards for whatever the project is. Many people equate resolution with quality and while there is much truth in that, a good camera with decent optics and capable firmware can produce better quality output at lower resolutions than some people might think.

[James Perrett]

SSD storage would almost certainly make a difference too, but I think that's outside the available budget in this case.

Seems that SSD prices (and other flash memory prices) have come down quite a bit in the last few weeks so it might be worth looking at.

[Wonks]

It will still cost more than free, which I believe is his limit at the moment.

[Nathan-VST-Plugins]

My current machine has less RAM than yours: only 4 Mb, what I do to keep thing working smooth is keeping the bare minimum of background applications and windows services active to save resources for applications, a good windows optimization guide can point what you have to do to achieve that.

Also I like to keep a memory usage monitor active on the taskbar to have a good knowledge of how much is being used at the moment, when it fills up it's time to close some non essential applications.

Other thing for essential apps like web browsers is do a little research for lightweight alternatives or application internal optimization.

Hope it helps!

[Mike Stranks]

That's a good point from Nathan. It's surprising how many routines Windows opens and leaves running by default. I've used CCleaner to help identify and suspend routines that were kicking-in on start-up that didn't need to.

And as he says... not all browsers are the same in terms of resources required.