Performance and other Tips

Performance of CINELERRA-GG is related to the software and video format being used in conjunction with your computer system hardware – the number of CPUs and its speed, I/O bus speed, graphics card, and amount of available memory. A basic, less powerful system will be sufficient for users working with audio only or lower resolution video formats. Higher end computers will be needed when playing and working with higher resolution formats, like 1080p or 4k. Adding effects and multiple tracks will require more cpu, memory, and various other resources to perform at an acceptable level.

Perhaps the easiest method for determining if your performance could be improved is to look at the numerical value displayed as Framerate achieved. Good performance means that when Play every frame is set in Settings → Preferences, Playback A tab, the frames/second (frames per second or fps) in playback might be almost always at the maximum rate of your project setting and/or video frame rate. You can check this in Settings → Preferences, Playback A, by watching Framerate achieved while playing forward. A higher number is better, up to the format frame rate of the video.

Some computer hardware factors to consider for better performance are listed here:

• Multi-core and more SMP processors greatly improve speed by making use of threads. CINELERRA-GG automatically uses the available threads, but some processes are single-threaded anyway and these become the weak link in the chain. The Project SMP cpus parameter is used to limit the use of threads in the deconding (playback) stage only. It is better to lower the number of threads to leave some for the system and for the plugins in use.
• RAM: In video editing in general, the more RAM the better. A large amount of free memory available can help speed up operations by avoiding unnecessary disk swaps and keeping videos easily accessible in memory. You can optimize RAM utilization with Cache size and Seconds to preroll render parameters. See section 19.4. If there is limited RAM you must necessarily have a large swap partition. For system swap, (2 x RAM) GB seems to be more than sufficient. If the amount of memory being used by the program is close, then swap might save you but often if swapping becomes necessary, it presents more problems and you end up killing the CINELERRA-GG process anyway.
• Video editing is almost always I/O intensive. To create longer running videos at high resolution you will want to have a lot of disk space available on fast access disks. The higher the transfer rate, the less slowdowns and problems. So a modern SSD is better than an old HDD.
• CINELERRA-GG benefits from OpenGL hardware acceleration. A good graphics card is worthwhile to have.
• Multiple monitors really come in handy to increase productivity as you can see more information and in bigger windows so you do not have to keep moving windows around.

Besides the above hardware recommendations, this section covers tips for performance improvements and tips on how to perform some specific tasks, often for older media.