Tips for Improving Smaller Computers Use

A list of items to check for smaller computers that will help to use less cpu/memory/resources follows:

• For large media files, use proxy to do your main editing.
• In Settings → Preferences, Appearance tab, uncheck Use thumbnails in resource window.
• In Settings → Preferences, Appearance tab, uncheck Autocolor assets.
• Speed-up certain time-consuming FFmpeg plugins through use of a carefully selected .opts file. See Speed-up of Ffmpeg plugin usage with OPTS files
• For large media files, in Settings → Preferences, Playback A, Video Driver set use direct X11 render if possible.
• For the Video Driver in Settings → Preferences, Playback A, if using a good graphics card, choose X11-OpenGL.
• Set CIN_HW_DEV=vdpau or vaapi to use the graphics GPU for certain ffmpeg media decoding.
• If you have multiple cpus or multiple computers, even if slow, take advantage of using Render Farm.
• When editing, background rendering causes temporary output to be rendered constantly while the timeline is being modified. The temporary output is displayed during playback whenever possible so it does not have to be recalculated – very useful for transitions and previewing effects that are slow.
• In Settings → Preferences, Playback A, uncheck Play every frame which means frames will be skipped as playback of the video falls behind.
• Adjust Cache size in Settings → Preferences, Performance tab, to not exhaust the memory and yet still provide decent playback.
• When working with multiple tracks containing video at opacity 100%, if you just want to play one of the tracks, disable "Play track" in the patchbay for the tracks that you do not need to see. This uses a lot less CPU.
• For playing a track that has attached Video Effects, if you just want to play the track, you can temporarily disable the Video Effects which will decrease CPU considerably in most cases.