Export issue

Firs time user. Why my Export is taking whole 8 hrs to finish 100%. How to solve this problem? ( Video length is 1hr 19 min. Only 3 trims, not other change. YouTube setting ). My Computer is DELL Optiplex 9020 SFF High Performance Desktop Computer, Intel Core i7-4790 up to 4.0GHz, 16GB RAM, 480GB SSD, Windows 10 Pro

I have an i7-4770 and it performs much better than this. My hunch is that 16GB RAM is the limiting factor, and the slowdown is due to swapping virtual memory to disk. This could be verified through Task Manager. I have 32GB RAM and have no issues. However, this is just a wild guess based on limited information.

It not only depends on physical RAM capacity but also how much is used by other applications and the operating system. Close Shotcut and see how much free memory is available. Shotcut includes a low memory dialog, but it will close itself if the situation improves. If you are not attending the export, then it is possible the dialog appears, Windows system swaps, export crawls, memory is freed somehow somewhere, the dialog closes itself, and repeat.

During the export, is the CPU 100% utilized by Shotcut? If not, you might try to turn on the “Parallel Processing” option in the export settings.

Does Shortcut use the virtual memory of the operating system? For example, software from the Adobe package needs to be manually specified as the location and amount of memory on the hard drive. I have not seen such an option in Shortcut.
Does RAM affect the rendering speed?

Maybe the video is encoded in some strange way, for example h.265/HEVC 10 bit and 4k resolution.

“Parallel processing”, there is some kind of warning, I like it better when it works stably. Does this option greatly speed up rendering? I usually load the processor only by a third. But a 3-minute video can take more than an hour to render.

Shotcut just asks the operating system for memory and Shotcut does not know if the OS is using real memory, virtual memory, or something else.

Parallel processing is off by default because in the past it caused some unexpected artifacts with some filters. I think we have all those problems fixed. Parallel processing can speed up the export, or not, depending on which filters are in use.

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I didn’t mean exactly that, I don’t know what this memory is called. The operating system has a swap file. Wouldn’t it be better to make the shortcut work more autonomously? Assign the place and the amount of memory yourself.

Not a good strategy. Shotcut does not have awareness of all the other programs running at the same time and what their memory needs are. A system may have 32 GB RAM, but it will feel like 16 to Shotcut if a web browser is taking up the other 16 as a cache. If Shotcut acted like 32 was available when only 16 were actually available, there would be problems. The operating system is in the best position to manage memory needs across all applications. Pinning memory to one application (like a frame cache for Shotcut) is only viable when there is a very large amount of RAM available and Shotcut is tuned with that expectation. But it isn’t a realistic or common reality.

The specified location in Adobe and Resolve that you’re seeing is a separate concept called a scratch drive. Shotcut does not have or need one.

Okay, I don’t know anything about it and I don’t want to make a fool of myself. I know for sure that you just need good equipment for video editing.

If a computer has 32 GB RAM and the “project” fits within that RAM, then Shotcut may not use the swap file at all. I run Shotcut in LiveUSB sessions with no swap file configured at all, and Shotcut runs entirely within RAM no problem.

I suggested (as a guess) that the slowdown on your computer could be due to swap file use because your RAM is a bit low to be video editing and doing other tasks at the same time. In that memory-constrained scenario, Shotcut is likely to get paged to the swap file not because Shotcut asked to be there, but because memory was tight and the operating system was doing the best it could to balance the overall system in an overloaded state.

Shotcut does not request or require or intentionally use any swap space. But in a low-memory situation (which I suspect your computer was in), it is still the operating system’s decision to move parts of Shotcut into the swap file if the OS thinks that would be best. Shotcut does not have control over that decision. Microsoft and Linux would both do the same thing in this scenario.

Short version: Add more RAM, and the swap issue (if there is one) will likely go away on its own.

Well, RAM is not my biggest problem, so I just increased the size of the swap file in Windows 10, in Windows 7 it is “by system choice” on a disk with free space. Maybe “after effect” will work better, although I set a separate place for the cache in the settings. I did not know that programs use a swap file, I thought it was for Windows services. But I do not think that Shortcut completely places the project in RAM, it probably does it in pieces. Here in “after effect” I see right away that it completely places the project in RAM. But these are just my assumptions.

Before I start using SHOTCUT, I do a reboot of the laptop. Browsers have a bad habit of not closing properly, but a reboot does that.

Don’t use any other programs - just SHOTCUT, and it improved my export time.

I use the default export, (not YouTube though - never tried that). And I generally reduce the video CODEC quality a few points - unless you need high definition. You can reduce the Audio quality for most purposes unless you need Hi Fidelity, might save a little time.