I started editing a new video and when I played the video in the editor it would play out just fine for a lil bit, and then it would suddenly just have these lag spikes that made the video unable to be followed. However what really surprised me the most was when I looked in my task manager and saw what I saw
CPU and GPU were barely used at all but yet my disk was used up at 100%. anyone have a fix for me about this or how I could possibly remedy this?
I should also mention that when my disk was not involved at all, playback would be absolutely flawless and my CPU would sit at a comfy 30% and my GPU a comfy 20% with 0% of my disk being used.
Side update, I updated my shotcut version to 21.03.21 from 20.07.11 and I still get the same problem as before with nothing changed. But I just thought it would be important that I pointed it out.
Old Shotcut Version: 20.07.11
New Shotcut Version: 21.03.21
Without knowing any specifications about your computer, or video, etc… I would guess you’re using a HDD (Hard Disk Drive), probably the same drive that is running windows. Using a SSD, or NVME will greatly improve performance.
Yha it is a HDD. that is also running windows on the same drive. It also has 2Tb of storage and currently has 264 gigs free so its definitely not a storage issue but an issue with the speed of the drive.
The 264 gb of free space is irrelevant. According to your initial screenshot, it appears you probably have are most likely below minimum specifications for Shotcut to even work at all. When you run out of memory, windows attempts to write a temporary file to disk. All of this is happening on one hard drive at the same time.
This is known as a paging file.
If memory is an issue, might want to read this post:
I highly doubt its actually a memory issue like its being maxed out due to the limitations of the system, but rather it isn’t using enough memory. I could only get it to go into 1.4 gigs of memory while the video is playing. is there any way to get shotcut to be allowed to use more memory? Maybe that would help
This “all on one drive” can cause significant slowdown when it is on a conventional HDD, because of the head-movement delays. (The is a similar, but lesser problem sometimes encountered on SSDs due to cache saturation.)
This problem can be alleviated by adding small disk drive to the hardware configuration (NOT additional partitions), and reassigning the TMP and disk cache duties to these auxiliary drives. Used drives of this small size are quite cheap.
What kind of video file format is being imported into Shotcut? Is this some kind of giant lossless screen capture file or a ProRes file? Normal MP4 stuff doesn’t run at a 124 MB/s data rate.
Secondly, proxy files and preview scaling will help a lot here because the proxy files won’t be at a 124 MB/s data rate. They will be much lower, something your HDD can handle.
Having OS and video on a single drive is usually not the worst thing in the world. Executable files are already cached in RAM and not placing any load on the disk.
It probably won’t help. 16GB is likely to have only one memory controller chip and would be doing good to achieve 100 MB/s. Plus, flash drives like to go to sleep if they aren’t used every 30 seconds, and the startup lag is usually very noticeable and inconvenient. But you can always try it and see how it goes.
Pretty certain its an MKV file. not an MP4 (Not at computer rn) But I will try out what it is although I am sure its an MKV. So I can make that into an MP4 first to see if it will work nicer or not.
Secondly. Proxy files. Do they effect end result of the video quality in any noticable way??? Iv heard about them before but I havent dived into too much information about them.
That’s just the container. We need the codec of the video stream inside. Like H.264 or Huffyuv or something like that.
Conversion would cause a generational loss of quality. Better to use proxy and avoid conversion.
None at all. Proxy only “stands in place” of the original file during editing for performance benefits. At export time, the original file is used again and the data rate can be as slow as it wants.
I typically run three or more disks, and put the temp files and page files each on their own dedicated drive, separate from each other, separate from the OS and apps, and separate from the video files drive.
When you add a clip to the timeline, a background thread is reading the entire file and decoding the audio to generate a waveform. Depending on the number of logical processors, there could be a few of these running at the same time. This activity is observable through the waveform display on the timeline (it shows partial and increases in chunks) and View > Application Log.
If you have proxy turned on, a proxy generation job could be running in the background. This activity is observable in the Jobs panel.
