Accelerate Your Video Editing: Top Free Techniques and Tips

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How to Speed up Video Editing - You can Edit Video 5x Faster for Free

Are you experiencing slow or choppy video editing performance? Check this post and learn how you can speed up video editing.

By Candice Liu ｜Last updated onJan 15, 2021

Video editing is probably the most intensive task on a computer system, and the rise of highly compressed videos in high definitions, like 4K HEVC files, literally pushes the computer to the limits of its power. Then problems occur. If you have edited a lot, you will be familiar with slow or choppy video editing performance, frozen system, crashes and shutdowns. This leads to a question: how to speed up video editing and get rid of choppy problems? Tips on how to edit videos fast are all here.

To make video editing faster, there are two major ways:

Speed up Video Editing Method 1- Upgrade Your Hardware

In a word, if you have bigger budget, buy better hardware.

1. Get as much RAM as you can

RAM is an area used to temporarily store the data that working applications are using as RAM is far faster than hard drive in reading and writing. Computer RAM is often utilized by the running programs, browser, emails and operating system. In other words, more RAM can hold more data and let more applications run without slowing the computer down. With that said, how much RAM do you need for faster video editing? It mainly depends on the resolutions and bit depth.

8GB: Fairly capable of editing videos in 1080P or smaller with closing down other demanding programs. Adobe app may go stuck on it.
16GB: Good for processing and editing HD 1080p – 4K 8bit projects. A recommended choice for most common users using editors like Premiere or FCP or Vegas Pro.
32GB: Professional for editing large and complicated videos, such as editing 4K 60FPS videos in Adobe Premiere Pro like butter.
64GB: Purpose-built for editing 8K footage in 10bit or more. It’s ideal for RAM hogging Programs such as After Effects.

2. Get the fastest CPU

CPU is the brain of all the operations on a computer. It performs the logic and binary calculation and instructions. The CPU speed is dictated by the clock speed in gigahertz (GHz), number of cores and others. The more you spend on the CPU, the faster video editing will be executed. The tasks performed by CPU in video editing vary depending on the editor you may use. For example, when you use iMovie to edit videos , CPU will run the editing program and render the effects. Some others may take advantage of GPU to do most of the task, but still, not the whole editing runs outside CPU. Therefore, get the strongest CPU in your budget.

Entry-level: 4-8 core CPU will be good for editing 1080P videos and below.
Medium-level: 8-12core CPU will be good for 4K video editing. For example, processors with 8-12 logical cores 3.0GHz work well for Adobe Premiere Pro.
Professional-level: 12+ core CPU will be good for professional video editing (VR or 3D). Higher-end system like Intel Xeon E5-1650v3 (logical 12-core, 3.6 GHz) or Intel Core i7-5820K (logical 12-core, 3.5 GHz) will be fast enough to run programs like After Effects.

You should also note that some programs will help reduce the demand on CPU. For example, some may take advantage of features in CPU to make video editing faster, like the multiple cores (multithreading) and virtual cores (hyper-threading). Some others may rely on the GPU to accelerate editing.

3. Upgrade the graphics card

GPU is a card that is professional in parallel processing or calculating massive data. GPU does better job than CPU in editing videos beyond HD to 4K, 5K and 8K UHD (to see how GPU works, check GPU video processing ). For example, many programs apply GPU acceleration for AVC/H.264 encoding on Nvidia Cuda. By harnessing the power of GPU, it will speed up the editing effects.

A dedicated GPU or multiple graphics cards can significantly reduce the time used to render the effects and speed up video editing overall. To leverage the features, your card should support for AMD OpenCL, QSV or CUDA. Therefore, you should consider upgrading the GPU to edit videos fast. Besides, newer GPU supports more video formats. But you should note that not all the video editors are able to take advantage of GPU in video editing.

4. Replace hard drive with SSD

Storage also affects the speed of video editing on computer. There are two kinds of storage options: HDD and SSD. You’re suggested to switch from HDD to SSD, why? SDD stores data on microchips while HDD stores data on rotating platter. This makes SSD far faster than HDD in data transferring (300mb/s - 40gb/s vs 20mb/s - 220mb/s). A high-end SSD can provide fast transfer rate for large videos like 1080p ProRes HQ, 4K HEVC. If money is not a problem for you, get a SSD.

Speed up Video Editing Method 2- Get the Right Software

If your budget is limited and don’t have a plan to upgrade the hardware currently, don’t worry, there is free video editing software to speed up slowdowns - macXvideo.

A 100% free video editor especially designed for HD, 4K, 5K and 8K Ultra HD videos;
It accepts videos in any video formats, covering ProRes, HEVC, AVCHD, MTS, H264, DV & HDV, MPEG2 etc from DLSR, GoPro, drones, mobiles more;
It offers flexible options to adjust the frame rate, resolutions, bitrate, codecs, sample rate, video quality, other parameters of the videos;
Rich editing options to rotate, trim, cut, merge, crop videos, adjust video speed and color options, add effects, subtitles, and more;
It’s the only free video editor that applies Hardware Acceleration, Intel QSV, AMD and Nvidia in whole video editing, world’s No.1 fast speed.

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How can macXvideo Speed Up Video Editing?

Secret - Hardware acceleartion

If the hardware remains the same, the software will be the battlefield to decide how fast you can edit videos. There are programs that will take full advantage of the functions of each hardware to maximize the performance. For example, the multithreading and hyper-threading of CPU. But the final factor that affects the video editing speed is whether or not the GPU - the unit specialized in graphics processing - can be fully used. This is called hardware acceleration .

5X faster than others -There are many editors that support hardware acceleration, for example, Adobe Premiere Pro and Lightroom, but they are not fast enough due to partial usage of GPU and the complexity. macXvideo is by far the only free video editor that applies all the major GPU hardware accelerations (Intel QSV, Nvidia CUDA/NVENC, AMD) in the full video editing process (namely video compressing, deinterlacing, rendering effects, transcoding etc.). Even a normal GPU can provide a decent performance. The GPU acceleration, on one hand, lowers the requirements on other hardware like SDD, CPU, RAM to make video editing faster, on the other hand, allows a 5x faster video editing than other programs on the market.

Smoother editing - Another extra benefit using hardware acceleration to speed up video editing is that some common problems are gone. For example, when editing a 4K video, you may encounter frozen computer, lags and sometimes overheating. This is because the CPU is driving too hard to provide the energy in editing process. By offloading the task to GPU, the CPU is free up for other tasks while GPU can do things faster than CPU.

How to Edit Videos Fast for Free

macXvideo is free video editing software that will speed up slow down easily. Support hardware acceleration (Intel QSV, Nvidia and AMD) in the whole video editing process, users can edit HD/4K/8K videos with 5x faster speed. It also solves the problems like overheating and stuck computer.

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Accelerate Your Video Editing: Top Free Techniques and Tips