How is audio/video editing affected by moving from 8gb of ram to 16gb

liamecrow

Distinguished
Jun 29, 2011
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I have googled and looked through forum posts, and I cannot find a trustworthy answer to this. It seems like there's a lot of 'oh you need X GB of ram, which is ideal for editing because it just works better' type answers. Has there ever been any kind of benchmarking done to compare 8gb to 16gb when it comes to video or photo editing? I actually do more audio editing, but I never run into RAM limitations or even come close, with a reverb and maximizer on multiple tracks and on the master. Please explain to me how it would matter that I have 16GB of ram instead of 8. Where do the benefits come in? How do they scale with performance when everything else in a system is the same?

Thank you for your thoughts,
-Miles
 

Tradesman1

Legenda in Aeternum
When working with video, ideally you will load the video itself into memory so as changes are made it happens right then. Then when you rewrite the video to the drive it's again basically stright to the drive. With too little memory, the rig is constantly reading and writing to disk slowing everything down every time you want to do anything
 
as long as you have a good hard drive audio editing won't be affected at all, audio editing is affected by slow hard drives more then ram. Video editing however... Encoding will take all the ram you've got... the more ram you've got the faster it will encode.