Today’s experiment… Failed (maybe)

Fluxmeister · Post by **Fluxmeister** » Sun Jan 21, 2007 10:21 pm

I'm always annoyed with all the garbage that is installed on my computer along with Premiere. I figured Premiere might crash a bit less if it operated without anything else at all. (no virus scanner, firewall, etc. etc.) The potential solution?

Microsoft Virtual PC is a PC emulator from Microsoft (previously Connectix). You can install a number of different operating systems and easily move files in and out of the virtual machine. Best part: It's Free! (second best part is that it emulates DOS sound/networking... Duke3d! haha)

While Premiere loaded and ran fine, even scrubbing alright... previewing was quite slow. If I had a top of the line machine this might be more of a reality. The other issue is how to operate on video files in the virtual machine. Because the virtual machine uses a file for it's virtual hard drive you cannot directly access your actual hard drive. Instead there are two options.

1) Use the Networked Folder function - The network folders function resulted in terribly slow access time. The upside was I didn't have to copy anything into the virtual machine.

2) Copy the files into the virtual drive - In testing the files that were copied into the machine things were a bit better, but still not exactly usable. This of course resulted in a huge virtual drive.

I look forward to having a faster machine...

Tested on:
Athlon 64 3400+
10K RPM non-OS drive.
1GB Ram (DDR 400)

Pwolf · Post by **Pwolf** » Sun Jan 21, 2007 10:45 pm

what version of premiere do you use? 6.5 doesn't crash unless i'm doing something that is very cpu and ram intensive. You're probably right about it running better without all the extra crap though.

Pwolf

Orwell · Post by **Orwell** » Sun Jan 21, 2007 10:57 pm

So... what exactly is this good for? Isn't this the same as partitioning a drive? Or does it already have the older operating systems on it and can use legacy programs?

Lyrs · Post by **Lyrs** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 12:56 am

Performance wise, is it better than Linux + Wine?

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 2:00 am

Orwell wrote:So... what exactly is this good for? Isn't this the same as partitioning a drive?

No, it's quite different.

The idea is that you use a piece of software that emulates hardware (the virtual machine), and run everything inside that. This allows you to isolate the application from the rest of the system: this is popular for running server applications, because if the server application is compromised, the worst that can happen (leakage of sensitive data aside) is that you just need to restore a virtual machine image. You can also more easily use the same machine for multiple purposes, thus more easily maximizing system usage.

Other popular virtualization solutions (there's lots, but these are the three companies I've researched most recently) are provided by VMware, Xensource, and Parallels.

On the topic: I wonder how much hardware virtualization support would speed this up.

Lyrs · Post by **Lyrs** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 7:59 pm

Well, that would still have to depend on the API and how close to the metal the app is allowed.