What will speed up iMovie more: an SSD or more RAM?

[mossme89]

I'm working on a slideshow on my dad's Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz Mac Mini, and it's PAINFULLY slow. There's a noticeable several second wait when changing settings for a photo (like how long it is) and often times when playing, it gets "stuck" on a transition or photo, and the preview window doesn't change.

My dad has 2GB of RAM and I have 3GB of RAM. My Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro is a tad faster, but not much so. So I'm trying to figure out how to speed this up, as the whole process is taking way too long. These extra few seconds here and there really add up when working on a long slideshow. I think our computer processors and graphics processors themselves are powerful enough so it's probably something else. What would speed up iMovie more, an SSD, or maybe 6-8GB of RAM?

[Mal]

Those processors are actually a bit slow, but more RAM will significantly affect your speed. An SSD will help with many operations, but probably not much with iMovie for those operations.

jW

[Icy1007]

iMovie would benefit more from a processor upgrade than anything, but RAM would speed it up more than an SSD.

An SSD would improve the startup times for the app, that's about it. Basically if the operation accesses the hard drive, the SSD would help that.

[faroZ06]

Really? I think the SSD makes the bigger difference. iMovie reads and writes a lot of big video data to/from the hard drive.

When importing video from my HDV camcorder, it lags behind when I'm using an external hard drive, but it's fast internal.

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Originally Posted by Icy1007

An SSD would improve the startup times for the app, that's about it. Basically if the operation accesses the hard drive, the SSD would help that.

Whenever you play or edit video, iMovie has to read/write video. That's a lot of hard drive access.