Easy way to speed up my MacBook Pro (September 2012)

[Sceneshifter]

Hello all,

I have a MBP (13") which I purchased early September in 2012.

I haven't changed anything to it yet, as it does well in every area I needed it perform up till now. I wanted to make our overdue honeymoon video, but I notice that it is quite cumbersome and the rendering time is ... well huge.

Is there anything I can do to 'bump' the speed a little in this area? Would an SSD do much to this? What is the easiest way to get a good bit of extra performance in this specific area? I have no idea

In advance, thank you very much.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

What editing software do you use and what kind of footage from what camera do you use in that editing software? Is the footage stored on the same HDD as the OS runs from?

 

[devilcm3]

ssd helps on loading times,

rendering / processing videos ... can't be helped because it depends on the processor speed.

 

[Sceneshifter]

What editing software do you use and what kind of footage from what camera do you use in that editing software? Is the footage stored on the same HDD as the OS runs from?

I'm using the super pro iMovie... absolutely nothing fancy
The footage is indeed stored on the same HDD. Is that a bad idea? Would it then be better to simply get a SSD or to put it on external storage? I have an external firewire drive and it has been a bad experience dealing with stuff stored on that drive (audio files mostly).

 

[maflynn]

There's only two ways you can improve the performance of a laptop.
1. Add memory (but only if you're running short on that resource)
2. Replace the HD with a SSD.

Memory helps but only if you're swapping out now, that is running low on memory. The SSD will improve all disk i/o processes like booting up, or programs that access the drive.

 

[Sceneshifter]

There's only two ways you can improve the performance of a laptop.
1. Add memory (but only if you're running short on that resource)
2. Replace the HD with a SSD.

Memory helps but only if you're swapping out now, that is running low on memory. The SSD will improve all disk i/o processes like booting up, or programs that access the drive.

Ok perfect, seems like I'll go the SSD route then, I was thinking about that for a while now. Thanks all!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

The SSD will not make your editing that much faster though and an external HDD (Firewire 800 or USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt) is recommended to store the footage the editing application uses.

As you have not mentioned what kind of footage you use, I presume you use some kind of HD footage, probably AVCHD footage, which gets transcoded (convert codec and format, more info below) into an editable format, which takes time depending on the CPU you have.