First let me appologise for being so long winded, I created the account on this forum for the sole purpose of making this post and may not make any more (but who knows). I already searched, so if this has been covered, again I appologize.
I'm a new user of the AVS Video Editor. After I began to experience extreme lag and stuttering during preview playback I hit these forums and discovered that many people experience this and shared my frustrations. Now That I have a solution (of sorts) I feel compelled to share it with you.
I had a 20 min project consisting of about 200 high resolution photos, two text tracks one music track and two vocal tracks, the preview became unuseable (took about a week to build to that point), stuttering and sometimes not playing at all. As of Thursday morning I realized something, AVS was not completley to blame as I was at fault too!
Yes AVS needs to arrange for the transitions, effects and video to go through the GPU when available. Here's what I have come to the conclusion of. This is a "Non Destructive" editor. When you import a 10 min clip, drag it down to your chosen track and then trim it down to 10 sec, you now have a 10 min clip loaded in to the memory (or maybe some kind of porcessing cue) which has 9m 50s muted (not cut out or deleted), do that over and over again and you've met the limit of your machine.
The solution lays in 2 methods;
First, cut all of your footage (video and audio) in to short clips before importing them (remember to leave some padding). The AVS Ringtone Maker proved to be perfect for clipping out my audio tracks and I would love to see this integrated in to the video editor importing system with options to clip my video in the same way. I was not using video so I didn't look arround but I'm sure that there is a sutable clip cutter for this somewhere (I'll be looking soonish).
The second method is referred to these days as "Proxy Editing" (I'm not sure that it had a name nearly a decade ago when I used it last). The short explanation is that you edit with low quality proxy files which are made from your clips and then master your video with the high quality original clips. It's just that simple and I'm now running the editor quite smoothly.
The steps;
*Cut your raw video footage to clips and place them in their own folder.
*Repeat the above step for your audio.
*Edit your photos and place them in their own folder.
*Convert your video clips to the lowest quality that you can stand to work with and save them using the same name as the original clips to yet another folder.
*Repeat the above step for your audio and photos. The converted clips are your proxies. You should now have seperate folders for your clips and your proxy clips.
* Create a new folder labled something like Imports, you may use subfolders to keep things organized if you like.
*Copy your proxy clips to the imports folder.
*Import your clips from the imports folder.
*Edit your video.
When you're ready to save your video in high quality to file or disc there is only one step left to perform.
*Copy your high quality clips to the imports folder overwriting the proxy clips and start the encoding process in the editor. You may need to shut down and restart the editor for the changes to take effect, I didn't test that.
Hopefuly this works for you too, happy editing!