Windows XP Windows Movie Maker multithreaded/ multicore?

[David Christensen]

Windows Movie Maker:

I am running Windows XP Professional SP 2 and Windows Movie Maker
2.1.4026.0. When I save a movie to my hard drive, my dual-core CPU indicates
~50% utilization. Is WMM multi-threaded? Do I need to configure something
so that it uses both CPU cores? Is the Vista version of WMM multi-threaded?

TIA,

David

 

[PapaJohn]

when my XP MCE laptop renders a complex or large movie, it runs close to
100%... both cores... so I go in and turn off one of the two cores to keep
the heat down and let me work on other things in parallel a bit more
smoothly.

 

[David Christensen]

How do you turn cores on/off?

 

[PapaJohn]

right click the blue start bar at the bottom of the computer > Task Manager

Processes tab > select a process like moviemk.exe > rght click on it >

Set Affinity... > uncheck one of the CPUs to turn it off for the selected
process.

 

[David Christensen]

Thanks! Now my CPU utilization is over 90%. (I'm not sure why it was
lower before -- I am now creating a WMV file, perhaps the other was AVI?)

I am thinking of building a fairly powerful computer this year, in part for
WMM:

1. Am I better off with a two dual core desktop CPU's with higher frequency
(Athlon 64 FX 3.0) or two quad-core server CPU's with lower frequency
(Opteron 2.0 GHz)? My goal is to minimize reading/ writing of files
(transcoding?).

2. Should I be using XP Pro or Vista? 32 or 64 bit? If Vista, which flavor?

3. Are there auxiliary processors I can install to accelerate WMM video
processing, such as video cards?

TIA,

David