More RAM is always better. If I can scrape up the money to double mine I’ll let you know what it does. But I’m not sure if that alone will fix the problem. Mine does OK for short projects, it’s just long weddings where I’m starting to get gummed up.
Could be my drive speed, too, I suppose. Nothing to do about that. But a DV project I did recently worked smooth as could be so might not be the drive.
H.264 video live AVCHD is really processor intensive because it’s so compressed. I think (will need to double check) PE 10 has better support for AVCHD than PE 9 does. Regardless, modern highly compressed HD codecs really need a good processor.
The core i3 is a dual core with hyperthreading, so theoretically it acts like a quad processor. I’m not soldon it for video due to my own less than aweome experiences. It gets the job done, but not well. My render times in PE 9 for AVCHD is faster than real time at least. It’s just really slow working and playing back in the timeline.
I think a new i7 which is a quad core with hyperthreading would do the trick for the actual editing part, even on a laptop, especially with PE 10. If you expect to go big with something like CS5.5, a laptop gets pretty expensive. But a new i7, especially if you had a seperate graphics processor,should mow through AVCHD in Elements.
