I am editing my first 4K project on a fairly old computer and I've been getting hanging shortly after loading the clips in the project bin.... it's a big project... I'm just looking for a sanity check before doing a significant hardware upgrade.



Arch Linux
amd phenom ii x6 1045t
ASUS M4A78E motherboard
8GB RAM with 16GB Swap
system drive is an SSD with 40GB free
storage drive is a USB3 raid10 far 2 in 2 drives of an 8bay enclosure

Now... where things get a little out of hand...

The project is a 3 camera (GH4s) 2 hour shoot... using the internal 4K 100M 30p MP4 (LPCM) format. About 5-6 hours of footage total. It can load the footage which is broken up into 4GB files by the camera (about 23 clips per camera)... generate proxys automatically... and then it just hangs. If I kill kdenlive I can restart and see the proxies in the project bin... and maybe load a clip in the timeline but it will then hang and thats as far as I've been able to get. (I'm currently on day 2 of transcoding these files to possibly do an offline edit so I can't recheck my testing at the moment... but I recall it not really running out of RAM... using maybe 6.5GB and maybe 6GB of swap during the inital clip loading... after restarting it used very little resources... maybe 2GB RAM but it would still hang. I didn't see any error messages or warnings that looked important. Only kdenlive hangs, not the entire computer.

It feels like insufficient RAM or a motherboard cache problem to me but I wanted to get other peoples thoughts before panic buying a Threadripper system tomorrow

why a threaripper (this is overpriced) .. a ryzen 3700 a very good CPU 8+8 3.6ghz threads ..
and a video-editing PC is half CPU and half GPU (kdenlive is not using the GPU , i know, but seems a little strange to make a CPU BEAST PC without GPU just for Kdenlive)
a 16 GB DDR4 is a very cheaper module (at 2400mhz)

i made a Xeon 6+6 threads 2.91Ghz and 32 gbytes of ECC RAM just collecting JUNK on ebay ( 120 euros? ) PC just for Kdenlive (previously i have an overclocked AthlonII X4)
looking at the work-in-progress of kdenlive (maybe on future the GPU can be used..) i never invested a lot of money on actual Kdenlive.. better to wait DDR5 before updating system on 2019.

BUT if you have to invest money now... it depends only on how money you want to invest. (maybe a motherbaord with 2 M.2 Ultra slot with raid capability can be a nice thing)