Adobe After effects is a good example of a fairly standard app that will happily chew through 8-12 gigs of ram when working on moderately complicated videos.
I also know people who work with fluid dynamics and the new workstations they bought for work have 48 gigs of RAM.
Think about what Adobe After effects is doing, though: non-linear video editing. A bit more than a decade ago, you couldn't do that outside of Hollywood. A bit more than two decades ago, and even Hollywood couldn't do it - everyone still used celluloid.
I'm not sure that either video editing or fluid dynamics count as bloatware in my book, because the problems are inherently complex. Word processing, however...
I did non-linear video editing on my PC in the late 90s. There were certainly some limitations since the AVI format was stupid (used a signed integer for an index limiting you to 2GB file size), but my machine then was a 133MHz pentium with probably 32 or 64MB of RAM. Granted I was only working with half-height VHS (640x240), but it worked.
I haven't tried a lot of video editing software today (since I no longer pirate software like I used to), but what I have used is not huge progress from what I did in the late 90s. The only big step is that you can work with compressed streams directly, which is nice, but expected since even a modest machine today is expected to be able to decompress the latest MPEG spec in realtime.
Comments
Adobe After effects is a good example of a fairly standard app that will happily chew through 8-12 gigs of ram when working on moderately complicated videos.
I also know people who work with fluid dynamics and the new workstations they bought for work have 48 gigs of RAM.
Think about what Adobe After effects is doing, though: non-linear video editing. A bit more than a decade ago, you couldn't do that outside of Hollywood. A bit more than two decades ago, and even Hollywood couldn't do it - everyone still used celluloid.
I'm not sure that either video editing or fluid dynamics count as bloatware in my book, because the problems are inherently complex. Word processing, however...
I did non-linear video editing on my PC in the late 90s. There were certainly some limitations since the AVI format was stupid (used a signed integer for an index limiting you to 2GB file size), but my machine then was a 133MHz pentium with probably 32 or 64MB of RAM. Granted I was only working with half-height VHS (640x240), but it worked.
I haven't tried a lot of video editing software today (since I no longer pirate software like I used to), but what I have used is not huge progress from what I did in the late 90s. The only big step is that you can work with compressed streams directly, which is nice, but expected since even a modest machine today is expected to be able to decompress the latest MPEG spec in realtime.