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Grading the factors in rendering time?
So what is your grading of the importance of the factors re actual rendering times in Vegas Platinum Movie 11?
CPU
GPU
Ram
Disk type/Size
OsThat the CPU speed is important is obvious but how much does a faster GPU or a fast ide drive compared to à flash drive change actusl rendering speeds?
Martin
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5 Replies
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[Martin Hoefner] “That the CPU speed is important is obvious but how much does a faster GPU or a fast ide drive compared to à flash drive change actusl rendering speeds? “
A faster CPU is all that matters. It is highly unlikely that drive I/O is your bottleneck. With the highly compressed AVC/H.264 video that most cameras shoot today, raw CPU is the only thing that matters to decompress it , process it, and recompress it.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
The CPU is what you’d LIKE to see as the only important factor in rendering time. That’s because it’s fairly easy to eliminate all the others.
If you’re editing HD, it’s a useful though not cast-in-stone rule of thumb to have 2GB of RAM per CPU core. The bottom line is that you never, ever, ever want Vegas to run out of memory during a render or edit. Of course, Windows is a virtual memory system, and like any other program, Vegas will be happy to start paging memory… which will bring your system to its knees. So, start with enough DRAM. DRAM speed isn’t going to be significant enough to make a measurable difference: all of the critical stuff is happening in CPU cache.
Every hard drive that still works is likely to be plenty fast for an AVCHD stream or two. Ok, having 20-30 old drives on a shelf over in my hardware lab, that may not be technically correct. But I’m unlikly to feel the need to hook up a PATA drive again (much less the SCSI and maybe even an ST-506 or two). So you’re probably ok there. If you do crazy stuff with lots of mixed video, high resolution stills, etc. you probably want to split assets across multiple drives, and render to yet another drive (even a USB flash stick, unless you render uncompressed or something gigantic).
The GPU hasn’t yet had a huge effect on basic performance. I’m not sure how significant the GPU acceleration is in Platinum versus Vegas Pro. I’ve found it to be useful, but kind of a specialty item so far. It does speed up some kinds of renders, others, not so much. If you’re a heavy user of plug-ins, and can use GPU-enabled plug-ins (either OpenCL or OpenGL-based), the GPU may start to make a difference. But still, I’d get all the other ducks in a row before worrying too much about the GPU… with that said, all my other ducks have been in a row, and I did just add an AMD Radeon HD 6970 to my system. Works wonders on Sony’s VP11 benchmark. On my own projects, I’ve actually seen one real project double in preview speed, and render to AVC about 37% faster. Of course, if I were buying a new system, I already know that the fastest Intel systems around will about double that performance (I have an AMD 1090T x6 3.2GHz here), so GPU shopping would still give way to CPU shopping, for a new system.
-Dave
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Thanks for great replies guys and this pretty much confirms what I thought, I´m considering getting one or two new machines dedicated
for rendering.Any thoughts on what CPUs are the business for video rendering today? I´m looking at the available Intel i5-2500/i7-2600 machines right now.
Martin
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Vegas is very good with more cores so I would recommend the i7-2600 quad cores over the i5 dual cores. As David pointed out, you need to also configure them with enough memory. The rule-of-thumb for servers is 2GB/core. That means if you have a 4 cores you should have 8GB of memory. I’ve seen people misconfigure their machines, for example, with 4 cores and 2GB of memory which is only 512MB per core which is hardly enough for video work. Ultimately a Hex core with 12GB of memory would be even better.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Sounds right and I am looking at a i7 2600 machine with 8 Gb Ram
now, I installed Vegas Pro 11 on my laptop with Vista SP2 today and am blown away by the rendering speed of that compared to my stationary
machine! The laptop has a dual core T5670 1.8 Ghz CPU but it still
renders i1080 AVCHD at twice the time of the video, (as compared to surely 7-8 times the video length with my stationary running Vegas HD Platinum 11 on XP Pro.) And the i7 rig ought to do this job very much faster still…[John Rofrano] “Vegas is very good with more cores so I would recommend the i7-2600 quad cores over the i5 dual cores. As David pointed out, you need to also configure them with enough memory. The rule-of-thumb for servers is 2GB/core. That means if you have a 4 cores you should have 8GB of memory. I’ve seen people misconfigure their machines, for example, with 4 cores and 2GB of memory which is only 512MB per core which is hardly enough for video work. Ultimately a Hex core with 12GB of memory would be even better.”
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