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Real-world impact: 8GB vs 16GB memory
Hi folks,
Just wondering if anybody might be able to share their experience with how beneficial a ram upgrade has been for use with VP11.
I am considering moving from 8 to 16GB in the hopes that it will improve results when working with .r3d footage up to 4K. Currently working on a laptop with an i7-2630QM, Radeon 6770m (GPU-assist enabled), 128GB Crucial M4 boot drive with a 7200rpm secondary drive where footage is housed. I get close to realtime playback as is but it’s frequently a few frames slower than that. Am I correct to think that a memory upgrade could improve this?
secondary question– wondering about the viability of working with footage off of an external drive via a USB 3.0 interface.
Thanks guys.
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3 Replies
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More memory will not help much with your setup as far as preview rendering. The bottleneck for most modern PC builds is not hard drive speed (although that does play a part in uncompressed video.) The main factor in preview rendering with Sony Vegas is CPU (now assisted by GPU) and with some effects and some codecs there is not a consumer computer made that can give perfect frame rate playback inside an editing framework. Professional dedicated effects hardware is truly the only thing that does that on a rock solid basis.
I have 12 GB in my machine and the reason I find it useful with Vegas is opening multiple instances and not having to shut Vegas down if I need to open another intensive editing program (Photoshop, Illustrator) as well. Being a Windows program you will find that Vegas actually does not go grabbing for memory so continually adding more has little effect. If Vegas actually can solve it’s GPU issues then “perfect” playback (as always consistent dedicated hardware gives) may become a Vegas reality because the GPU becomes that dedicated hardware. Memory is cheap right now but unfortunately it is not the answer to a better running Vegas. It would be nice if fifty dollars of memory solved preview issues. The answer is two-hundred dollars for a good graphics card (at least) or six to eight cpu cores at 4.0+ ghz.
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the answer to your second question is that I’ve had good luck with a USB 3 drive, but I haven’t tried 4k footage. So…maybe go buy one of the small USB 3.0 portables like I bought for $125 and give it a try. I have USB on my Dell laptop, and it is *fast* but I haven’t tried real work benchmarks against my portable RAID using estata. I still tend to focus on eSata, for now. Maybe render out to the USB 3, and keep your sata freed up?
I don’t know the specs for your video card, but it may be a bottleneck. It’s been my experience that I got much more consistent preview smoothness with Apple desktops with dedicated video cards and FCP 7. I’m just now starting to do some projects in Adobe, so still can’t say whether it is better than Vegas on Windows.
So I tend to agree with the notion that you likely won’t get that ‘smooth shave’ we all are looking for , especially with 4k files.
Al
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More RAM probably won’t make any difference in your preview quality,BUT, installing more RAM lets you make a bigger Preview Ram in prefs. Then you can preview render (CTRL-B) a larger region.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com
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