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Recommended HW/SW upgrades with V12 upgrade
I’ve got a ASRock Gen3 Rev4 motherboard with an Intel i7-2600 CPU. After a year, this machine still rocks and is rock solid. I skipped the Vegas 11 upgrade as I didn’t use 10 as much as I thought and it certainly sufficed for my needs. I plan on doing more things with the software this time round. I’ve been using the built in video on the Mobo and haven’t used the GPU since rendering frequently did not look great and the CPU seemed more powerful. If I was going to upgrade, there are a couple of things to considering:
(1) A higher end graphics card. I’m not sure I’m going to Windows 8 any time soon, especially with such a rock solid setup. What might you guys consider for a reasonable priced accelerator? My largest concern is power and cost. I wish there was a way to turn it on and off easily so it wouldn’t consume so much power when not in use. I also use Photoshop CS3 and I wonder what card might be a reasonably good budget card. I can certainly afford to spend $100-200 if it makes a noticeable difference.
(2) It looks like the NewBlue software comes with Vegas. I heard there is anupgrade for $100. Is this really worth it? I’d rather have a good stabilizer software (something came with V10 but it was basic) and something that is good for general purpose video, doing work for others requesting video editing.
What are your thoughts? Thanks and look forward to participating mroe again here.
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3 Replies
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A Vegas 12 upgrade is the way to go.
Yes, the Newblue set of plugins are worth it and the best
stabilizer plugin is Prodad Mercalli.
Im pressed for time, so others will chip in here.Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956 -
I’ve not really used the NewBlue bundle yet – not because I don’t thibnk it’s any good, but because I’ve been doing “boring” corporate stuff. Similarly, I’ve been perfectly happy with the built in Satbilisation – but that’s because 90%+ of my footage is shot on a tripod, so there’s not a lot of post-stabilisation needed.
Your best bang for buck is to go for an decent nVidia GeForce card. I know Sony and all the “pro” system builders’ll recommend Quadro cards but for mine they’re (a) expensive and (b) based on old technology. For decent GPU assist, you need two things – lots of CUDA cores and plenty of GPU memory bandwidth. I currently use a (slightly) overclocked GTX570 card and it’s rock solid and blazingly fast. These days, a GTX670 would be the way to go. It’s based on nVidia’s latest Kepler core, and has 256bits of memory bandwidth, which is as good as you’re likely to get. Try not to go lower (66Ti , for example) because their memory bandwidth is constrained to 192 bits, and that’ll hurt performance. And stay away from ATI/AMD cards – there’s nothing wrong with them per se, but Vegas is optimised for nVidia’s CUDA architecture at the moment.
The second best bang for your buck is memory – I run 16G, and will soon be bumping that to 32G. You can never have too much memory 🙂
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Brad and Steve, thanks for your responses. I’m taking a look at the current GTX cards and realize that there is nothing worth buying except for $250 and up that would make a huge difference. It also seems that the 670 gets you more than twice the cores for only about 25% more money. Might be worth splurging at the right time.
Regarding the plugins, I think that Prodad was included, or at least some lite version. I think there was a special Vegas version that isn’t a general version that cost $200 or so, which was way too much for me for the stabilization. I found it difficult to use at times except for very specific scenes which it did help a great deal without losing too much resolution. Will have to think about getting this one. Looks like NewBlue has their own too.
Regarding NewBlue, it appears they have several different packages. The Video Essentials packages seem to be the ones to get as well as an audio. But I have no idea what would be the most versatile that I could use for the work I do. It’s mostly amateur work, family videos, some video clips I do professionally for YouTube including tutorials. So many plugins, so much money, not enough to go around. 🙂 Hoping some of you will have some insight that might be recommended.
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