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CPU at 50% during rendering!
The problem is during both preview of simple FX events and rendering of same the CPU shows only about 50% capacity according to the Task Manager. So preview is jerky – even in “preview” mode I see one out of 30 frames. Shouldn’t the CPU be running up there in the 90’s? Another problem is when I preview no-effect events, there’s a period during which the CPU drops from about 15% to 5% and temporarily causes preview to stutter as if it were under severe load. This lasts for maybe 30 seconds. It’s always after I first start up Vegas, about 15 seconds into a preview. This particular glitch even happened with my old CPU, a 2.4 g P4. When I ran Vegas 3 this wasn’t a problem.
I recently began using Vegas 6, recently installed a P4 3 gig hyper-threaded CPU. Windows shows 2 CPU’s in Device Manager. Bios has H/T enabled. Task Mangaer shows two CPU performance graphs. Vegas was set to both 2 and 4 threads alternately.
Any advice? JohnnyOrca -
5 Replies
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You might want to switch your hyperthreaded processor to conventional single processor mode and see if that helps. This is done in the BIOS. BIOS can be a little intimidating if you’ve not worked with it before – take a thorough tour before you do anything.
Otherwise, optimizing system performance by turning off everything that isn’t important to video, disconnecting from the network, finding and resolving any driver conflicts… You’ll find lots of info on this by doing searches in the archives. There’s also a good guide to optimizing here.
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Thankyou Seth.
The Link was helpful. I’ll be tweaking a little at a time. I tried disabling the Hyper Threading in the Bios but so far it makes it worse. My current theory (regarding issue #2)is that my hard drive is temporarily bogging down as Vegas tries to access files, which could then cause the CPU to slow down because it’s not receiving enough data to work at full tilt. I’ll defrag the drive and try again. I’ll post more if I figure anything out.
John -
Unneccessary system processes would be a particular problem if media is on the same drive as your operating system and program files. Best performance is achieved with media on a separate drive, internal or external.
Rereading your original post, one frame per second rates in preview-full with a 3.xGHz processor and 1GB of RAM indicates something very wrong. (yes, defragging is still a good idea)
If optimizing per the winXP tweaks doesn’t give you near full-rate performance (you really should be getting 30fps with no filters or transitions with that system) then you may be bogging down due to viruses or worms, adware, or other junk you don’t want. Free antivirus from grisoft.com, adware remover adaware from lavasoft.de, another called spybot search & destroy from download.com. I use all three regularly. I also use the freeware version of zonealarm (zonealarm.com) and turn off internet access during capture and most editing sessions.
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Thank you Seth.
I discovered something about Hyper-Threading last night. As you know I have two issues, the first being, why is my CPU only functioning at 50 – 60% when doing a render or displaying preview efects? I mean, I wss expecting to see it in the 90’s as it sweats to make FX playback smooth or crunch out the render. Well, I decided to do a “Gary Kleiner” test. I took one minute of DV .avi file, added a “movie look” from Magic Bullet, added a Sony “Border”, then flipped it upside down, then rendred it to MPEG 2. Then the CPU was running in the 90’s. Finally! And that one minute of DV took 35 minutes to render, which, comparing to Gary’s test, looks pretty good for a P4 3.0 Ghz. So, I’m guessing now, at this point in time, that an H/T CPU will not work at a hundred percent with only one thread to process. But when you throw more threads at it, ie, multiple effects, then it can use all its resources. OK. But I would still like to know if others are getting smooth playback in the preview window with say, one “magic bullet” type FX running. It ssems that with my system I should but I DON’T KNOW. I don’t want to go problem solving where there may not be a problem
The other issue has to do with very bad preview playback (no effects) lasting about 20 or 30 seconds, and always when viewing the very first clip of my Vegas session,and it starts about twenty seconds into the clip. Here there obviously is a problem. The CPU suddenly drops from about 15% to about 5%, and you hear what i think is the Hardrive doing its crunching sound. I’ve tried defragg, turned off network, anti-virus, etc. So I still need to track this problem down as it’s quite frustrating. I will keep looking for hidden processes getting in the way.
Thnaks again,
John -
Update on “temporary bad preview”… another post said there can be problems if you set your “ram render” allotment too high. So I set it to less than half my installed Ram and my problem went away. The post said (I forget who posted it) if that number is too high that Vegas will begin to write a swap file to it. Hmmm. Well, I think it solved the issue.
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