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Render Dual Core / Quad Core
Ok, guys… Need any input… I have a Quad Core Extreme 2.66ghz processor, 2ghz RAM… My render times are getting pretty horrible… During render my processor is at like 19% of usage when rendering to an MPEG-2… During heavily composited clips (i.e. chomakey, mask, etc.) it spikes up to 100%… But for a mainstream project with not really anything except straight cuts and no adjustments it is just not using my systems full abilities…
The bottleneck is not my drive (high speed SATA), tried rendering to multiple different networked and USB drives and getting the same result… I am tempted to try to do some effect or plug in that does nothing to see if it will trick my system in to using my processor… But I shouldn’t have to do this…?
Any help greatly appreciated…!
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13 Replies
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That is very odd. You are using the MainConcept MPEG-2 renderer? When I render on my dual core AMD box with MainConcept CPU usage jumps to 100% and stays between 95 and 100% for the duration of the render. Even with just a simple DV-AVI on the timeline, no cuts or fades.
I typically wouldn’t recommend rendering to a USB or a networked drive. The latter will typically be too slow (depending on your network) and the former will engage the CPU too much in storing to disk (taking away from render speed). Rendering to your SATA drive should be fine though.
In Preferences->Video, what is your max number of rendering threads?
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Terje A. Bergesen -
[Terje A. Bergesen] “That is very odd. You are using the MainConcept MPEG-2 renderer? When I render on my dual core AMD box with MainConcept CPU usage jumps to 100% and stays between 95 and 100% for the duration of the render. Even with just a simple DV-AVI on the timeline, no cuts or fades.”
Ya, it’s very strange why some clips that have a ton of effects my processor is like “Oh, I guess I need to doe something…” then other clips that have nothing and no adjustments it’s like “Ahhh, I guess I don’t really need to do anything…” It’s really frustrating…
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just woundering what graphic card are you two useing?
graphic cards has alot to do with rendering any video.
thanks
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Nvidia Quadro NVS 285 (128Mb)… But I do not believe that’s the problem. Vegas relies on the processor and memory for operation and rendering… It’s a really strange issue…
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[marmels] “graphic cards has alot to do with rendering any video”
No, the graphics card has nothing to do with rendering the video.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
Graphics cards act as processing powerhouses, offloading from your CPU much of the hard work of calculating how scenes look, particularly in 3D graphics. Taking a 3D scene and rendering it to the screen takes an incredible amount of processing power. So much processing power, in fact, that the fastest graphics processors often have more transistors than mainstream CPUs,
A graphics card should be purchased in accordance with your needs. The simple rule is that all currently available graphics cards are up to snuff for 2D operations. If 2D is as far as you want to go, then you should look for a low-cost solution, perhaps even go for integrated graphics.
It’s 3D graphics performance that really separates the wheat from the chaff. The performance of the graphics card will directly influence both the frame rate and image quality of 3D programs and games. There are huge differences between the low and high-end cards in this respect.
Detailing how 3D graphics works is an entire guide in itself, but the digest version is that there are two main tasks to be completed. The first is lighting and geometry, the second is rendering.
For the first, think of the ‘wireframe’ 3D images you’ve seen in documentaries and the like. These wireframes define the shape of the objects in the scene. This is the geometry of an image, and has to be calculated based on what the viewer can and can’t see of the objects, the positioning, camera angles and the like. Lighting – figuring out where the light sources are and what effect they have on the objects also happens in this phase.
The second phase of drawing a 3D scene is the rendering — that is, the painting of the wireframe. Textures are applied to surfaces, and modified according to light and other factors.
At one time, 3D graphics cards did not do any geometry processing, leaving that entirely to the computer’s main CPU. Since the introduction of the Nvidia GeForce however, consumer graphics cards have possessed considerable geometry processing power – it was with the introduction of this chip that we first saw the term “graphics processing unit” (GPU) appear.
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I absolutely agree. But it’s application specific as to what hardware is used to do what. For instance 3D studio max and Maya rely primarily on the GPU to get it’s data and renders. My understanding is that Vegas only uses memory and CPU in the render and preview process. So as far as Vegas goes the GPU is fairly much a moot point unless it is a matter of displays and 2nd, 3rd, and 4th monitors.
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You are correct, for video editing, there is no advantage to buying into an expensive graphics card. There are some software packages that can offload some of the rendering problem to the GPU, you can see some of these on the Matrox website for instance. For SD video, you really don
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can i have the link to an offical sony website that tells you that graphic card has nothing to gain from an expensive graphics card for video editing
thanks
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LOL. No, you can not. I don’t think there is such a link at all. Now, if you know anything at all about computers, you do know that it is so, but that sounds very overbearing. Let me try it another way.
The expensive graphics cards are special-built CPUs (often called GPUs) designed to deal with 2 and 3D rendering. The majority of work is in the 3D rendering engine where it does things like surface reflections, light, sprite animation in 3D space etc, in hardware. In video editing you do nothing of this, so the graphics card has no impact.
The only area where some graphics cards assist when it comes to video is that some of them have MPEG decoders in hardware. This means that if you play an MPEG video (DVD) on PCs with this type of hardware, some of the MPEG decoding is offloaded to the GPU. This means that your CPU is less involved when you watch video. When you do video editing however, the CPU isn’t particularly busy doing MPEG decoding, it is busy doing mpeg encoding. Very few graphics cards support this, and none of them are supported on Vegas.
The main supplier of graphics and other cards for video editing is Matrox, they have the RT.X2 series. The only software that supports these cards is Premiere Pro, in fact, the cards are shipped with Premiere.
If you feel that there is information you are missing here, feel free to contact me or reply to this post, but you have nothing to gain from investing a lot of money in an expensive graphics card for video editing. Get one that supports two or more monitors and has video out and you’ll be fine. If you want to start doing 3D modelling in software like Maya or similar, you should get an expensive 3D card.
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Terje A. Bergesen
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