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3 hard drives
Probably most of you know this. I just found it out thanks to help from another poster here: for optimum performance, it pays to have at least 3 hard drives. One (usually the C-drive) for Vegas itself. A second for original media and veg files. A third for renders. However, this gets a bit tricky. Render #1 goes to drive #3. But if you then modify that render, such as color correct it, you now want to render to drive #2. And if you make a third pass, you would render back to drive 3. At each render, you want to be rendering footage from one hard drive to a different drive.
Speeds things up.
Rick Wise
director of photography
Oakland, CA
http://www.RickWiseDP.com
email: Ri**@********DP.com -
4 Replies
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I think two drives are good enough. One for your operating system and one for media. The render time is mostly processor usage and not so much drive I/O. Try a little test file with 2 and 3 drive and check render times to see. Danny
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It depends on whether you are rendering to the same format as your source and if you process all of your video frames or not. If most of your video has no processing then Vegas will smart-render AVI and MPG source which is just a file copy. At that point having three drives really speeds things up considerably.
But I agree with Danny, if you are color correcting or adding other FX that require processing time, (which for many of us is most of the time) or rendering to a different format (e.g, AVI to MPG, M2T to MPG, etc.) then your render will be CPU bound and disc I/O plays a very small part.
The easy way to tell is to look at the disc activity light when you render. If it is just blinking on and off, then disk I/O is not your problem. If it is solid ON, then a 3rd drive will help.
~jr
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Thanks for the clarifications.
Rick Wise
director of photography
Oakland, CA
http://www.RickWiseDP.com
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
I too found that three drives were the solution. But I have kicked it up a notch to have my media drive(s) exist as a RAID of two or more drives. My rationale was that I am pulling two or more files from the media drive to playback from the timeline. Faster file delivery means that the only bottleneck is the CPU and that is dependant on what I have done to the footage. When rendering to my third drive as an output file, it becomes a single stream and a single drive is more than fast enough to keep up.
GB-)
“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”
Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135
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