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Building a Vegas Dream Machine
Hello! My Dad is preparing to upgrade his dinosaur to a racehorse to facilitate editing in Sony Vegas. He creates videos at 1920×1080 in AVC/H.264 and has had some problems with strobing/low frame rates when editing; we’re thinking that a hardware upgrade is the best way to fix that. I confess that I don’t know much about Vegas; without wasting money, I’m trying to put together a machine that will more than satisfy Vegas’ needs and be at least moderately future-proof.
My problem is that I don’t really know what Vegas relies on for speed during playback and rendering. I’ve heard that Vegas doesn’t really care about high-end video cards and that CPU speed is what’s important; is that true? What about multiple CPU cores–should I go for one fast core or several slightly slower ones? His hard drive is a 5400 RPM model; should I upgrade him to 7200 RPM? Is there anything special I need to look for in a new motherboard?
Many thanks for any expert advice you can provide!
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5 Replies
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True, Vegas is a CPU based program and a fast video card doesn’t help with your preview. An I7 with like six gig Ram will work fine for your video. Also you should keep your content on a diferent drive than your operating system, and both should be at least 7200 rpm drives. Hope this helps, Danny Hays
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You may consider this an unnecessary expense: I put my system drive on an SSD. The system response is greatly improved and the temp files Vegas uses are handled really fast.
I also installed up 12 GB of triple channel RAM (the best I could afford.)
My mobo has usb 3.0, but I don’t have any 3.0 devices, for the future.
Jeff
http://www.narrowroadmedia.com
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Dad likes to carry his project files around on an external hard drive. What connector should he be plugging those hard drives in through? Is USB3 fast enough to do video editing through? Should I just tell him to move the files onto an internal drive before he opens them up?
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I’ve used external USB 2.0 drives for several years for both capturing and editing without any problems at all.
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Thanks for your input, folks! I ended up purchasing:
Motherboard: ASUS M4A78T-E AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor
RAM: OCZ Gold 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Low Voltage Desktop Memory Model OCZ3G1333LV8GK (2 packs, for a total of 8 GB)
Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive…in addition to the power supply and other parts that I’m pulling from his old machine.
For anyone else who treads this path, I also found this thread informative. Thanks very much for all of your advice!
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