4k viewing and rendering in Vegas Pro 13

[Aaron Star]

1. A 4k video takes forever to create a proxy file for when importing to Vegas 13 Pro. Like 20 minutes for a 4 minute video. Is this normal?

Obvisouly make sure you are up on the last build of VP13pro, and your system drivers & BIOS are on the final revisions.

Conversion on my old i7-870 with a 32GB ram and an hd5770 takes about 1.6x the length of the video to convert to HDCAM-EX 1080@30P (29.97). That would make 4min file be more like 6mins to convert a proxy. If I drop the proxy down to HDCAM-EX 720@30P I get almost a 1x conversion (1.06x).

Cineform Low 1080@30p proxy converts at (.86x) or 34FPS. 720p Cineform Low converts at .8 or 37FPS.

Clearly if you are converting to 60P, you are processing 2x the amount of frames so the processing time will double.

The codec you are rendering from and to makes a big difference in render times. These times were processed from 2160@30p-H.264@50Mbs to either XDCAM-EX or Cineform Low.

Adding color corrections, image stabilization, whatever will add to render time.

2. I can’t view 4k videos right out of camera on my PC using Windows Media Player. Even though they’re MP4 files is there some upgrade or software I need updated on my PC? I can view them fine in Vegas 13. What’s the best media player?

VLC player to replace your windows media player as default. This player will playback almost any format known.

3. When rendering the files by matching render settings to project settings it creates an MXF file. Again, this is not viewable on my PC without converting. But can it be uploaded to the internet? If I render to a 1080/60p file am I losing quality that’s all that noticeable?

(Media Exchange Format).MXF is just another container like .MP4, .AVI, or .MOV. You can upload .MXF to youtube directly as long as YouTube understands the video and audio codecs contained. .MXF offers more advanced picture profiles, stream counts, and more audio channels contained. So it makes for a better pro format when delivering content to various places or other editors. On a simple level there is no difference between MXF and MP4 containers, as the picture quality comes from the codec information contained in the file.

VLC will playback .MXF files.

[Aaron Star]

“Dell Studio XPS 9100, Windows 7 Premium 64 bit, I7-930 ( 8MB L2 Cache, 2.80GHz), 9GB Tri Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz – 6 DIMMs, ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB GDDR5, 1.5TB – 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 1.56MB Cache”

What motherboard / chipset is that system running. There is an app called Speccy that can help with this detail information.

I would open an admin command prompt and run “Winsat mem” to test the memory speed you are getting. 10GB/s for single channel. Dual Channel would be about 15GBs+, and triple channel would be about 25GBs+.

Upping the memory available helps with disk cache in windows and allows more processes to function entirely from memory. Avoiding any memory swap. If your system has triple channel memory, then getting 3x 8GB or 16GB modules, and then dumping filling all the slots would be the best setup. Some motherboards drop back to single channel mode with more than one DIMM in a memory channel, or the DIMMS have to be very matched.

Beyond that recommendation, you would be better off upgrading to a Sky Lake (6 series,) Kaby Lake (7 series,) or AMD Ryzen system with Win10, 32GB of DDR4, 950 PRO M2 SSD, and a RX480/8GB (Vegas or Resolve) or Fury-X/4GB HBM (Vegas Only.) Version 1 i7s just do not have the connector bandwidths needed to work 4K material well.

[Mac Mcginnis]

Aaron,

Thanks for your reply and information.

I’ll download VLC for starters. Forgive my lack of knowledge, but how do I update to the latest build? I think I did this years ago with Vegas 10 when I was having issues.

I’m going to have to educate myself regarding Cineform. I see lots of discussion about it here and it’s use. If you have any links to share I’d appreciate it.

Your other response regarding memory and running admin prompts, chipsets etc is a little above my head. But I’ll try to do some research and see what I can find out.

Truly appreciate your help. And while I’m getting by with my current system it sounds like I may be looking at an investment of some sort if I want to shoot and edit more 4K.

Thanks again,

Mac

Dell Studio XPS 9100, Windows 7 Premium 64 bit, I7-930 ( 8MB L2 Cache, 2.80GHz), 9GB Tri Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz – 6 DIMMs, ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB GDDR5, 1.5TB – 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 1.56MB Cache

[Ryan Gray]

What is the absolute BEST graphic card for rendering 4K material down to HD 1080p files or 480p (DVD) files? I have an AMD Ryzen processor and an AMD RX 580 GPU….but sometimes during rendering in Vegas Pro 13 it does fine and then inexplicably stops and says 0 frames rendered, black screen. Nada. Don’t know what is causing this. Is there a better card that I should use? Or should I upgrade to VP14 or 15, do they handle 4K any better?