Abour rendering…

[Paul Anderegg]

I bought a brand new Lenovo i7 W530 laptop with the $200 K2000 GPU option, and 4GB of RAM installed, specifically for the AVC rendering speed enhancements. I purchased a 16GB RAM upgrade kit on the cheap, and when my computer first arrived, I did some before and after testing.

I started with a 1 minute DV AVI file, which I render to SD ACV MP4. My old $400 i3 laptop with no GPU and 4GB of RAM does the 1 minute clip in about 1:30. First tested the new laptop with the stock 4GB RAM and GPU off. Render time was around 32 seconds. I then turned the GPU on, still with 4GB RAM, and render time dropped by only 4 seconds.

I then installed my shiny new 16BG of RAM, and repeated the tests……exact same results, not an ounce of difference. Now, mind you this was simply rendering raw unedited DV footage, actually transcoding, and did not involve an hour or two of clips and effects, which could make a difference. I would expect working with 20GB of files on the timeline to have an effect on RAM. I would test 4GB vs 16GB again with a huge amount of data on the timeline, but i think I threw my original RAM fishstick away! 🙁

Paul

[Stephen Mann]

You don’t say which version of Vegas you are running, but V12 requires a minimum of 4Gb of RAM. Even then, you will likely run out of RAM during renders and encounter page swapping (using the hard-disk for RAM), greatly slowing the process.

If you only have 2Gb of RAM, then I am surprised that Windows even runs.

Once you get past the 4Gb minimum requirement, additional RAM is only useful to a small extent unless you have a lot of individual images or F/X, which all need some RAM.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Joao Souza]

I use V11 with only 2 Gb.
Works perfectly, never had a crash or something.
And I already made a video with 120 video tracks including videos, pics, texts etc plus effects and audio tracks.
I guess there’s a good Vegas entity helping me LOL

We have so much time and so little to do! / Willy Wonka