Advice for fresh start 64bit

[Steve Rhoden]

Well you want a fresh start…You can simply go with Vegas 9 64 bit,
if you don’t have Vegas 10 64 bit as yet. And compliment that with
windows 7 64 bit, So that you can capitalize on more of your
installed ram(memory) and more speed.

I’d also encourage you to add Adobe After Effects to your Arsenal for
complex motion graphics and visual effects needs.

I never recommend partitioning..simply get another drive for whatever you need.

And good enough for one internal drive for Windows7 and Programs,and the other to render to.

Don’t sweat the BlueRay issue….you also have DVD Architect 5.2

Don’t use Norton Antivirus….I would recommend Mcafee or Avira.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Project Samples at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Jeremy Rasnic]

1 a)Apart from Windows7,Vegas 9e,and Photoshop,
which other programs etc should I install that will be neccessary or helpful but not conflict with Vegas?
It really depends on what you are doing so I don’t think anyone here can answer that for you. However, you may want to look into Ultimate S pro 4 (VASST.com), Excalibur (Jetdv.com, Vegasaur, Mike Crash’s filters, New Blue FX, etc. for Vegas Pro 9. If you upgrade to 10, you will have a whole new world opened up to you in regards to plugins as Sony has integrated the OFX architecture into Vegas.

b)Should I create Partitions?
I would for your OS drive. I would allot about 20 gigs for the OS and programs (10 if you know that you will not outgrow it). I would use the remainder of the OS drive as a partition for files that are not for Captured or Rendering video (things like pictures, sound fx, etc.) I would not partition the Capture drive or the Render drive (I would add one more hard drive for a total of 3 for this setup). If you must only use 2, then capture to your secondary drive and render back to the Windows OS drive (the secondary partition)

c)Antivirus. I’ll only be connected to internet to update or download programs to do with video editing.I was thinking of installing Norton Internet Security 2011.Is this a good idea?I intend to turn it off when not online.
I would not install that. If you must run something, I would go with the free Microsoft Security Essentials as it is light on resources and still does a good job.

d)I also have a Blu-Ray burner.As I’m going to lose my pre-installed programs when I switch to 64bit,what’s the best program to install for playback etc?
I don’t know on this one. Perhaps note the name of what you are currently using and see if you can download it from the web. You could always try VLC (videolan.org) as it is my pc player of choice. (I watch my BluRay discs on my TV, not my PC)

2 I’m going to use the G-Raid via e-SATA for my raw footage and current projects.
That leaves me with 2 internal hard drives. Is it best to have one for Windows7 and Programs,and the other to render to?
OR
Is there any advantage of having them RAID 0?
I realise that it’s a risk,but would there be any noticeable advantage?
Sorry for the long post,and thanks for any help 🙂
Redundancy is good. I would mirror them if you have data that is worth keeping. I don’t think you will think it is an advantage to having the “extra speed” if you ever lose a drive or your RAID becomes corrupt.

As for drives, partitions and setup, see sub point b above.

j razz

https://www.jrazzcreations.com

[Dave Haynie]

2 Internal Samsung F3 1TB

First thing, for editing, get more memory. On a 32-bit system, you’re only good for another GB or so, but once you got to 64-bit, the system can (and will) use whatever you can put in there, eventually.

I use an EX3,Canon 550D,and a Zoom H4 audio recorder.
Just bought an H4n for myself… a Christmas present 🙂 I was a dedicated Tascam guy for years, but I was increasingly frustrated with the preamp levels of my DR-1. I wanted a unit with XLR inputs, phantom power, but also easy use with dynamic mics and guitars. They didn’t fix most of the issues with the DR-100… and add to that the H4n’s 4-channel mode, “portastudio” mode, and easy power (AA batteries, and it comes with a power supply).. it was time to give in 🙂

1 a)Apart from Windows7,Vegas 9e,and Photoshop,
which other programs etc should I install that will be neccessary or helpful but not conflict with Vegas?
What are you doing? If you’re doing any kind of complex animation or titling, you need a good set of plug-ins, and/or something like Adobe AfterEffects. I have Boris FX and Boris Continuum Complete… you need Vegas 10 for BCC7.

If you’re doing original music, Vegas is fine as an audio sequencer… you need something else (I use Acid 7 and Cakewalk Sonar X1) for MIDI and loop sequencing. And for most any serious audio work something for hard audio editing like Sound Forge.

I also have a few plug-ins for noise reduction (audio and video), morphing, etc. It’s not really necessary to load up on things you might use, given the typical download sales model these days — buy it when you know you need it. Ask around sites like this for advice on what to buy.

b)Should I create Partitions?
Probably not. Partitions don’t serve much purpose these days.

c)Antivirus. I’ll only be connected to internet to update or download programs to do with video editing. I was thinking of installing Norton Internet Security 2011.Is this a good idea?I intend to turn it off when not online.
I use NOD32, and you never need to turn it off.. it’s essentially transparent. Most of the “Antivirus screws you up” memes come out of things like Norton, which need to pester you all the time to make you think they’re doing their job… or to force you to buy upgrades. Norton in particular is a pretty bad idea on any media content creation system.

d)I also have a Blu-Ray burner.As I’m going to lose my pre-installed programs when I switch to 64bit,what’s the best program to install for playback etc?
Not sure about best… I use the Cyberlink PowerDVD that came with my BD player… like three years ago. If I did BD playback regularly, I’m sure I would have upgraded. But by the time I’m burning a disc, I play it back on the PS3.

2 I’m going to use the G-Raid via e-SATA for my raw footage and current projects. That leaves me with 2 internal hard drives. Is it best to have one for Windows7 and Programs,and the other to render to? OR Is there any advantage of having them RAID 0?

RAID 0 buys you increased linear read and write speed. It also tends to add together the negative qualities of the drives, otherwise. So you lose your partition when the first one fails. Your seeks take the longer of the two drives’ seek times… a non-issue if you’re reading/writing a single gigantic file (since you’ll need to seek only half as often), but a real issue if you’re dealing with a large number of files all at once.

So no, I haven’t been interested in RAID0. I supposed, if I found a real sweet spot on performance that matched my usual workflow, maybe (in English… a RAID starts out fast. As I add files pulled from the same drive to a project, eventually the RAID may get slower, which eliminates the primary purpose these days. When I did run RAID0, it was usually just to increase capacity. Not a huge issue today).

In my setup, I have two permanent internal drives, each 1.5TB. I use the C: drive for OS, etc. as well as a rendering target… there’s absolutely no reason you can’t use it for that. If you have enough RAM, you don’t actively page swap while running Vegas, and by the time you do a render, anything that’s speculatively loaded from Vegas, or other system-level drains on the main drive, are pretty much done.

The D: drive is for small projects and stuff I keep around all the time. One reason to offload stuff here is differing backup strategies, too… some things need regular backup, some need incremental, some need incremental with achiving, etc.

I also have two SATA “cartridge” drives, and a RAID. The RAID is Firewire 800, not eSATA, so it’s not for high-speed stuff, relatively speaking. I keep finished projects there, media I need regular access to, photos, lots of other stuff.

The cart drives hold one SATA 3.5″ drive and two DATA 2.5″ drives. These are for larger projects… any commercial project I do gets its own drive.

-Dave

[George Lawrie]

Thanks to all for the replies.I spose I should have joined this forum a year ago. I’ve done a lot of research,and am only gradually getting to grips with computers.Sometimes specific real world tips are hard to get.
Dave- I’m a musician,so I could do with another few pages of advice too!
Anyway,maybe I should start another thread,but here goes;

I took out my 2 old drives,so I still have Vista 32bit if I have to go back to it.I installed the new drives with windows7 64bit,and Vegas pro 9.0e,and installed new drivers and went from 4GB RAM to 12GB.

Everything seems to work,my RAM is recognised,and my programs open fast,but I’m seeing no improvement in Vegas,and I think playback is actually worse.

I can play back native EX3 1080 files no prob,but as soon as I add an effect the playback resolution goes to Half,and using 2 effects almost brings it to a halt.

Meanwhile,I can play 3 or 4 of these video tracks together and get full framerate at the Half setting.The CPU usage goes up in predictable chunks with each added track,but the effects seem to use much more CPU. I’ve tried different effects,and some are worse than others,but it seems that windows7 64bit with all the extra RAM is worse than Vista!?

I opened Windows Task Manager,and, regardless of effects or number of tracks,the RAM usage is around 2.5GB,with plenty in spare and in cache etc.

As i say,I dont have lots of experience,but is it normal that the effects would eat up so much CPU power,and that Vegas would not take advantage of RAM?

Also,I rendered 3 of these tracks playing at the same time with the opacity set to see all 3,and added track motion to one of them to see what would happen to the CPU and RAM.

The CPU went to 100% on all 4 cores (2.66 GHz Quad core) ,and the RAM usage stayed as usual around 2.5GB.

Any advice on system or settings would be greatly appreciated.

George.

[George Lawrie]

P.S…… when I say that I can play 3 or 4 video tracks together,I mean without effects,and with opacity set to see all of them.

George.

[Dave Haynie]

Dave- I’m a musician,so I could do with another few pages of advice too!

Funny story… I had moved from Amiga to PC for audio in the early 1990s, after Blue Ribbon Bakery stopped on new versions of Bars & Pipes, Sunrize (8/16-channel audio for Amiga) vanished. I started with Cakewalk, and spent much time on the PC-DAW mailing list, learning the ins and outs of what others had discovered. Getting a PC to do anything in realtime was harder than the Amiga, in part because we designed the Amiga, HW and SW, specifically to do things in realtime.

There was a thread going around, arguing over weather CPU or other things were the limiting factor on most PCs, for number-of-tracks.. and this was before signal processing plug-ins. I wrote some tome on the fact it was hard drive speed, and even more, seek latency. Turns out that the one guy defending that position, Peter Haller, worked for the Sonic Foundry. He sent me promo copies of Acid and Vegas… and I’ve been using both ever since.

I can play back native EX3 1080 files no prob,but as soon as I add an effect the playback resolution goes to Half,and using 2 effects almost brings it to a halt.

Vegas playback in one of the auto modes will scale according to load… so the more stuff you add, the slower it may scale down. The same PC with more RAM _might_ get a little faster, but it’s not necessarily the case. It depends, of course, on what the actual bottleneck was.

There are effects and there are effects. Some effects are pretty minimal, others take crazy amounts of time. For example, I use the Neat Video noise reduction plug-in on any video I shoot in a too-dark room. That one plug-in reduces throughput well below any level that still resembles “video”. So I keep that one turned off during editing, only run it at rendering time (it would totally be a cool idea to have that option in the plug-in dialog… apply always, apply at render, turn off).

The time spent also depends on your mode.. are you in 32-bit, or 8-bit? And if you’re on a slower CPU, the decoding of things like AVCHD can be a significant portion of the rendering time (see how well you do at playback of a single stream… and know that Vegas may well be slower, particularly compared to GPU-accelerated decoders).

Meanwhile,I can play 3 or 4 of these video tracks together and get full framerate at the Half setting.The CPU usage goes up in predictable chunks with each added track,but the effects seem to use much more CPU. I’ve tried different effects,and some are worse than others,but it seems that windows7 64bit with all the extra RAM is worse than Vista!?

It can depend on the specific effects, or even the video decoding CODECs. When you run 64-bit, you’re using a different set of CODECs and plug-ins than you do in 32-bit mode (though, apparently, 32-bit VST plug-ins work in 64-bit mode… no idea why they’re the exception). You can install both 64-bit and 32-bit Vegas in W764… do this, install both. The try some simple stuff. See you CPU use on decoding just the video streams you’re working on, 32-bit vs. 64-bit. Try the various plug-ins.

In theory, 64-bit will be much faster when you need the RAM. And it could well be a little faster when you don’t… the AMD64 CPU model adds more general purpose registers in 64-bit mode, it has a slightly better SISD FPU model, etc. It’s worth a check, you may find only one or two plug-ins are truly evil.

I opened Windows Task Manager,and, regardless of effects or number of tracks,the RAM usage is around 2.5GB,with plenty in spare and in cache etc.

It’s not going to use more than it needs. Doing various video things, I’ve definitely seen 6.5GB used on an 8GB machine. So you can get there.. but on any given project, not necessarily. I had a project in 2009, before 64-bit, with 45 video tracks, most of them greenscreens, and, well, wanna talk SLOW. This two minute music video took me about 3-4 hours to fully render, even after I had broken the video into two separate Vegas projects.

As i say,I dont have lots of experience,but is it normal that the effects would eat up so much CPU power,and that Vegas would not take advantage of RAM?

Yeah.. some plug-ins can use crazy amounts of CPU. Do as I suggested, and look for anomalous things.. some plug-in really dragging things down, or eating much more CPU in 64-bit than 32-bit. We’ve even seen, on this list, video CODECs that are good in 32-bit, but insanely slow in 64-bit.

-Dave

[George Lawrie]

Dave,thanks for your help.I’ll try loading 32bit Vegas to measure performance.

I went through all the Vegas plug-ins last night,didn’t have time to do it in depth,and it depends on the intensity of the effect I dial in,but I found the heaviest CPU users to be DEFOCUS,MEDIAN,RAYS,and STARBURST.

Starburst caused my system to crash 3times.Still,as a plug-in it’s no big loss.
I’m editing in 8bit.Tried the 32bit and it’s too heavy for my system in Best preview except when I use a plain video track with no effects.

*Also meant to ask,when I read that you should install Quicktime,is that only for opening certain file types? I read there’s a Vegas compatible Quicktime download on the Avid site.

On the music side,the only time I’d need loops would be for maybe building rhythm tracks,but I could do that in Vegas.

I tried Sound Forge,but it doesn’t appeal to me at this stage.I’m concentrating on getting my sounds captured as good as possible at the recording stage,and Vegas has enough depth of tinkering for me,at least for now!

If I get noise on a video’s audio track that cant be re-done,the Noise Reduction plug-in would have been handy,but I was thinking of saving money and trying out Audacity.

Thanks again for your help,it’s appreciated.I’ll go and do some more testing,then build up my energy levels to ask a load more questions on Cow about things that hurt my head,like file compression and using proxy files,and the multitude of settings in Vegas menus!

George.