Any Tips For Getting Vegas To Run Faster?

[Steve Rhoden]

“Is there anything i can do to make Vegas run a bit faster”
Sorry, nothing you can do with the system that you currently have gonna make
any significant difference.

Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia

[Hunter Madden]

Thanks.

Gonna upgrade in the future, any specific hardware i should be aiming for?

[Aaron Star]

Optimizing vegas has been discussed in several other threads over the years. The quick of it would be:

• 8x cores+, however more freq seems to make vegas more responsive than more slower cores.
• 16-64GB of single rank ram, depending on the amount of memory channels your MB has available. These days, I would start with 16GB DIMMs vs 8GB. If your motherboard has dual channel ability, use 2x 16GB single rank vs 4x cheaper 8GB DIMMs.
• Verify your memory bandwidth with “WinSAT mem” from an admin command prompt. Dual or quad channel ddr4 you should see 25-50+ GB/s. Memory channels and memory bandwidth is where you start to see the advantage of the Xeon class hardware. Cost generally prices most out of Xeon hardware, but don’t worry a standard desktop with good memory bandwidth will function well.
• Nvme drives for both Boot and project working.
• Use spinning disk for archive or project holding space. Always backup to something else, tape still the most reliable, but utilizing something like “windows storage spaces” in a mirror mode or the built in OS RAID 1, plus an external back up would work too. For example get 2x 4TB+ drives and mirror them with one of the RAID 1 technologies, and format them REFS. Then copy your project on and off the NVME working volume as needed. Then back up your 4TB drive to another external as needed.
• Load your OS (win10) UEFI boot
• GPU – depending on your MB and version of Vegas you will be using, you want to look for a GPU with high OpenCL compute speed, and support for NVENC (vegas 15+). 8GB+ of on board GPU ram, here again selecting the GPU with broadest memory interface and highest onboard memory bandwidth. Support for these functions allows the CPU/Vegas to offload higher math to hardware that can do it faster.
• Display port to your monitors running the latest version. Display port still has the most bandwidth for throwing pixels and color depth to screen. The DisplayPort cabling version/standard needs to match the interfacing on your monitors and GPU.

Hardware changes so fast that by the time you go to buy something, specific hardware recommendations will be dated.

[Hunter Madden]

Thank ya. I’m going for a bit of an Overpowered and stupidly expensive PC. And any corrections to what is currently below would be greatly appreciated, though i’m pretty sure that everything below is stupidly powerful, more so than what i would need for Vegas. But i’m not quite sure.

What I’m Aiming For:
CPU: Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6138 20-Core
MOTHERBOARD: Supermicro X11DAI-N Dual
GRAPHICS: (X2) 24GB NVIDIA Quadro P6000 {Not sure if i should spend the extra 5Grand on a third card for the system}
RAM: 1TB SUPERMICRO DDR4 2666MHZ (16x64GB)

OS on RAID 0 with x2 4TB Samsung 860 SSD’s
Storage bay set to RAID 5 with x5 10TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro Drives

Really overpowered and i’m guessing most definitely more powerful than i’m ever going to need. But it’ll be an investment that lasts me a long time (Knock On Wood).

[Aaron Star]

Here are some of the issue I see with that config:

16XDIMMS – the CPUs only have 12 memory channels. You want to find out how that board handles memory inserted in to the system, this will determine the number of DIMMs you need.

Dual CPUs might seem like the ultimate, but for Vegas you may want to play around with limiting your instance to a single CPU with affinity. I am pretty sure the Vegas developers do not test Vegas on such high end hardware. When you get into dual CPUs, you are looking at running software that is application specific and is coded to be optimized to run on that hardware. Windows will give Vegas the threads and resources, but the application code may not be optimized to handle it correctly.

Multiple GPUs – Yeah I guess if you have that kind of money to invest, and another application that needs it. Resolve will likely utilize the multiple GPUs, not so sure the Vegas code is up to speed to utilize multiple GPUs. I guess if you are planning on running say 3 4K monitors at high color depth then multiple GPUs would pay off. If you have a 3D rendering work load that can utilize multiple GPUs, then yes as well.

Storage – If you have xeon level cash to toss at this problem, you should really do some research on the differences between SATA, SAS, and NVME. With such a high end configuration, you would want to follow my workflow idea of using separate archive and working storage. Working storage would be something like an Intel 750 SSD, and the OS on an 970Pro M.2. Then back up your system regularly to an LTO-8, or multiple offline external HDDs formatted REFS. Multiple external HDD, because those suckers come up dead or bit corrupted over time.

Raid is not dead, but in a SSD world, backup is better. NVME is faster than raid on SATA, and you want the lowest latency storage possible with all the memory bandwidth speeds across the rest of the system.

I forgot to add that up to Vegas 14, I cant speak to 15 and 16, media codecs and formats matter in Vegas. Media formats in Sony MXF formats seems to be more stable and optimized. Other formats like mov and avid codecs do not seem to work as well in Vegas. Even still image formats can make a difference when dealing large amounts of them.

Just some of my thoughts.

[Steve Rhoden]

Well in a nutshell, you are good to go…. The only thing is that Vegas is not as optimized/coded to make full
use of all that horsepower in that system, other better optimized software would. That’s just how Vegas is.
But as i said, you are good to go!

Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia

[Aaron Star]

Might want to avoid the SuperMicro Motherboard and choose another.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

[Hunter Madden]

Any recommendations? Say a board that can handle all that hardware?

[Aaron Star]

Maybe look at Intel, Asus, Gigabyte products? Not really sure, the issue apparently was discovered year and half ago, and they are only implicating Supermicro. Could be that we just do not know about the other manufacturers yet, since everything is made in China these days.

If you start seeing other large manufacturers recalling hardware/PCs in mass, that is a likely indicator.

If you hear of no other recalls or alerts, then probably it was limited to Supermicro.

[William Mann]

Hi Aaron,
In your recommendations for performance you said “Nvme drives for both Boot and project working”
I only have one Nvme slot & one SATA – which one should I put the OS & Software on? For the other to have the project media.

Thanks!