Building a Good Vegas editing System ?

[Scott Francis]

I would wait for Vegas 10 to come out and go through the forums here. I am also looking to buy a new system, but am waiting to see if Sony updated the previewing abilities in SV10. I am looking to see if it will utilize the GPU for previewing as well as rendering, and also if it does not, to see if it at least will use more than one cpu core (which is what it does now) for previewing. This will allow me to better choose my processor and video card…at least that is my suggestion…hope it helps

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Stephen Mann]

I agree – wait for v10.

But.

The more I think about how Vegas non-destructive editing works, the less likely that the GPU would ever be used for preview. Or could, for that matter.

But each iteration of Vegas Pro includes some improvements in how CPU and RAM are used, plus the improvements in Windows 7 memory management add to the overall speed.

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

[Don Cobble]

Thank U both for the input,
Am I to understand that it might be advantageous to switch to Windows 7 64bit from Vista 64bit as far as memory utilization?

PC
I7 2.8 Ghz 8GB Ram
Vista 64bit OS
Nvidia FX 580 Video Card
3-4 TB HD
Vegas Pro 9 32bit & Vegas Pro 9 64bit

Camera
Sony EX1 shoot in 1920×1080 30P

[Ron Bakker]

Would you get a solid state hard drive for the OS and other programs? I too think SV pro 10 should have a lot of impact on renders. For me after doing this h.264 video I would expect better support for this format and I think it will support CUDA for rendering(with the right video card)Looks like they have a fix for the cmos jello effect and anti camera shake.

Pentium 2.4 quad|Asus P5G41C-M LX mobo|2 gig corsairs 6400 ram|Corsairs 630 power supply|Gigabyte 8800gt|2x seagate 500gig Hd’s|Lg dvd burner|windows7 premium , SV9E

[Dave Haynie]

I don’t see why GPU rendering couldn’t be used for preview.

For example, just take something fairly time consuming like AVC decoding. On my fairly fast Q9550 system (quad core, 2.83GHz) it takes a pretty serious effort with a multithreaded video player to play back 1080/60p AVC video (admittedly, fairly high spec compares to many formats)… 60% or more of all CPU.

But plain old everyday Windows Media Player uses just 12% CPU, in conjunction with the new Microsoft AVC CODEC. This uses DVXA 2.0, not even CUDA or OpenCL. Supporting just that level of acceleration, I ought to be able to get full 60p playback with at least modest compositing on 3 AVC streams in Vegas. Can’t do that today, though Vegas 10 does seem better at AVC than Vegas 9. This seems to be what EDIUS Neo is doing, and why it’s so much faster at AVC than Vegas (I got this free with my HMC40, and while it’s a painful program to use in pretty much every other way, it’s certainly an existence proof that Vegas could be much, much better at this).

Adobe’s thing is using the GPU more for compositing and FX than decoding. I can’t imagine their non-destructive editing system is profoundly different than Sony’s, and yet, they’re getting very significant acceleration in Premiere CS5.

-Dave

[Stephen Mann]

Vista is the second-worst OS that Microsoft made. Windows 7 makes up for that mistake.

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

[Stephen Mann]

It’s been years since I had to use Premiere, but I believe that I am correct that Vegas is unique as a non-destructive editor.

This is not fact, but my observation as a programmer from a prior life. I would really appreciate if someone from SCS would confirm or squash my hypothesis.

In a destructive editor, you are making changes to the media as you edit. Therefore, you have edited media to offload to the GPU for preview. In a non-destructive editor, like Vegas, your instructions on the timeline are simply instructions of how to generate your output when you go to “render as”. During preview, Vegas has to construct each frame from the instructions in the veg file. It makes a bitmapped image of each frame for display. There’s nothing that a GPU can do for preview. In fact, using the GPU could well slow the process.

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

[Dave Haynie]

Nope.. every modern video editor does non-destructive, realtime compositing. And there’s absolutely no reason you can’t use the GPU to help out at this — that’s kind of the point of GPUs — lots of massively parallel operations.

This was true even ages ago. There was a time when Premiere couldn’t edit native files… I used it long, long ago when it had to produce some kind of proxy file for editing. And even then, the edit-time preview was done in realtime, just like Vegas, just like pretty much any other video editor. Like Vegas, I believe you can also pre-render video in Premiere Pro, but it’ll happily try to play with realtime rendering, just as Vegas does.

The really unique thing about Vegas had long been the ability to not just edit native file formats, but to freely mix and match different ones on the same timeline. I think some editors still have issues with that, or with changing the output target in the middle of the project, that sort of thing.

And of course GPU could help here. You’re right that ultimately, you are compositing per-frame bitmaps… that’s summing numerous bitmaps, based on transparency, masking, etc. This is pure math… you COULD do this on a GPU — we are talking about CUDA here, it’s a math engine, nothing all that specific to graphics anymore. But maybe compositing isn’t an ideal use for this.

CUDA, OpenCL, Streams, etc… are all instanced of “GPGPU” APIs… general purpose computing using GPUs. Graphics itself made sense for this, particularly 3D, since it’s easily parallelized. Older GPUs were only applicable to graphics, working as a series of hard-wired blocks in a graphics pipeline. But modern GPUs replace those hard-wired blocks with hundreds of programmable elements. So while they work well at graphics, they can be used for many other kinds of parallel mathematics. nVidia even has a series of “GPUs”, the Tesla series, which don’t actually even have graphics output anymore: they’re only used for general purpose parallel computing. Some articles:
https://gizmodo.com/5252545/giz-explains-gpgpu-computing-and-why-itll-melt-your-face-off
https://gpgpu-computing.blogspot.com/

How about all of the work that gets you to the point where those bitmaps exist. You have video files on disc, probably not stored in RAW format. GPU decoding of AVC or even MPEG-2 can be considerably faster than CPU-only decoding.

Then there’s plug-ins, effects, color corrections, etc. that’s what Adobe CS5 seems to be using the GPU for as well. You’re applying some kind of math intensive transform to the bitmap that results from the decode of the on-disc video. GPU computing can help here, too. The point of the GPU isn’t graphics operations, it’s general purpose match operations, taking place on hundred’s of computing elements in parallel. Each one isn’t as powerful as your CPU, but together, they can do 50x-100x the work of a single CPU core, depending on the nature of the work.

Here’s a decent article on how this works: https://tech.icrontic.com/articles/reviews/a-case-for-gpu-computing-adobe-premiere-pro-cs5-and-the-mercury-playback-engine/

-Dave