Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future)

[Steve Rhoden]

Really, sony vegas isn’t hardware dependent….just get an overall
powerful computer, that has good processing power, enough memory (3-4gb), etc.
What needs to be taken notice of however, is the requirements of certain other software and plugins that you might be using. Some Compositing applications, high end plugins and visual effects
software, requires specific hardware and software requirements for
efficient workflow….(openGL, GPU video card,etc)..Those are the ones you have to build your system around.

Steve Rhoden
Creative Director
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.

[John Rofrano]

As Steve said, Vegas uses raw CPU power and nothing else so get the most powerful PC you can afford. Quad Cores will help with rendering times. Here are the specs from my editing PC that I built a year ago. It’s very stable and has plenty of power for Vegas.

For the future you might even consider an 8 Core PC because Vegas will being coming out with a 64-bit version that can use 8 cores. That will be my next machine.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Steve Rhoden]

Wonderful specs John….Boy, cant wait to give the 64 bit version a run.
(just add off-line editing feature, and Vegas will be industrial leader surpassing Final cut and Avid even for films)…lol

Steve Rhoden
Creative Director
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.

[Ralph Hajik]

John Rofrano,

When you build your next computer, please let us know what your specs are for the 8 cores mean machine.

Ralph Hajik

[John Rofrano]

I always keep that page updated with my latest specs.

I have held off on building an 8-core because the current solutions are extremely expensive and a slight “dead-end”. In other words, the desktop motherboards that support dual 4-core processors today “i.e., the Skulltrail platform” are the last of their generation and the new Nehalem CPU’s (8-cores on a single chip) will require a new motherboard. But that’s always the case with technology so right now I’m waiting but I may bite of the prices drop a bit.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Kert]

Definetly get a 4 core machine. It will handle AVCHD, whereas even fast dual cores will not (in my experience).
JK

[Kyle Johnson]

So with these higher end processors is preview frame rate evern an issue? It doesn’t take much for my frame rate to drop significantly on my current putput system (Pentium 4, 512MB RAM), but, at least according to Task Manager the processor isn’t being taxed all that much.

[Danny Hays]

Hello, We use a quad core at work and compaired to our old P4 3.6 gz dual, it’s render time are way faster but the preview frame rate is still slow with alot of track and or effects. I really dont see much of a difference there. I drag my preview on to my 32 HDTV and when filling most of the screen it’s slower than when I shrink it down. But compaired to non hardware based Avid or Finalcut systems, where you have to render alot of things before you can preview it at all, Vegas is the best by far for functionality and ease of use in my opinion. Danny Hays

[John Rofrano]

As Danny said, preview is unaffected by multiple cores in Vegas because it is a single threaded process so it will never be faster than one of your cores. This is not an issue for DV but with HDV you can easily peg the processor and get much lower frame rates. At that point you have to reduce your preview quality if you want to keep the frame rates up or use RAM Preview to quickly check small sections.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Kyle Johnson]

Thanks everyone for your input.

Since prerendering is essentially the same thing, it would benefit from multithreading on multi core processors right?

It seems to me the ideal (for my system anyway) would be to have one core running the the standard thread, and the other/rest continue to render, (I think they called in background rendering in an old Pinnacle program i used). Is something like this possible with Vegas that I’ve just been missing?