fresh vegas 11 install – not complaining but what’s my computer actually doing?

[Nigel O’neill]

Vegas will not max out your CPU to 100% unless it is CPU bound. In your case, it is not, which is a good thing. You may not know it, but you can start up a second copy of Vegas whilst the first is rendering, given your system has sufficient capacity :-).

A maxed out CPU is a sign of an underpowered system, so you should be glad at what you are seeing. Your system looks quite happy with respect to CPU, memory and disk usage.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Terence Kearns]

I’m having other issues which is impacting on my ability to edit video.

With some projects, Vegas takes a long pause before responding to the mouse. This happens when I switch away from the application and come back. It also happens when I first load the project. I didn’t mind having to wait around 10 seconds sometimes for the GUI to come back, but now I’ve been waiting for about 15 mins and still nothing.

I sometimes use veg files on the timeline – which seems to exacerbate the problem. But it’s hard to pin down.

I’m running an i5 processor with 8GB of ram and a GTX580. As you can see, there is no utilisation. However taskmanager says vegas is using 198MB of memory (top of the list for mem usage) and dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) is using 132MB (second in the list).

[Mark Allen]

“With some projects, Vegas takes a long pause before responding to the mouse. This happens when I switch away from the application and come back. It also happens when I first load the project. I didn’t mind having to wait around 10 seconds sometimes for the GUI to come back, but now I’ve been waiting for about 15 mins and still nothing.”

I’m never seen 15 minutes but I used to have to wait a couple minutes on one computer after switching back to Vegas from another program. There’s something you can try to improve that for program switches. Go to the Options menu, click Preferences, and then go to the General tab. Then uncheck “close media files when not the active application.” After that it behaves like you haven’t switched away from Vegas.

[Mark Allen]

“My question is: what is the bottleneck? If neither disk nor CPU nor memory is maxed out, what am I waiting for?”

You need to include the GPU on your list of resources because it can also be your bottleneck. Especially with Vegas 11. There are lots of GPU monitor utilities you can use to see how busy it is. GPU-Z is one. There are plenty of others which will display GPU loads.

[Terence Kearns]

Thanks Mark. Very helpful tip indeed. A massive timesaver.

Seems to be working okay now. Previously, the Vegas GUI would bo whiter and I would get the “waiting” cursor.

Those big projects with the VEG files on the timeline seem to be loading in a timely fashion now.

Cheers.

[Nigel O’neill]

[Terence Kearns] “With some projects, Vegas takes a long pause before responding to the mouse. This happens when I switch away from the application and come back.”

In your preferences, go to the General tab and UNTICK Close Media files when not the active application. When this check box is selected, files can be edited in external editors (audio, image, etc.) while they are contained in events on the Vegas Pro timeline.

That should speed up the swapping between Vegas and other applications

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[John Rofrano]

[Mark Allen] “You need to include the GPU on your list of resources because it can also be your bottleneck. “

Yea, my guess is the same as Mark’s. The GPU may be the bottleneck when rendering to Sony AVC. I actually modified the default templates to turn the GPU off because Vegas Pro 10.0 renders faster on my CPU’s alone.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

Right. If you have a properly tuned system, some computational resource will be the bottleneck. It should be.. that’s the sign that easy stuff (eg, your memory, your hard disc, etc) is performing properly.

Used to be the case that, if your CPU wasn’t maxxed out, there was something wrong with your system… something else was the bottleneck, but it’s ALWAYS computation that should be the weakest link (unless maybe you’re doing crazy stuff, like reading or rendering uncompressed HD). But now we have the GPU to consider as well.

I benchmarked Sony’s Vegas 11 GPU benchmark project on my system awhile back. Without GPU, I was at 96% CPU, which isn’t bad for a six core system. The same render took only 58% CPU with the GPU enabled, and 30% GPU.. but it finished better than twice as fast. So, no problem.

-Dave

[Andy Abulafia]

thanks so much for insights everyone!

And I just checked – my GPU acceleration setting was OFF (by default, I assume) – – does that sound right?

Also (stupid question) what *is* realtime rendering?

Vegas 8.1, XP64(yes you read that right!), HP Pavilion i7 12GB RAM, separate disks for projects and OS

[John Rofrano]

[andy abulafia] “Also (stupid question) what *is* realtime rendering?”

It’s for rendering audio in real-time rather than faster than real-time. This is useful if you are using external audio FX.

~jr

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