How do I get Vegas to use all of my processor power?

[Stephen Mann]

No. hat would be like expecting a line of cars to move faster because someone in the back is tailgating the car in front of him. The program will use resources as it needs them. And no faster.

CPU usage is a poor metric for measuring program efficiency.
All that a low CPU usage means is that the processor is not the bottleneck in your workflow. A 100% usage means that your processor is too slow for the task at hand.

What else are you running. (Don’t say nothing because even when there are no tasks running, there’s dozens or more processes running in the background). Anti-virus programs are a huge resource hog – especially Norton. A browser consumes a lot of RAM and processor time. Any Microsoft Office program stays in Ram even after closing the program.

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

[Mike Brennan]

Hello Steven and thanks for the reply.

This machine is dedicated to audio and video only, so no browser
runs in the background. Internet access is for driver updates only, so I don’t have any heavy virus/spyware software running, just windows security essentials.

My audio interface is the RME UFX. RME is known for the efficiency of their drivers. It is not cpu intensive at all, so no problem there.

I’ve always read on this forum that Vegas is CPU intensive, and the more CPU power/speed, the better. So I’m a bit confused by the “tailgate” analogy. I look at the CPU and Ram as a locomotive pulling a heavy load. That’s how I thought that Vegas worked.

I’m new to multicore/turbo boost technology, so I’m wondering if I should dedicate more (or less) cores to vegas. Does it matter?

I remember reading somewhere that dedicating more than 4 gigs of ram will actually slow things down for some reason, so I stopped at 4 and left 4 gigs for everything else.

Any insights are appreciated.
Thanks again,
Mike

[Stephen Mann]

The push analogy was that you can’t push more processor resources to Vegas. The program will use whatever it needs. Dual core processors typically have CPU usage running 90-100% when rendering or encoding because there isn’t enough processor available for Vegas.

The default affinity is for all processes and programs to use all cores. This is the most efficient. I’m not sure about the 4Gb story, but I haven’t ever seen any supporting documentation. I don’t know where you would dedicate RAM to Vegas – the program uses all the RAM it needs. Are you confusing it with the Ram Preview setting? This is RAM that is only reserved for preview buffering (CTRL-B). It’s also used if you loop on a region, (Ctrl-Q).

Keep in mind that the Windows CPU usage is only a snapshot taken every second, so you really only see an average.

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

[Mike Brennan]

What you said made sense, so I did a few test renders to disk with various core affinity settings and monitored with resource monitor. Yep, it’s exactly as you say.

If I run all cores, they load at 50% and I render my test in 1 min:45 sec. If I drop down to 4 cores,Those 4 run at about 87%, and I render in 1 min:46 sec, so I get about the same level of performance.

If I drop to 2 cores, they load at 100% and it takes 2 min:56 sec to render. If the computer didn’t have those extra cores doing everything else it needed to do outside of Vegas, it would really choke!

So the machine seems to tax the CPU as needed. I would imagine that those extra cores would come in handy for plug ins and such, especially when you do multi track audio along with your video.

I sure would love it if I could have pushed those cores closer to the max to speed up the render time, but I guess that’s not how Win 64/Vegas allocate the workload.

Thanks again,
Mike

[Nigel O’neill]

Mike

The extra cores come in very handy when performing multiple renders simultaneously. I had 2 x 2 hour two pass VBR projects to render. Both had track and event FX and one even had NeatVideo denoiser FX. I was quite expecting it to take all night. Took no longer to render two projects than it did for one. It was the first time I really heard my i7 processor getting worked hard with the fan running flat out!

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

[Nigel O’neill]

I forgot to mention my preview is laggy. Damn tail gaters!

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

[Ken Mitchell]

Are you working with a different variety of files and sizes in you timeline?.avi,mov,mpeg,uncompressed etc? If you were to transcode all of the different formats to a single format such as uncompressed or.mxf. you may be able to recover some of your performance. It may simplify things. This is why Apple wants to encode everything to ProRes when you input into finalcut.

[Mike Brennan]

Hello Nigel.

Thanks for the post. I’m really glad to hear that.
So you rendered two projects at once ? how did you do that?
Details please!

I also need to render out various output format versions of the same project. I never thought to start rendering one, change settings and file name,render that one, repeat as needed… I can’t wait to try that.

Maybe we should all have a tailgate party 🙂
Regards,
Mike

[Mike Brennan]

Hello Ken.

I don’t think that I did that, but it’s a good point and I’ll check.
Thanks for the tip.

Regards,
Mike

[Nigel O’neill]

You can start Vegas more than once on the same PC, and in effect have 2 or 3 instances running, allowing you to swap between them.

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