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

[Mike Brennan]

Hello Nigel.

Prior to reading your post, I tried to render 2 files off of the same project at the same time.Vegas won’t let you do that.

So I figured that maybe you ran two “instances” of vegas by opening it up twice. Thanks for confirming that!
I tried it and it worked like a charm. I rendered two files in not much more time than it took to render just one. Man, did THAT get all of those cores cooking!

And that’s what I love about the support on this forum.
Here I was yesterday wondering why I spent $$$ for all of that power, and today I realize that it will never be enough 😉

Cheers,
Mike

[Nigel O’neill]

Mike

Glad to be of assistance. Vegas is a great product. The preview lag issue started in version 9 when Vegas stopped bundling Cineform. You can still get Cineform from Neoscene, and if lag is a real issue, consider getting it. I get by on my lowly i7-970 processor (only just :-)), but most of the time I can edit in Preview Full. I only revert to Preview Draft if I apply massive amounts of FX and color correction.

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

[Useph George]

I have this same issue with my new fancy laptop/i7. It just does not thread well when rendering. One rendering on this laptop takes 7 hours longer that that of an AMD desktop running at 2.5Ghz ( the equivalent speed of the laptop). The amd quadcore desktop runs at nearly 100%, and finishes rendering in 9 hours. The laptop takes more than 16hours.

I can edit on my laptop, but I can no longer render on the laptop as it take too long.

Sony vegas offers no explanation. Nor do they seem to be investigating this issue.

[Nigel O’neill]

Useph

There are more things at play that sheer processing power. The choice of motherboard by the manufacturer, memory speed, disk RPM, bus speeds etc, your laptop configuration and other installed software will impact performance.

The most obvious performance hits on a laptop are:
– slower hard drives. Typically laptops are shipped with 5400 rpm drives. Not much you can do, apart from replacing your hard drive with a solid state drive
– inadequate RAM. Most laptops ship with a bare minimum required to run the operating system. The first thing I do is max out the memory to what the motherboard AND installed operating system can support.
– slow RAM. Many laptops ship with DDR2 RAM which is slow compared to RAM in desktops. DDR2 only runs at 800 Mhz, whilst most PC’s have RAM that runs at 1333, 1600 or higher.
– antivirus software. Disable it during renders. Don’t forget to re-enable it when you are done
– power plan on your laptop , accessible via Control Panel\System and Security\Power Options. A laptop running off a battery power source will use CPU more conservatively than when running on mains power.

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

[Useph George]

Well, laptop is an ASUS g73sw notebook:
cpu: I7 2630QM(2.00GHz) quadcore, turboboost to 2.8ghz
mem: 8GB DDR3 1333 ( CAS/RAS specs ?? )
disk: 500GB 7200rpm with Hybrid SSD x2
Sys: Win 7 64bit

Specs can be found at
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220957
under the heading details

All in all, nothing you have stated explains the erratic “Monitor Resource” cpu usage graph. At times cpu usage goes down to 0%. Cpu usage averages just 20%. It as if the CPU hits a “STOP” processing sign every so often.

Rendering with vegas pro 10e is a cpu intensive process, and not disk intensive. I suspect that with a 32Ghz ( thats thirty two ) quadcore processor, issues with disk throughput would begin to appear. My amd quadcore runs at ~100% throughout the rendering. The laptop intel i7 does not even get near that.

I dont blame Sony Vegas, other than their inability, or refusal to tackle this issue. ASUS seems to blame intel. I blame the bios that asus has placed in the computer.
I dont know why some I7’s have this issue. And some do not.

[Mike Brennan]

Taking a quick look at your picture, all of your cores seem to be bouncing from 60 to 90%.
My cores stay relatively steady at 50%. I’m just guessing, but it seems that your laptop is incurring some type of bottleneck.

Do you have multiple drives in the laptop? If not, that can cause problems. So can the drive speed.
My desktop has individual drives for the OS,Audio,Rendering, and Source as to help avoid bottlenecks.

Remember that if you are using 4 cores at 100% and four cores are at rest you’ll see a 50% overall CPU average. When I render two files at one time, I use 100% of all cores, and in resource monitor most of those cores are a solid green squares with little to no dips. I can indeed render two files at close to the speed of a single file.

I would try looking for bottlenecks in background tasks, disk read/write, system setup, etc. and see if some tweaks can speed things up.

Please keep us posted on your progress.
Good luck,
Mike

[Useph George]

They bounce from 1% to nearly 90%, with may of them slowly dropping to 1%

On My amd, rendering is ~100% usage.

[Useph George]

Finally figured out how to get 100% cpu usage. I moved the video & veg files to an external USB 2.0 disk drive. Once I did that rendering just hummed along.

So I removed the second seagate hybrid disk ( ST95005620AS Firmware Ver SD28 ) and replaced it with a hitachi 750gb notebook travelstar( not a hybrid disk( ssd&platter)). Now I am a happy renderer in search of something else to complain about( 😉 )

So far the folks from ASUS, the maker of my G73SW notebook has not replied. Probably in warranty hell since I replaced the hybrid drive with something that works with Sony Vegas 10.
I let the sony vegas tech help folks also know of my discovery. no word from them either.

[Mike Brennan]

Glad to see that you solved your problem. Always good to look for and eliminate those bottlenecks!
I recently rendered a complex project on my new system, and it used 100% of all of my cores.

So after spending time with my new computer and Vegas 10, it safe to say that Vegas
will use what it needs when it needs it. I’m using Nigel’s “dual instance” tip to render multiple
output formats when I’ve got the available headroom, but on this latest project that poor
2600K hit the wall !

Too much is never enough..
Cheers,
Mike

[Joe Simiana]

You can patch your Lib Files on any Sony Vegas to run at a higher processing rate, as the default on all Vegas programs is set to maximum of 4Gig CPU rendering (for the common home users) If anyone has 16 or 32 ram with say an i5 or i7 operating on a 64bit Operating System it will still run at a rate of 4gig regardless unless the lib files are changed to run beyond that based on your PC having Higher CPU and Ram available .

So my friends just reading your Blog here and the only way to get maximum render rate is to patch all the lib files in the program to run higher than 4Gig.

opening the program twice and fancy ways of saying to someone no you cannot do that..is rubbish…you can !!!! im running Win 7 Pro 64 bit and another PC is running Vista x86 with Sony Vegas Pro…both PC’s have i5 processors with a bank of 32gig ram i set the lib files to run higher than default 4gig and whulla…no more rendering 10 minute segments…i can render 42 mins of HD 4k res in 30 seconds instead of 14 hours.

it can be done…just some people here in this blog seem to appoint themselves as the know all and therefore it’s Gods Word !!! .HAH !! Laimers !!!