New high end Vegas system – recommendations please

[John Rofrano]

I’d say minimum a Quad-core system but an 8-core would be better. Vegas doesn’t use a GPU so any graphics card will do as far as Vegas is concerned however you might want to get a good OpenGL graphics card for use with Boris RED or After Effects.

You’ll need a RAID with at least 4 discs to handle uncompressed HD (e.g., 4x500GB) and, of course, a camera that can deliver uncompressed and a capture card that can ingest it. Something like the Decklink Blackmagic card can capture uncompressed HDMI if your camera can deliver it.

The HP xw8600 Workstation line is something to look into unless you want to build your own. My Quad-core specs are on my web site. This system is a year old so you can get it for a lot less or build one that’s more powerful for the same price. I don’t do uncompressed but this system edits HD just fine.

~jr

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

[Alan Lacey]

thanks John that’s interesting.

Does this mean that Vegas won’t run in a 64 bit OS, or just cannot take advantage of it?

Also I see from an above post that although Vegas currently does not use the GPU, some plugins (well one at least)does.

Kindest regards

Alan

[John Rofrano]

It should run on 64-bit right now as a 32-bit application. Sony is working on the 64-bit version of Vegas as we speak and they announced at NAB 2008 that it will be a free upgrade for existing Vegas Pro 8 customers so while Vegas does not take advantage of 64-bit today, it will very soon.

Yes, some plug-ins do take advantage of the GPU. Magic Bullet is another one that will as will Boris FX, Boris Graffiti, and Boris RED, so it does pay to get a good graphics card if you feel you will be using plug-ins like this. It’s just that Vegas itself does not so I didn’t want you to think that you could make Vegas render faster by getting a better graphics card. Vegas rendering is CPU bound.

~jr

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

[Alan Lacey]

So it’ll use all eight cores? Do you happen to know how efficiently?

Thanks for you help John.

Alan

[John Rofrano]

Right now it will only use 4 cores when rendering because having 4 rendering threads is the current limit, but the 64-bit version will use all 8. How efficiently is dependent on how well the work can be parallelized. There are some plug-ins that are not multi-threaded and these will force Vegas to only use one core when rendering that plug-in.

~jr

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

[Bryce Willing]

Yes, I know I’m digging up an oldish post, but my question is relevant to this same topic, so…

My question is this. Does the memory requirement for Vegas scale with the size of the project? In other words, would 4gb be sufficient for smaller projects, or would it still be advantageous to have as much memory as possible for the application?

I’m trying to help some folks make a hardware decision for Vegas, and what they produce are ‘mini-movies’, probably no more than 10 minutes long, ever. Hardware costs are an issue for them like they are for everybody, in fact it’s 4x for them, because they need 4 editing stations, so we’re trying to prioritize spending to make the boxes as efficient as possible.

thanks in advance,
Bryce

[John Rofrano]

> …what they produce are ‘mini-movies’, probably no more than 10 minutes long, ever.

It’s really not the fact that they are 10 minutes. It’s what are they packing into those 10 minutes. Will they have lots of composited tracks? Are they using HDV/AVCHD? Are they using lots of 8 mega-pixel still images? What uses memory is the type of media and the number of composited tracks more than the length of the project. If they are just using DV footage, then 2MB of memory is more than enough even for an hour project. It really depends on the complexity of compositing and the media being used.

~jr

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