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Really slow rendering times in Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10
I would be extremely grateful if someone could help me out with this. To sum things up, the rendering times in Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 are obnoxious. This is even in comparison to Windows Movie Maker.
I would really like to use Vegas again, I haven’t used it for years and after seeing it for a pretty good price on Amazon last week I purchased a copy. Unfortunately it didn’t take too long for me to realize that the render times were horrid, literally from my first project with a one minute clip I knew something was wrong.
To put the encoding time into perspective, Vegas took 1 hour and 25 minutes to encode a 31 minute 1920×1080 video clip that was imported RAW from FRAPS AVI files. The times were pretty consistent regardless of my format choice (WMV, MP4, Raw AVI, etc.). In Windows Movie Maker Live however it can encode the same video in 30 minutes at the same resolution.
I have tried modifying the number of threads allowed, I’ve bumped and reduced the memory cache, I’ve changed task manager priority settings, and I’ve even poked around in registry. No matter what I do the encoding times stay the same, and this is even when it’s set to one thread instead of four.
Here are my system specs if it helps any. As it stands right now, I’m about ready to push on Amazon hard to return this software because there is no way I’m going to spend nearly 2.5 the amount of time just on encoding.
Core i7 920 2.66ghz (not overclocked) 4 core CPU (shows 8 w/Hyperthreading)
6GB DDR3 1600mhz RAM
Two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs in SLI (CUDA support enabled)At the time of encoding my CPU had over 95% cycles free, and after beginning the encode I still maintained between 30-40%. Memory during encoding remained at about 50% free.
Please help me figure out if there’s a fix for this. The software seems like it would totally suite my needs, but again there’s just no way I can justify the crazy encode times.
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7 Replies
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What are your project settings?
How many frames per second did you use to record the FRAPS files?
What are your render settings?
Did you try rendering to Sony AVC? This format is GPU accelerated and should fly on your GPU.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I’ve tried HDV 1280×720-30p, AVCHD 1920×1080-60i, Internet HD 1280×720, 29.97 fps prog, and match media settings. The Fraps files were recorded at 29.97FPS.
Render settings I’ve tweaked everywhere from best to good, CPU only to GPU allowed, even encoding up and down. No matter what I do though I can’t get a difference in rendering time. GPU on / off it doesn’t matter, it’s all really the same.
I don’t remember my very old SD resolution copy of Vegas doing this, but then again this is before the days of HD. I just can’t get over the fact that Windows Movie Maker beats it silly whether I’m encoding 1920×1080 or 1280×720.
I have tried rendering in AVC, no difference at all and I even verified in custom that it was exporting as a true .AVC file instead of .MP4.
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That’s strange that you are not getting faster renders with GPU acceleration turned on. Do you have any Codec-Paks installed (like K-Lite)? These will sometimes mess up Vegas’ ability to render properly.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I have had the Win7codecs pack 1.3.0 by Shark007 installed since Fall of 2009, and have had no issues whatsoever. Without codecs I lose the ability to easily view any / all media types, plus tinkering with them after they’re installed can cause OS issues.
Can you show me any evidence at all that codecs have been known to mess with Vegas rendering times? Google searching hasn’t brought up anything. I’d really like to see some sort of evidence before tinkering with codecs.
Also, shortly after making my last post I spoke with a friend who it turns out owns version 9, and he said he also has very long render times but accepted it as a tradeoff for the more powerful editing abilities over WMM. I don’t have that kind of time though, especially considering this is my PC that I use for work, games, etc. I’m not going to give away 1 1/2 hours for small projects, and even more time for larger ones.
I thought about installing Vegas Movie Studio 10 on my laptop to test on there, but it has less cores, less memory, and has the very same codec pack installed. I feel like my patience is wearing thing on this issue now, I just tried to encode a small archive project and cancelled it out of irritation.
It just makes no sense to me how Microsoft can have this garbage free app which runs circles around a commercial one when it comes to encoding.
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To make sure that I cover all options possible to resolve this I’m removing the codecs. I’ll report back later.
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[Ryan Larkin] “Can you show me any evidence at all that codecs have been known to mess with Vegas rendering times? Google searching hasn’t brought up anything. I’d really like to see some sort of evidence before tinkering with codecs.”
If you overlay the quality codecs that you paid good money for in Vegas with free lesser quality codecs from a codec-pak, then you will be rendering with codecs that may not produce the same quality as Vegas codecs would have AND you are using codecs that have not been tested with or tuned for Vegas’ use. It may not be your issue, but it’s certainly something that could be happening.
In reading your initial post again, I see that you are only seeing 3x rendering times. This is quite normal for HD renders. Vegas is performing a much higher quality render than Windows Movie Maker is going to giving you. Any program can render lesser quality video faster. Resolution means nothing… it’s how good details in the image are reproduced that is important.
If your footage is 1920×1080-60i make sure that your project is set to 1920×1080-60i. Otherwise Vegas will resize your video to match the project and then resize it again to render doing double the work. When rendering, use the Good quality setting. If you set it to Best it will definitely make your render take a LOT longer with no noticeable difference in quality because best should only be used when using still images that are being resized (which is not what you’re doing).
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Did you test your rendering time without the codecs? I’m curious to see the results. I have the same codec pack installed (I need it installed or a number of my videos wont work), and rendering times are 3x longer than the actual length of my video (GPU encoding actually takes longer with my [slow] 9600M GT).
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