Rendering Speed Used To Be Decent But Now Is Abnormally Slow- Sony Vegas

[Nigel O’neill]

I don’t think your laptop is the culprit in this case, even though it is pretty underspec’d in CPU, RAM and probably disk performance for any serious video editing. Something like this on my system renders pretty much in 3 minutes or less. Not bragging, just stating the facts.

Without knowing exactly what your Project Properties are and ‘Render As’ template you are using, I can only offer general advice. In your render template, if there is an option for GPU/video acceleration under Video, Advanced Video or System, disable it. It’s a long shot, but without knowing your laptop model, I can’t tell if your laptop has a CUDA or OpenCL video architecture. Vegas tries to take advantage of GPU acceleration, but as it was implemented badly, the side effects on some systems are crashing during editing and poor render performance. It’s a known issue.

If video acceleration is not available to you, I would look to your system. If you have everything on C: drive, I would consider installing another HDD or try hooking up a USB 3 drive (assuming your laptop is USB 3 capable), transfer your project to it, and render to it.

Lastly, if your anti-virus software has been recently updated, it could be the performance hog.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, GTX570, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Michael Fernandes]

I’m aware my comp is a bit outdated, that’s why I was putting up with the fairly slow 45 minute render time before. But the sudden drop to 3-4 hours is strange. GPU acceleration would always crash my render so I stopped using it a while ago. My Render As template is under the Sony AVC/ MVC section I choose Internet 1920x 1080-30p and use default settings. My project settings are the default HD 1080p – 60i . Laptop model is Hp Pavillion M6

I checked and I do have USB 3.0. Like you said, I do have all my stuff on the C drive, however, I own a 500GB portable hard drive that I could use. Does this method work better simply based on the fact that it’s a separate drive, or will it only help if there’s more space on the other drive? And should the source files used in the project be on the portable hard drive as well or just the project and rendered file?

Let me know if there are any other details I left out, thanks!

[László Kovács]

I would blame windows update.
If you have the time, try uninstalling recent updates in small groups, until the problem disappears.
I bet you’ll find the culprit somewhere in 2016 updates.
(I mysels also had problems with some of the updates)
If I’m wrong, you can still reinstall the updates.
Regards

[Nigel O’neill]

Having your edits on the same drive as Windows is going to always result in a performance hit as Windows uses the same drive for its swap file. Try hooking up a second drive (preferably internal) and run your project off that. 6GB of RAM is pretty low and will result in swapping as video files are pretty big.

Your recent performance hit could be due to a Windows update, but working out which one is going to be next to impossible and uninstalling/reinstalling is a trial and error exercise. I would be looking at antivirus updates, first up, or try disabling antivirus protection during renders (remembering to re-enable when done). I see the laptop comes with Norton AV which can be a bit of a resource hog. I use Microsoft Security essentials and Windows defender now after using Norton, Comodo and Avast which all slowed my system down.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, GTX570, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[László Kovács]

[Nigel O'Neill] “Your recent performance hit could be due to a Windows update, but working out which one is going to be next to impossible and uninstalling/reinstalling is a trial and error exercise.”

It’s not that hard, if you find a good way to do it.
Here’s how I did:
In elevated command prompt type “wmic qfe list brief /format:csv >>d:\temp\updatelist.txt”
That puts a comma delimited txt into d:\temp\updatelist.txt with the list of installed updates.
Of course you can have this list in any txt file you like.
Then you can import this csv file into a spreadsheet (Excel or anything similar/compatible, I have Softmaker Planmaker, but Libreoffice should work as well).
In the spreadsheet you can sort the list by the date the update is installed (so that the newest comes first), and add to another column, one before the “KBxxx”, and one after it, with a special text, which is not contained by the list elsewhere. You can use “command” before, and “parameter” after. Then delete unnecessary columns, only “command” “KBxxx” and “parameter” is neededd.
Could look like this:

Then export it to antother csv, and then open this csv with a txt editor.
I like notepad++, but simple notepad will do as well.
Search and replace for “command,KB” (note, that the delimiter and KB is in the search criteria).
Replace with “wusa.exe /norestart /uninstall /kb:”.
Do another search/replace for “,parameter,,,” –> ” /quiet”.

If everything went well, now you have a txt similar to this:
wusa.exe /norestart /uninstall /kb:3138910 /quiet
wusa.exe /norestart /uninstall /kb:3135988 /quiet
wusa.exe /norestart /uninstall /kb:3139914 /quiet
wusa.exe /norestart /uninstall /kb:3135983 /quiet
wusa.exe /norestart /uninstall /kb:3134214 /quiet
wusa.exe /norestart /uninstall /kb:3127220 /quiet
wusa.exe /norestart /uninstall /kb:3126593 /quiet

(This is just an example, you’ll have much more lines.)

Save this file to any cmd, say “removeallupdates.cmd”
Now, if you start enelevated command prompt, and execute “removeallupdates.cmd”, all the installed updates will be uninstalled.
This is not what you want 🙂
Instead, break it up into smaller chunks. Cut-paste into other cmds, which you can number. 01.cmd could remove the first 10 updates (the newest), 02.cmd other 10 updates and so on.
After running a script restart windows, and see if your problem is solved.
And temporarily disable autoupdate, so you won’t get back those updates unintetionally 😉

With this method you can quickly find the group (10 updates) which contains the culprit.
Then reinstall those updates one-by one, and when your problem appears again, you know which update to remove again and hide fo forever.
Then you can reinstall the rest of the updates (reeanble autoupdate).

It’s not that hard so, at least way much easyer then uninstalling updates via control panel/remove one by one.

Kind regards

[Michael Fernandes]

Thanks for the help so far guys! Unfortunately, I checked and I had not installed any windows updates recently, nor do I have an antivirus installed other than windows defender. I tried disabling defender just while I render my project and that didn’t seem to help either. I’m completely stumped as to why my renders are performing at 25% speed of what they used to as recently as a week ago. The strange thing is that CPU, memory, and Disk according to task manager never go above 60% during the render, and are much lower than 60 for most of the rendering time. It feels like something else is holding the speed back, but I have no clue what it is. Nothing else appears in task manager as a performance hog. It shouldn’t take 3 seconds to render 1 frame, this is brutal.

[László Kovács]

What about cooling? Is your computers cooling OK?
Every few years the cooling mechanism has to be cleaned.
Maybe change that stuff between the cooler and the cpu.
Did you ever do such a maintenance?
Kind regards