Rendering time problem

[John Rofrano]

[Seranya Myor] “What determines the time it takes Vegas pro 9 to render a project?”

The amount of FX applied has a lot to do with rendering time as does the number of tracks that are visible at one time. Working in HD requires a lot more memory because HD has 5 times the resolution of SD. Finally, the types of files that you are editing will affect rendering because Vegas has to decode all of those different file types, process them, and then encode them to the final format. All of this is happening 30 times for every second of video (at 30fps).

If Vegas is running low on memory you may need more memory. How much memory does your PC have? What operating system are you using? If you are using a 32-bit OS or the 32-bit version of Vegas Pro 9, then you will only have 2GB of memory to work with regardless of how much more memory your PC actually has.

~jr

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

[Seranya Myor]

I’m using Windows 7, 32-bit, and 1 GB memory. Does this mean I can’t improve this even if I buy more memory?

[John Rofrano]

[Seranya Myor] “I’m using Windows 7, 32-bit, and 1 GB memory. Does this mean I can’t improve this even if I buy more memory?”

No, it means the opposite. 1Gb of memory is not a lot to be running Windows 7 32-bit. Sony recommends 2GB of memory and if you’re serious about video editing, you should probably have at least 3-4GB. I think just adding another 1Gb will give you a lot more room for rendering.

~jr

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

[Seranya Myor]

Ok, thank you! But you were saying that if I run a 32-bit OS, then even if I add more than 2 GB memory it won’t have any effect on vegas. Is that so or did I get it wrong?

[Jeremy Rasnic]

That’s what he’s saying. If you have a 64 bit OS you can add a whole lot more RAM. However, if you have a 64 bit OS and are running Vegas 32 bit you are still limited. If you are running the 64 bit version of Vegas you can use substantially more RAM.

j razz

https://www.jrazzcreations.com

[John Rofrano]

[Seranya Myor] “But you were saying that if I run a 32-bit OS, then even if I add more than 2 GB memory it won’t have any effect on vegas. Is that so or did I get it wrong?”

You got it right but don’t forget that the OS needs memory too. So if you have 1GB of memory you are very limited. If you have 2GB of memory, you have more room but 32-bit Vegas still won’t get 2GB because the OS needs some. If you move up to 3GB of memory then you have 1GB for the OS and 2GB for Vegas. That’s where the benefit of adding more memory stops. At that point you need to move up to a 64-bit OS and 64-bit Vegas to get any more benefit from adding more memory as Jeremy said.

~jr

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

[Seranya Myor]

I got it now. Thanks a lot!

[Dave Haynie]

There are a bunch of factors.

The others pretty much addressed the memory issue.. that’s the big one. When you don’t have enough memory, Windows, being a virtual memory OS, will allocate more virtual memory… memory the system doesn’t really have. What this means is that stuff that should be in memory gets “swapped” to and from hard disc. Even on really fast HDD systems, your PC’s memory is thousands of times faster than the HDD. So this can be a huge slowdown.. and memory is cheap.

After that, it’s complexity of any kind. Each layer adds rendering time, each effect adds rendering time, etc. And memory requirements. I did a music video with over 40 layers of video… eventually split up into two .veg projects, and on the PC of the day (a year and a half ago), it took over four hours to render… for a 2-minute video, on a Quad-Core CPU with 8GB of memory.

But that is one thing you can do today… if your project is at all complex, figure out how to render part of it out, then load that into the next project. In the old days when computers were hard pressed to mix more than a few audio tracks in realtime, we called this “bouncing a submix”… multiple tracks go into one, freeing up resources to allow more stuff in.

-Dave