Sony Vegas Pro 10 and a laptop

[Danny Hays]

Find a fast dual core or quad if you can swing it with an NVidea Gforce graphics card in it. Vegas Pro 10 can use the GPU on it for rendering AVC and helps with some pluggins preview speed. I haven’t found any puggins that don’t work on 64 bit. It can use 32 bit pluggins.

[John Rofrano]

As Danny said, get the most cores and fastest processor you can afford with NVIDIA graphics. Some plug-ins like Red Giant Magic Bullet don’t work with the 64-bit version but you can always run the 32-bit version for those plug-ins.

~jr

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

[Al Bergstein]

Hey John, by the way, is ATI ok for Vegas? I accidently said OK to a new Dell desktop that comes with a top of the line ATI card instead of a NVideo. I do have another older (last year) NVideo card, but wondered about the ATI. It’s too late to change, as they didn’t have NVideo in stock..sigh..

Doug, I’m also running Vegas 10 64bit on a Samsung i5 with 6 GBs of RAM 500 GB hard drive internal, esata port and docs external and it rocks. The eSata port on that machine (which is why I bought it) and my eSata dock works fine if you don’t mess with the cables at all (a bit touchy). Just did a short 5 minute video on it because my other machine MB failed. Main problem with any laptop is that you really don’t have multiple video out capability, in the way a desktop does. It’s really hard to go back to a small screen unless you are desperate. It does have both a standard VGA and HDMI out, and my 22″ monitor works well with it. However, I’ve been amazed at how fast this machine is rendering Vegas. It seems as fast as my 8 core that just died.

Alf

[John Rofrano]

[Alf Hanna] “Hey John, by the way, is ATI ok for Vegas? I accidently said OK to a new Dell desktop that comes with a top of the line ATI card instead of a NVideo. I do have another older (last year) NVideo card, but wondered about the ATI. It’s too late to change, as they didn’t have NVideo in stock..sigh..”

Well… it’s Ok in that Vegas won’t take advantage of it so it’s like not having it at all but Vegas will still work. If you can exchange it for an NVIDIA card I would definitely do that. The major vendors like Sony and Adobe all support CUDA processing and you will only get that with NVIDIA. ATI is NOT a card to place in a video editing workstation.

~jr

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

[Al Bergstein]

Ok. Thanks. I’ll do that.

Alf

[Doug Kereszturi]

Hey John,

Happy New Year!

Have you ever come across any problems running Sony Vegas on a Mac with Windows installed?

That may be the way I am heading. I would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks!

Doug

[John Rofrano]

[Doug Kereszturi] “Have you ever come across any problems running Sony Vegas on a Mac with Windows installed?”

I have never owned a Mac so I cannot speak from personal experience but I have read that it works fine with the exception of some firewire problem with running Windows on Mac Bootcamp. Maybe they have worked these out, I don’t know. I don’t think new Mac’s even have firewire ports anymore so that’s something to consider if you are still capturing from tape.

~jr

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

[Thomas Roell]

Beeing a Newbee here, I got also a few questions for Vegas Pro 10 and setting it up on a Laptop.

For reference, I got a Sony VAIO F, 1080p display, Core i7, 8GB ram, 500GB HD, NVIDIA 425M (since I work for NVIDIA, I couldn’t get ATI ;-)). The system is running Windows 7.

Now to the specifics:

(1) The GPU rendering on a 425M sucks. Just used straight transcoding in the AVC codec. Any ideas ? As far as I understand it, the 425M has 96 cuda cores, and should have about 215 GFLOPs, while the Core i7 should max out at around 40 GFLOPs.

(2) I am seeing a lot of disk activity eaten up by the SearchIndexer. Is there a way to avoid that other than to nuke the Windows Search to begin with ? (yes, I excluded the directories where the video files live).

(3) This is the more tricky on. Is there an advantage/disadvantage to having your video files on a separate partition, but on the same drive ?

[John Rofrano]

[Thomas Roell] “(1) The GPU rendering on a 425M sucks. Just used straight transcoding in the AVC codec. Any ideas ? As far as I understand it, the 425M has 96 cuda cores, and should have about 215 GFLOPs, while the Core i7 should max out at around 40 GFLOPs.”

For some unknown reason, no one is getting large benefits from GPU encoding in Vegas. I don’t know why but you’re not alone.

[Thomas Roell] “(2) I am seeing a lot of disk activity eaten up by the SearchIndexer. Is there a way to avoid that other than to nuke the Windows Search to begin with ? (yes, I excluded the directories where the video files live).”

I’m not sure what advantage the search indexer has unless you are constantly searching for files. I just keep my files organised in the first place so I would turn it off if it’s interfering with your performance.

[Thomas Roell] “(3) This is the more tricky on. Is there an advantage/disadvantage to having your video files on a separate partition, but on the same drive ?”

No, really no advantage at all. The whole idea of having your files on a separate physical drive is to reduce drive head contention since each drive has it’s own heads. Having two partitions on the same physical drive can actually make this worse because there is only one set of heads and they must seek across two partitions.

~jr

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

[Thomas Roell]

[John Rofrano] ” [Thomas Roell] “(3) This is the more tricky on. Is there an advantage/disadvantage to having your video files on a separate partition, but on the same drive ?”

No, really no advantage at all. The whole idea of having your files on a separate physical drive is to reduce drive head contention since each drive has it’s own heads. Having two partitions on the same physical drive can actually make this worse because there is only one set of heads and they must seek across two partitions.”

Hmmm … I was more thinking along the line of disabling system restore and using a different cluster size. The head contention is probably not a real problem on a single driver system, given how often system processes do something behind your back and will move that heads no matter whether there is a single partition or multiple partitions. Then again, this is just a guess …