The Ultimate Vegas Editing machine

[Dave Haynie]

Rendering doesn’t require a fast drive at all, unless you do lost of RAW output. The typical finished video output is 25Mb/s (AVC,HDV) to 150Mb/s (Cineform, DNxHD)… that’s a walk in the park for any old USB 2.0 drive, USB stick, etc.

The big hangup on writes will be disc thrashing… any time a drive seeks, it’s losing speed. So it is very smart to use a separate drive for output. Even the C: drive.. by the time you’re rendering on a well tuned system, the C: drive is just sitting there, not doing any work anymore (your code is all loaded, you have enough RAM to not need virtual memory, etc).

Input assets can definitely slow up a render… if you’re not hitting 95%-100% CPU (or very high rates of GPU and CPU together), you probably have some kind of input holdup. You’re only ever rendering one output file at a time (well, two in a few rare cases), but you can have dozens of input files in a single project. RAID 0 or 1 here can help, but spreading out your assets across multiple drives can help just as much. Per byte transferred, RAID is faster, but per seek, RAID is actually slower. It’s a useful tool, but no panacea.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Nigel O'Neill] “So, since Vegas 8, we have lost native Cineform support (version 9) “

Vegas 9 didn’t bundle Cineform, but oddly enough, “native” Cineform support was added in Vegas 10. Which is ironically why Cineform has barely worked right since Vegas 9. Bundling saves you $100, that’s pretty much all it does. The native support was something very different.. they’re using a private Cineform API, some special mode of communications between Vegas and Cineform, to render video. Sony’s never really explained WHAT they’re doing with this that makes it superior in any way to plain old VfW rendering. In fact, after buying Vegas 10 and upgrading to Cineform 5.x, it was nearly six months before I could read Cineform files in Vegas 10. Vegas 9, using the plain old VfW interface, still worked just dandy with Cineform, even the new version.

So, “native” support seems highly overrated.

As for the GPU, I’m seeing a pretty reasonable acceleration in regular editing (Vegas 11 of course, along with some other components), along with the boost you get with specifically accelerated CODECs (AVC or MPEG-2). If you have the very latest Intel CPUs, you may see less of an improvement here. I evaluated both nVidia and AMD/ATi GPUs, and found the Radeon HD 6970 to be the faster for about $300 spent. Also adds support for that third monitor I’ve been considering…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

One thing I put in all of my PCs: a SATA drive rack:
https://www.amazon.com/Connectland-CL-HD-MROF-5-25-Inch-Mobile-3-5-Inch/dp/B0028Y4DAO/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1328262179&sr=8-6

It’s very easy, using one of these, to devote a 1-2GB HDD for each major project (even if some assets may be on other drives temporarily for faster rendering). Slap a label on the drive and, when you’re done, there’s the whole project archive for as long as you need it (easy to make a clone, too, if you’re not happy with one backup drive… I always have the finished materials on my 8TB RAID as well, no need to keep all that old stuff at one’s fingertips).

-Dave