Tweaking OS for vegas?

[Norman Black]

You need to give detailed information for any response.
Project settings.
Source file(s) formats. mpeg-2, h.264, ?

The hard disk is very unlikely to ever be a bottle neck for HD 1080 video.

If task manager says you still have free RAM you are probably okay there.

With CPU percent utilization you have to be careful. When most people say they have 8 cores, what they have are 4 real physical cores with with logical cores. Hyperthreading is the common term. Logical cores really only give you an extra 0-20% boost. So when you are at 50% you are pretty close to maxxed out in a real sense.

Even with less than 100% CPU, if the task of a single program thread, which runs on a single core, is the bottleneck you are typically screwed no matter how many more cores or threads you have or add.

For example. Decoding an H.264 video stream appears to be single threaded in Vegas. If I take a 1080p60 file from my GoPro Hero3 Black, Vegas has stuttery playback on my machine with only 15% CPU utilization. Vegas is not really using 3 of my four physical cores. A 1080p30 file works fine. If I proxy the 1080p60 files it works fine. Vegas 12 smart proxy files are mpeg-2 which is easier to decode than AVC/H.264/mpeg-4.

[Matthew Jeschke]

Yeah I was afraid it might be the scheduler as well. I took some classes in grad school on that and it’s almost impossible for a scheduler to determine the optimal assignment of tasks. I’m curious what then is the best place to upgrade? A higher clock speed / processor that can do more instructions per second?

I feel my new setup is really fast… however, my old setup wasn’t too much slower. It was a two separate processors each with dual 64 bit AMD Opteron cores operating at 2.5 ghrz. I could clearly see thought the processors in that setup were the bottle neck as task manager showed them at 100% during render / playback. Unfortunately, the motherboard went out that and I cannot easily get a replacement for it.

What is your setup?

I’m learning the ropes of online publishing. Mostly as an excuse to play with more cameras.

Here’s several of my latest ventures,
https://www.keystoaz.com
https://www.fitlish.com
https://www.corvettemedic.com

[Norman Black]

To me more CPU speed may be your key. RAM is easy to detect, and change, when you need more if your projects need it.

My machine is a Core i7 860 2.9Ghz. 8 logical cores, 4 physical.
8GB ram, AMD 7950 video card.

My videos are from my GoPro Hero3 Black I attach to my mountain bike. They are MP4 AVC(H.264) files at 20-30 Mbps bitrate.

The videos are typically 1080p30 (20Mbps) or 1080p60 (30Mbps). I did test 720p120 (30 Mbps) once for 4x slow mo at 30p.

As I said, my machine just does run out of gas with AVC 1080p60 files, preview quality half size. This is in a 30p project. They only gas out just barely. As stated mpeg-2 or Cineform proxies decode with room to spare. I briefly did a test of a 3.4Ghz machine and it handled the 1080p60 GoPro files.

I only have a single monitor so the max I view at is half 960×540. Everything has played real time with what little effects and transitions I have done. Some titles and text animations slow down.

With jpeg sources for slideshows I do get playback performance issues in various circumstances. jpeg size being the biggest concern.

[John Rofrano]

It seems like your CPU is probably the bottleneck and part of the problem could be your choice of CPU. I’m afraid AMD has fallen far behind Intel and really isn’t the processor of choice for media encoding. A 4 core 3.5Ghz Intel is faster than an 8 core 4.0Ghz AMD for media encoding. Take a look at the benchmarks:

Tom’s Harware AMD FX-8350 Review

PassMark AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core

If you want smoother playback, get an Intel processor. I have an Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz 6 core (which is the fastest processor in the PassMark link above) and Vegas Pro pretty much plays everything I throw at it smoothly.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

Only Intel has virtual (hyperthreaded) cores.

Assuming the latest AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture, he’s got eight real cores. Sort of. This architecture is based on modules consisting of two integer cores, one floating point unit, and a shared L2 cache. So basically, he’s got eight integer cores but only four floating point units.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I agree with John… on several levels, in fact. I had an AMD 1090T system, 3.2GHz, and even that often benchmarks faster than the new AMD architecture. I never had an issue with HD playback of simple stuff, but it’s also true that Vegas isn’t terribly efficient a decoding of input material. For compositing (eg, more complex projects), the GPU acceleration helped quite a bit. On the Vegas GPU benchmark project, for example, I was running pretty slow, CPU-only, but full frame rate with the CPU+GPU. It’s been my observation, as well as others’, that GPUs particularly help you with the CPU is slower.

I replaced it last month with an Intel i7-3930K (you might see the pattern here) and it’s at least twice as fast at pretty much everything. I’ve never found memory to be a problem with Vegas, even on complex projects I’ve rarely gone beyond 8GB on my old 16GB system… I have more memory on the new machine, but that’s really only for photography.

I’m a little suspicious of the new AMD cache architecture: CPU core pairs share L1-Data and the unified L2 caches, along with the L3. And typically, AMD caches have been slower, with narrower buses than Intel’s. So the AMD core, while it has a larger L2 cache (2MB vs. 256K), share it between two cores, so there’s bound to be access contention (Intel’s only sharing between hypertransport threads, which, by their very nature, generally can’t be in contention for memory at the same time). And the Intel Socket 2011 also has four memory channels, versus AMD’s two. So caching isn’t even quite as critical for Intel.

Processor speed these days is the sum of many, many little things. AMD seems to be optimizing for cost over performance, and they’re winning much of the low end… including the next two major gaming consoles.

-Dave

[Matthew Jeschke]

Darn… yeah I had to do a shoot in the dark as I couldn’t be down for too long. I didn’t expect my PC to blow up. Unforutnately, I hadn’t been doing too much shopping for parts 🙁

But with that, you mentioned price / performance. I cannot complain about the AMD as it was quite inexpensive. I did notice the Intel setups were slightly faster in my initial searches before buying but they seemed soooo much more expensive.

I was just REALLY surprised when I bought the new processor & mother board that the timeline playback wasn’t much better than when I had run my old processors. It is easily 2 to 3 times faster in rending the final product though.

You mentioned GPU plays into Vegas performance?

I was surprised to hear that. I do have a decent GPU but I never installed it in the new system. Instead I am currently using a low end graphics chip set integrated on the Motherboard.

So will a high end graphics card further my playback and rendering performance?

I’m learning the ropes of online publishing. Mostly as an excuse to play with more cameras.

Here’s several of my latest ventures,
https://www.keystoaz.com
https://www.fitlish.com
https://www.corvettemedic.com

[John Rofrano]

[Matthew Jeschke] “So will a high end graphics card further my playback and rendering performance?”

If you have one, Vegas Pro will take advantage of it. If your CPU is not performing that well, the GPU could give it a boost. There is definitely boost in using the GPU for rendering.

~jr

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

[Matthew Jeschke]

Thanks! Yeah I wish I’d had more time to research this. Both of your advice is really helpful!

Still a pretty awesome little processor and really cheap (with bother board it was $250) so a bit of a no brainier despite it’s not the peak performer.

I just plugged in my Radeon 5670 (old by today’s standards). It actually doubled up with the motherboard’s integrated GPU which is pretty cool. However, it made absolutely no difference in playback performance of Sony Vegas.

I noticed apparently in Sony Vegas 10 Pro 64 bit Rev D (I’m on Rev E) they added GPU support for AVC rendering only.

I’m curious is there a setting to enable GPU hardware acceleration in Sony Vegas? I’m looking here but not seeing anything. I did however, find a setting to increase the amount of ram used. I bumped it up to 2048 MB (I have 8 gigs total).

I’m still only able to playback at half preview quality. However, I noticed in my resource manager my page faults pretty much disappeared which is helpful. Previously under 1/2 my ram was utilized and the computer was tripping page faults quite frequently.

I also just noticed it’s reporting all 8 cores as completely floored (100% utilization) when I render which is good, and I’m rendering much MUCH faster than my old processors.

I don’t think this is scheduling the playback threads worth a crap though. Timeline playback leaves a lot to be desired as you mentioned at a fraction of CPU utilization (under 50%). Would be interesting to see if the extra cores are helping me render faster than the Intel setup though.

[Dave Haynie]

[Matthew Jeschke] “I noticed apparently in Sony Vegas 10 Pro 64 bit Rev D (I’m on Rev E) they added GPU support for AVC rendering only. “

Yeah, prior to Vegas 11, GPU support was pretty minimal, and limited to nVidia GPUs only. In Vegas 11, they added OpenCL support (which works on either nVidia, AMD/ATi, or even native CPU — though not terribly useful, that last one) and added this in the compositing engine, many plug-ins, etc.

I do think that the AVC de-coding is single-threaded in Vegas. That means that, for video playback, you’re pretty close to being effectively single threaded, unless you have lots of plug-ins to render as well. Both Intel and AMD have some dynamic clocking, where they’ll boost a single core or dual core, out of all four, if the traffic gets really unbalanced. But it’s only of limited value.

[Matthew Jeschke] “I’m curious is there a setting to enable GPU hardware acceleration in Sony Vegas? I’m looking here but not seeing anything. I did however, find a setting to increase the amount of ram used. I bumped it up to 2048 MB (I have 8 gigs total).”

That setting is just “RAM Preview” memory, and too much actually makes things render slower. No good reason given why that is, but it’s best to keep fairly small (256K? I’m not sure of the latest magic values) unless you’re actually using the RAM preview feature.

[Matthew Jeschke] “I’m still only able to playback at half preview quality. However, I noticed in my resource manager my page faults pretty much disappeared which is helpful. Previously under 1/2 my ram was utilized and the computer was tripping page faults quite frequently.
“

Yup.. these days, you ought to have everything in RAM. So minimizing page faults is the best way achieve that. You can’t eliminate them completely, since some things in the OS use them for “cool VM tricks”, like just pretending to lode code segments that aren’t likely to be used while running (they fault themselves into memory as needed).

[Matthew Jeschke] “I also just noticed it’s reporting all 8 cores as completely floored (100% utilization) when I render which is good, and I’m rendering much MUCH faster than my old processors.”

If you’re seeing anything close to 100% CPU, you’re getting your money’s worth out of the new system. CPU is generally the bottleneck, so you want to see it being the bottleneck. When you’re not near 100% CPU during a render, that means something else is acting as the bottleneck, and nothing else should.

[Matthew Jeschke] “Would be interesting to see if the extra cores are helping me render faster than the Intel setup though.”

The only “standard” Vegas benchmark we have is the GPU benchmark, which you can download from Sony… but it requires Vegas 11 (the one with the red car). This previews in realtime 29.97fps on my new system with the GPU, a little shakey in a few places without the GPU, but mostly keeping up. On my old AMD 1090T six core, I averaged 8fps on full preview of the benchmark project, managed 28fps with the GPU. So on preview, the Intel is overall better than twice as fast, though it’s not silky smooth without the GPU. Though the Vegas benchmark gets complex in places.

Some other numbers: my AMD 1090T did a Sony AVC render without GPU in 5.95 mins, with GPU 2.73 minutes, both in Vegas 11. It did the XDCAM EX render in 5.37 minutes without GPU, 1.73 minutes with GPU. The new system (same HD6970 GPU) and Vegas 12, it did the Sony AVC render in 2.05 minutes without the GPU, 1.22 minutes with the GPU. And on the XDCAM render, it was 3:08 minutes without GPU, 0.56 with the GPU. Curiously, the same AVC render on the new system took longer on MainConcept without the GPU, but faster (0.43sec) with the GPU.

-Dave