Upgrade my Windows 7 – Vegas 10.0 Editing Machine

[Steve Rhoden]

I’m not seeing your question, or what specifically you want suggestion on!

Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia

[Geoff Chandler]

Looking at my current setup, I’m wondering if a processor or graphics card upgrade would increase playback smoothness on the timeline. I think that sums up my question.

Thanks.

[Paul Berk]

Yes. CPU upgrade will help smooth playback …. Always best to get as fast a CPU as you can afford.

[Ole Kristiansen]

Yes, update Motherboard, cpu, gpu, ram and Vegas !

Why .mov with Vegas ?

[Geoff Chandler]

Why MOV?

My choices with a Panasonic GH3 are:

AVCHD 24p @ 24Mbps
MP4 30p @ 20Mbps
MOV 24p @ 72Mbps ALL-Intra

I was under the impression I would get a higher quality image from the higher bit rate. If nothing else, have more room to tweak exposure and color. When selecting MOV in the camera, a warning comes up that reads, “A high performance PC is required to play or edit. Proceed?” I’ve never done tests with the other codec options but the 72Mbps is the setting everyone was crazy about when the camera first came out.

Is there a transcoding option or recommendation to make editing and playback smoother?

https://www.chandlervideo.com

[Ole Kristiansen]

Hi Geoff

Vegas and .mov is not the best combination because .mov use Apple 32bit decoder !

“Is there a transcoding option or recommendation to make editing and playback smoother?”

Yes, Cineform – If you install the free Gopro Studio – you can use Cineform in Vegas !

[Geoff Chandler]

I installed GoPro Studio and quickly figured out how to convert files. They play back smoothly however the converted file has no audio clip associated with it when I open in my Vegas timeline.

https://www.chandlervideo.com

[Ole Kristiansen]

Hi Geoff

You can try Batch Render your clips to Cineform in Vegas !

I think you first have to make a Cineform template – save and re-open Vegas to see the new template in the Batch Render window !

I made a simple guide !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo095lPxgLI

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Aaron Star]

“Intel Core i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
16 GB RAM
Nvdia GeForce GGTX 660
Windows 7 – 64-bit
Vegas 10.0”

The “x”77 series chipset (i7-3770) was a good rig at one point. Assuming you have that chipset. Upgrades are going to not do a whole lot unless you are running really slow RAM and no SSD. That chipset was the end of PCIe2.0, and the next generation came with PCIe3.0. 3.0 has not only improved bandwidth, but also comes with less overhead for even more bandwidth. Your GPU will appreciate the 3.0 improvements.

GPU upgrade, you could go up to an RX480, 390x, or Fury-x. This would work much better with Vegas.

16GB of ram is good, but you want to make sure you have not fully populated the DIMM slots. If your board has dual channel, that means work 16-32Gb of ram out of 2 sticks of memory. Adding more will cause most motherboards to drop back to single channel operation. Memory bandwidth is very important to Vegas, encoding, and general operation. Test your memory bandwidth with Winsat mem, or memtest86+.

Windows 10 pro has a much improved memory controller. I recommend moving to Win10-64.

Motherboard design type could matter with regards to SSD SATA drives. Try and get an M2 slot NVME Samsung 950 Pro. With SSD drives you are placing a lot of load on the DMI bridge. Look up DMI bridge. So a motherboard like the x99 will give you more options for high bandwidth devices like SSDs.

Z270 chipset with the latest processor would be a good upgrade choice for a modest configuration. This would upgrade you to PCIe3.0, and DD4 memory the latest evolution. Also the CPU would give you the longest service life since it comes with the most contemporary instruction sets. X99 still has more memory bandwidth, but the memory controller speeds of the z270 are reaching a point where they are almost neck and neck these days. We are still waiting on an x99 class motherboard for the latest generation of CPUs.

I would upgrade to VP 14, as 10 is not going to take advantage of any GPU upgrades.

Vegas may work just fine with the .MOV encoded material. Try VP14 with that format, .MOV may not use QT and may use native mode of operation for certain codecs like Prores and AVC. You can determine this by looking at what .dll is being used under the Vegas media properties. That format sounds alot like XAVC-intra in a .MOV container. FFMPEG may be able to re-wrap without re-encode, if you have a problem with playback.

[Geoff Chandler]

Thanks. But a typical wedding has hundreds of clips. Is the workflow you’re demonstrating requiring putting all the clips on the timeline to convert (transcode)?

https://www.chandlervideo.com