Vegas 32 / 64

[Sam Caino]

John, thanks for your cut and dry assessment. You have all given me a lot of info to move forward with.

[Al Bergstein]

I’m running Win7 64 Bit with Vegas and it works fine. 32/64 Addon & Utilities: The main issue you will likely face in your department would be third party add ons. Not all of these yet support 64 bit so I would compile the list and make sure you have compatibility. And yes, Windows XP is no longer officially supported by MS, though they will continue to produce security updates, especially if your company is an enterprise, and yes, do NOT go to Vista, it was terrible. W7 is really Vista V2, in that it builds on the Vista underpinnings. I have seen very little software designed for Vista that didn’t work on W7, and I run tons of various products. However, I often upgrade as well, so I don’t have an enormous amount of legacy software. However, XP apps are a different story. A number of legacy XP apps I have that were essentially designed for XP from earlier versions of MS OS’s did not make the transition to W7. Compatability mode for XP is not very good, from my tests, I decided that if I really needed to run an XP app, I was going to use Hyper V or VMWare and just continue to run XP on those machines for the few apps I needed.

Best of luck.

Alf

[John Rofrano]

The main issue you will likely face in your department would be third party add ons. Not all of these yet support 64 bit so I would compile the list and make sure you have compatibility.

Good point. It should be pointed out that Vegas Pro 32-bit and Vegas Pro 64-bit will both install on Windows 7 64-bit at the same time with a single license. This allows you to use Vegas Pro 32-bit for those projects that need 32-bit plug-ins so this is not a show stopper at all.

W7 is really Vista V2, in that it builds on the Vista underpinnings.

and to prove it… type the ver command at the command prompt and it will return Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600] so Windows 7 is really Windows 6.1! (i.e., Vista) 😉

A number of legacy XP apps I have that were essentially designed for XP from earlier versions of MS OS’s did not make the transition to W7. Compatability mode for XP is not very good, from my tests, I decided that if I really needed to run an XP app, I was going to use Hyper V or VMWare and just continue to run XP on those machines for the few apps I needed.

I agree and I highly recommend using VMware. I use it every day and the free VMware Player will now create images for you so unless you need the capability to take snapshots and create teams, you can just use the free version.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

By default, a 32-bit application in Windows can only see 2GB of memory. This is actually kind of a protection mechanism. Some poor programming practices wind up using signed arithmetic on 32-bit pointer variables, and will thus fail horribly if the address extends beyond 2GB.

If a program is “clean” for use beyond 2GB, it can get as much as 3GB in Windows. But in practice, it’ll never see that much anyway. Most systems have most of the 4th GB reserved for video card and other I/O memory. And the kernel needs memory too, at least some in the the same context as the user code (eg, your app).

In short, if you find 2GB is a limit (it may be, but it’s not a given with Vegas, even doing HD stuff), move to a 64-bit OS. Sony would be wasting time trying to optimize out another few MB of usable memory when there’s a readily available 64-bit version of the OS for anyone who needs more memory.

64-bit programs are effectively unlimited in address space. Physical PCs are more limited in the memory beyond 4GB they’re allowed to access (my system here, for example, can handle 8GB… many i7 systems handle 12GB, and server-class systems can often go beyond 64GB).

-Dave