Vegas Pro 11 released

[Rob Wijnhoven]

Hey guys,

I did a quick performance test on Sony Vegas Pro 11, to see the effect of the GPU acceleration on a Nvidia GTS 450.

Check the page at: https://robwijnhoven.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=120%3Asony-vegas-11-released-first-benchmark&catid=16%3Avideo-software-tricks&Itemid=28&lang=en

Cheers, Rob

[Dave Haynie]

You may have found a bug in multicam… I sincerely doubt Sony did this on purpose or anything. I was always mixed about Sony’s multicam implementation anyway, though it has improved over the years.

It should go without saying, but you absolutely must get the latest graphics driver for your card before judging its performance on Vegas 11 or any other GPGPU stuff. These things have been evolving rapidly over the years. For example, if you have an ATi/AMD card more than a year or two old, you might have the deprecated “Close to the Metal” Streams API, and an incomplete OpenCL implementation.

As for XP vs. Vista/Windows 7, the choice is usually based on the available APIs. Microsoft builds OS functions, C++ frameworks, etc. that developers use. And these are continuously improved. And sometimes, they’re not back-ported to the older OS. Windows XP was released over 10 years ago, the last major update was in 2008… one would hope that technology advanced just a bit since then.

I dropped XP in 2009 for Windows 7, largely to get 64-bit support. Sure, XP existed in a 64-bit version, but that was largely unsupported. Microsoft drives those things: their certification program tells developers what they have to support and what’s optional. 64-bit was optional for Windows XP, mandatory for Vista. I like 64-bit for video. I absolutely need it for photo editing — just try a 30-40 photo panoramic merge of 18Mpixel RAW photos without at least 8GB of RAM (I have 16GB). Things explode.

And of course, while it’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep customers happy, it’s also in their interest to both spend their money when it’ll make them the most money. That often means supporting new things only on new OSs. Similarly, developers like Sony move to these new things, either for better device support, easier and more reliable coding work, or even totally new functions.

For example, part of my current day job is with Connectify. Their main product is a computer program that turns a Windows PC into a hotspot. It is absolutely necessary to have Windows 7 to get a real Access Point. You can get Ad-Hoc mode with Windows Vista or XP, but we can’t even support anything before XP SP3, due to other improvements in the OS (not sure of the details there).

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Peter Goswick] “You say it is time to move on, yet Vegas seems to support Vista…not going to get rid of XP for crappy Vista.”

Nobody is recommending Vista. You should be using Windows 7 64-bit.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

You ought to KNOW the HD6870 works in Vegas 11… Sony’s own published benchmarks use this card. If you’re not seeing it, you probably don’t have OpenGL installed.

Sadly, that might be common. Over ten years ago I had an ATi graphics card, a decent one. I didn’t care about GPUs or anything, but ATi was one of the companies actually producing clear analog video. But their installer was a mess… it failed, repeatedly, to properly install the drivers.

Jump forward to the HD6970 I bought last week… same problem. I found it’s reporting errors on really stupid things, too… in my case, a version of a Microsoft support module didn’t install… because I have a more recent version. But the installer reports an error, and doesn’t tell you what failed.

And, with everything installed, the main ATi configuration program won’t load. In fact, it tends to crash my whole system.

I naturally grabbed all the latest stuff online. Still failed. So grabbed the individual pieces, including the OpenGL drivers, which are separate. It works.

My concern right now is that, yeah, the GPU stuff is real; sometimes moderate, but they’re real. Worth it, and Sony’s doing right by supporting OpenCL. But there are still companies doing plug-ins supporting only CUDA. So I’m concerned that CUDA might be more important than I was thinking. All current CUDA implementations also support OpenGL and the Microsoft thing no one uses, DirectCompute, but only nVidia supports CUDA. I’m getting in a nVidia card to evaluate, to see if it compares to the AMD/ATi or not on Vegas performance.

-Dave