Vegas Pro Hard Drive Configuration

[John Rofrano]

The USB should be fast enough for rendering but might not be fast enough for reading video files from for editing. You can use the eSATA drive for both editing and rendering without any problems. I would keep all of my video files off the single physical drive in your laptop so there is no contention between video files and swap/temp files.

~jr

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

[Stephen Mann]

I use a USB2 desktop dock for my project files, HDV, and it is plenty fast here.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Al Bergstein]

I agree with John. I use one 512GB internal for Windows 7, and all apps.

1TB internal D: drive is where I put my “active” projects.
External eSata dock (cost like $50 and an esata card for hooking it up) and various 1 and 1.5 TB drives for archiving.

No RAID yet, I just copy files using Robocopy.

Alf

[Todd Greer]

First of all thanks so much John, Stephen and Alf! Your replies gave me more to think about than originally figured. I see now in SVP there are two places to select a TEMP directory as well as a PRERENDERED files directory. So, to basically “dumb it down” for me, if I have one physical hard drive (currently holding the progam itself as well as my raw video files in My Documents) and one new eSATA drive to help relieve the load, then:

My original hard drive would hold the SVP program (and Vista of course)
Which drive would best get the TEMP dir?
Which drive would best get the PRERENDERED dir?
Which drive SHOULD hold the original video files?
Which drive should I eventually RENDER to?

(I’m keeping the USB out of this scenario here…unless you feel it could/should be thrown into all this if it can help in conjunction with the eSATA addition.

Thanks!

[John Rofrano]

Here is how I would configure them. Others may have alternate suggestions:

Which drive would best get the TEMP dir? Original Drive
Which drive would best get the PRERENDERED dir? eSATA Drive
Which drive SHOULD hold the original video files? eSATA Drive
Which drive should I eventually RENDER to? eSATA Drive

I like to keep temp files off of my work drive which is why I said place them on the original drive. Prerendered files are only created when you print to tape or manually force a prerender. These are just like rendered files. The original video should go on the eSATA drive to keep them off of the system drive. Some people will say that your render drive should be different than your source drive and that may have been true for DV, but rendering is so CPU intensive these days that your hard drive will not be the bottleneck so I don’t see any problem rendering to the same eSATA drive.

Hope this helps,

~jr

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

[Todd Greer]

Thanks again John! The more I play with SVP, the more I see your suggestions making sense to me now. I’ve set up as you’ve recommended…and if you could indulge me two more questions here:

(As a quick memory jog, I’m the one with the laptop fixed drive and now an additional eSATA drive)

1) Given what you’ve said about the slow rendering (CPU intensive “bottleneck”) could I conceiveably now throw in an additional USB drive used solely to render to (and keep all your other suggestions in place) as an even bigger improvement?

2) After setting up my eSata drive, I also set up Windows to manage the PAGING FILE (swap file, virtual memory…whatever) on it. This is in ADDITION to the already existing paging file allocation that my original internal disk has on it. I still let Vista manage both (I don’t manually set the swap sizes). This has now given me twice the virtual memory in my entire system of course. Now, is this recommended “in general” for a “storage only” drive or should I turn it back off (for the eSata). Will this slow/speed SVP as well?

Thx, Todd

[John Rofrano]

[Todd Greer] “1) Given what you’ve said about the slow rendering (CPU intensive “bottleneck”) could I conceiveably now throw in an additional USB drive used solely to render to (and keep all your other suggestions in place) as an even bigger improvement?”

Yes, I would do some tests and see if rendering to the USB drive is any slower than rendering to the eSATA drive but I would bet that it’s not since rendering formats like AVCHD is CPU bound. If this was SD DV I would give a different answer. Only use the USB drive after you have proven to yourself that it’s not slower on your system.

[Todd Greer] “2) After setting up my eSata drive, I also set up Windows to manage the PAGING FILE (swap file, virtual memory…whatever) on it. This is in ADDITION to the already existing paging file allocation that my original internal disk has on it. I still let Vista manage both (I don’t manually set the swap sizes). This has now given me twice the virtual memory in my entire system of course. Now, is this recommended “in general” for a “storage only” drive or should I turn it back off (for the eSata). Will this slow/speed SVP as well?”

The whole purpose have having a separate media drive is so that the Windows paging file is NOT on it! I would definitely remove the paging file. Remember you are trying to reduce drive contention. The last thing you want is for windows to decide to swap data to your eSATA drive while your trying to use it for video work.

In addition, don’t let the OS manage the paging file. Create a fixed size paging file of the size recommended by Windows. Then defrag your hard drive with a defragger that will defrag your page file. This will keep it contiguous and it will perform better.

~jr

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

[Roy Foliente]

Sorry I’m late to this thread as I just came upon it (I am new to Creative Cow Vegas). I cannot tell you how pleased I am to have found it as it has been challenging to find detailed info on the optimal hardware configuration for video editing, especially with Vegas Pro. I’ve received varying bits of info geared mainly for Premiere Pro but was never sure if most of it was applicable to Vegas as well.

John, I am so impressed with all the practical info you provide on this forum that I’ve gone ahead and ordered a copy of your Absolute Training for Vegas+DVD. I figured it was the least I could do for you based on everything I’ve learned from your posts on Creative Cow already. My background is in still photography although I’ve been forced to dabble in video on and off over the years and this interest has grown steadily, especially with the introduction of Canon’s 5d Mark ii. I’ve owned Vegas pro since version 7. I took a liking to Vegas Pro as it was fairly easy to get going with it and am pleased with its evolution, especially with version 10’s ability to handle my Canon’s .mov files natively.

With that said, if I wasn’t limited to a laptop for video editing and had a more generous budget, what would the ideal setup be for editing 1080-24p files from my DSLR? I’m not averse to spending the money, if it makes sense!

I have a colleague who uses Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects and he has me almost convinced I should purchase a 12-core Xeon setup with Windows 7 (64-bit), overclocked to at least 4GHz with 48GB of RAM and a Quadro 4000 video card. He uses an SSD for his OS, a dedicated 1-TB hard drive for a scratch disk/temp files, a dedicated 1-TB hard drive for rendering, and an external RAID 5 array (8 x 2TB) for his workspace/file storage. While I understand that a Quadro 4000 video card would largely go underutilized by Vegas Pro 10 as this is a CPU-based program, does the rest of this setup make sense? Specifically:

1) Can Vegas Pro 10 (64-bit) take advantage of 12-cores? As you’ve stated, it is the CPU that is often the bottleneck with Vegas Pro when dealing with hi-def content and so it would make sense to not skimp on this detail of the machine. It would also seem to make sense to get the fastest clock speed you can afford and even overclock, if possible.

2) Can Vegas Pro 10 take advantage of 24 or 48 GB of RAM? I realize that the 64-bit version can see this much RAM but will it take advantage of it? Is there a sweet spot?

3) If Vegas Pro can benefit from 12-cores and overclocking and lots of fast memory, at what point do the hard drives become the bottleneck with hi-def content? Does it then make sense to have 4 separate drives (OS, swap/temp files, workspace, render)?

I know what Sony’s minimum recommendations are but I’m not interested in just getting by although I also want to feel confident that my software is taking full advantage of my hardware.

Thanks!