Vegas/PC Upgrade reality check

[Rob Mcneill]

Sorry to resurrect this thread
Question for Joe (who built a new system last month)..
What operating system are you using?

I’m currently using Vegas 11 on Win 7 pro and am looking to upgrade
in the near future. My existing hardware is woefully underpowered …

[John Rofrano]

[Rob McNeill] “Question for Joe (who built a new system last month).. What operating system are you using?”

In his original post Joe said:

I plan on also installing Boris Red, After Effects, Win 7 64 bit Pro, VASST products.

So he’s using Windows 7 64-bit Pro which is what every video editor should be using. 😉

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

Yup. I used Win7 Pro on my build last month as well. The main reason you need Pro for video work is memory; Windows 7 Home only allows 16GB to be used. Yeah, I did say “only 16GB”.. and while that’s probably enough for most single-application video editors, getting more doesn’t cost that much, and it could be pretty useful down the road.

-Dave

[Rob Mcneill]

Hey, thanks John & Dave for clearing that up. So Win 7 64 Pro is the go.
Is there any particular reason to avoid Win 8 at this stage?

[John Rofrano]

[Rob McNeill] “Is there any particular reason to avoid Win 8 at this stage?”

Windows 8 is designed for touch screens. If you don’t have a touch screen, everything will take you two or three clicks longer than it does in Windows 7 so there is no advantage to using it. It’s not particularly bad… it’s just awkward to navigate with a keyboard and a mouse.

~jr

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

[Rob Mcneill]

Thanks again John. I know what you mean about the ‘clicking’ probs in Win 8 – I bought a laptop with Win 8 for my son recently and had a bit of a fiddle and was shocked how ‘clunky’ it was to use – I shaking my head in disbelief actually. Anyway, Win 7 pro it is then – cool 🙂

[John Rofrano]

[Rob McNeill] “I bought a laptop with Win 8 for my son recently and had a bit of a fiddle and was shocked how ‘clunky’ it was to use – I shaking my head in disbelief actually.”

Yea, it is hard to believe. Microsoft us clueless with their one-size-fits-all approach. People don’t want their desktop to look and feel like a Windows Phone. Heck I don’t even want my phone to look like a Windows Phone. lol. They just don’t get it. It’s best to avoid Windows 8 if you can. Good luck with the new computer.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

I totally agree. Microsoft has a terrible steering problem. They’re going along their chosen road, drive right past something (office tools, The Internet, PC-based entertainment, Gaming, Mobile), then think they can correct course if only they steer hard enough toward that missed thing. Which, as you might expect, has more of a tendency to run them off the road than copy that thing well.

Windows 8 is the perfect example. They have a touch interface now, as John pointed out, basically the one from Windows Phone, which itself was inspired by the one from the Zune (you remember the Zune, of course). I have used just about every touch interface… Microsoft’s for me is the worst, on a touch device. It’s just not intuitive to the same degree as iOS, Android, Ubuntu for Phones, Blackberry 10, WebOS, and … there’s got to be another in there somewhere. Like many things Microsoft “embraces and extends”, they’re not the inventors of these ideas… they’re someone else’s. Whoever’s designing these seems to have both missed some fundamental aspect of touch UI harmony the others pretty much get (I had some issues with Android before 4.x, too, but I think it’s mostly fixed). And at the same time, they’ve forgotten the even more fundamental rule of any GUI — it’s a user interface that uses graphics in order to make things intuitive. The Windows touch interface is chock full of “you just have to know it” things that no amount of intuition will reveal.

Then they made the mistake of doing this everywhere. Sure, touch is critical on smartphones and tablets. Even there, touch is a blunt thing… no precision. If you’re doing to do much creative work (eg, input) with a tablet, you probably want some other kind of input device. And that’s also where Microsoft fails… you pretty much need the keyboard for Windows 8 anyway. When I was messing around with Windows 8, in a VM on my desktop machine, I was annoyed at all the things basically missing or impossible to find that I had in Windows 7. The stock answer: there’s a hot key for it. On a touch UI. Sure.

Despite moving the world from pen/stylus to touch, Apple’s been far smarter here. They’ve actually been looking at the things from the iPhone/iPad that might work on the desktop, and rejecting the things that won’t. Like touch screens. Apple did a study a year or two ago, and found exactly what had already been learned and apparently forgotten back in the 80s… vertically oriented touch screens you have to reach for are a terrible idea. The CAD industry did this in the 80s.. there were all sorts of dedicated CAD systems, before PCs could really do the job, and most of them used touch screens, light pens, or some other system for input to the screen. And in a few years, these companies were all selling users larger digitizers, adding keyboard commands, anything to get them off the screens. If you think RSI is a problem with keyboard and mice (and it can be), that’s nothing compared to a few months of reaching out to your big-screen monitor. And today, pretty much everyone is using monitors folks in the 80s, even with $20K-$50K CAD system budgets, could only dream about.

In short, desktop touch screens will NEVER work. And still, we’re forced into this on Windows 8, even before Microsoft has touchscreens or any other HID device to make Windows 8, well, maybe still a trip to the dentists’ office, but less of a root canal.

And perhaps the most annoying thing about this: none of it was necessary. The Windows 8 UI is just a “graphical shell”, after all. The UI shell has always been replaceable in Windows, just as you can use different command-line shells (PowerShell, “Command Prompt”, bash+cygwin, etc). They could easily have kept the Windows 7 shell available for desktop users, if they didn’t want to include the full compatibility, as they have in the past (eg, Windows XP could give you pretty much the Windows 2000/98 experience if you wanted it). And there are certainly 3rd party tools to fix this up, though you’ll need many to fix everything. And I’d be concerned about reliability at that point, particularly if you’re mixing a bunch of random fix-up tools from different companies.

And that’s before you get to Microsoft’s WinRT… the whole tablet OS that’s there along with the tablet UI. Full-screen only (well, ok, now offering a couple non-overlapping panels, just like Windows 1.0 and some Android home screen shells) is apparently also Microsoft’s vision (Apple and Ubuntu are a little into that, too, unfortunately, but not locked in the way WinRT is).

-Dave

[Joe Mantaratz]

Update and some issues with lates build.

Assembled most of my list from Video Guys Sandy Bridge list except I elected some items for higher end products. Build 10 was not to be published for a while and the cost of this system was at my high end budget, including all the new software.

1 CPU 4930K Ivy Brigde
2 32 Gig Ripjawz 2133
3. Nvida PNY K4000
4. ASUS P9X79 Pro
5. Crucial SSD 960GB (OS/Programs drive)
6. WD Velociraptor 600 GB (Media Drive)
7. WD 160 WD Velociraptor 160 GB (Render Drive)
8. Cool Master Full tower (USB 3/2, E Sata) Huge case
9. Water Cooled
10. Net Gear Wireless USB Adapter
11 Win 7 64 bit Pro
12. Sony 12 Suite..updated to latest build
13. Boris Red
14. Boris Particle
15. ASUS Blue Ray
16. Firewire PCIe card

Render times and timeline preview all markedly improved over older systsem. However I dropped one Low Res PNG on the time line with 2 other tracks of MXF 1080 files from my Ex1. Project properties all matched source etc. The image file (also converted to other formats for testing) would signicantly stagger the preview.
Note: there are no effects inplemented on any events.

GPU has been turned off (tried on…no difference)
Nothing running in the background, no antivirus or horrible windows defender.

My older system runny Vegas 8 was a rock in comparison and it would never hiccup like this.

I’ve not turned up any info in research so perhaps I have missed something. Nothing in the preferences I can immediately see.
This has to be a simple one…..maybe.

Of interesting side note…no matter how many times I delect the Video preview during render option it stills does it anyway. So the only recourse is to close the preview window. Curious issue,
Thanks as always