which perf improvements with a new PC?

[Fred Robinson]

I use an i7 and 8gig of ram and run Vegas Pro 9e 64bit. It’s blisteringly fast at rendering, and I work with 1080p media.

But… …don’t ignore the advice re hard drives above… …I made another step-change in speed by adding a solid state drive to my configuration. Interestingly though, unlike the recommendation above, I have Vegas on the SSD and Win7 on the normal disk. The project files and media are on the SSD.

Fred

[Frederic Baumann]

Thanks you all for all these feed backs, this is quite useful!!

Fred, could you give some numbers (how much time of rendering for which movie duration? how many video tracks and effects)?

Thanks again,
Frédéric

[Norman Willis]

Frederic,

Check out Steve’s render data.

https://www.mmdv.com/sonyvegas/rendertest/about.php

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org

[Mike Tobias]

We’ve been using Vegas 9 Platinum for a few years here on a quad-core PC. I’m looking at upgrading our hardware and software to decrease render times.

I’ve purchased Vegas Pro 9 (to get 64bit) and am looking at what might be the fastest machine to use for editing and rendering. We have a new Dell XPS 9100 with what is currently the fastest Corei7 processor, but this PC might have to go back because of hardware problems.

I was thinking about building a PC using a server motherboard and two 8-core AMD Opteron CPUs, and running Win7 Pro 64bit on it. We also have a 3 year old quad-core Xeon server on the LAN that I’d like to use as a network render station. We typically render to WMV, so I’m wondering if I will be able to utilize all of those cores?

One other variable in all of this: all of our videos reside on a storage server on our gigabit LAN. Editing is done on the workstation, but the source and target videos are always on the storage server. Watching the the perf monitor during a render, network utilization never goes over 5%. Do you think this will impact my render times at all?

[John Rofrano]

Watching the the perf monitor during a render, network utilization never goes over 5%. Do you think this will impact my render times at all?

It depends on the render performance boost you’ll get from all those cores but in general, rendering HD is so CPU/GPU intensive that disc throughput is not as much a concern as it was in the days of SD.

~jr

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

[Mike Tobias]

Thanks John, good to know. And yes, most of our projects are in HD. Is there a good chance I can get Vegas Pro to use that many cores? 16 on a local PC and 4 on a remote PC? I ran a test render to wmv with our quad-core and all four cores are being utilized.

Thanks,

Mike

[John Rofrano]

Is there a good chance I can get Vegas Pro to use that many cores? 16 on a local PC and 4 on a remote PC?

Yes, especially with the 64-bit version. I will use all 16 cores.

~jr

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

[Mike Tobias]

Excellent! Thanks.

[Frederic Baumann]

Hi again!

A stupid quick question: I do not have Vegas Pro, but only Vegas Movie Studio Platinum HD 10.0.

Do you know if Platinum can take benefit from a 64-bit architecture in the same way than Vegas Pro? (to make sure that all the good things you say about 64-bit would apply to my case…)

I have seen no specific mention on the Sony web site, and on the Vegas pro page, they mention 32 and 64 bits, which they do not mention for HD Platinum.

Thanks!
Frédéric

[John Rofrano]

Do you know if Platinum can take benefit from a 64-bit architecture in the same way than Vegas Pro? (to make sure that all the good things you say about 64-bit would apply to my case…)

No it will not. The Movie Studio version of Vegas is only 32-bit and so it can only see 2GB of memory. I’m not sure how many threads it can use for rendering. I believe 4 is the maximum so it will only take advantage of a QuadCore. I might be wrong since I only have a QuadCore to test with. You really need the Pro version to get 64-bit support.

~jr

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