Will This PC Build Work With Vegas & HD?

[Steve Rhoden]

Well then, put your mind at ease…Your system
is quite capable. And the graphics card doesn’t really
matter when using Vegas,but still encouraged to have,
because at some point down the road you probably gonna
use a software or a plugin that requires a good graphics card
for requirement or for better performance.
Example, Earlier versions of Magic bullet looks
plugin, required specific graphic cards for it to function.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956

[Nigel O’neill]

The raptor drives are small in capacity, and without active cooling i.e. a fan, will literally have a meltdown. I have managed to burn out 2 of my 3 raptor drives in my old editing system in just under 3 years of use. They get hot enough to burn your hand.

Since your motherboard supports 2 x SATA 6GBs controllers, why not buy 2 x 1TB SATA3 Western Digital drives and still have some change left over from the price of 1 Raptor drive?

The video card does matter if you intend to render Sony AVC. Vegas takes advantage of CUDA cores on ATI and NVIDIA cards.

You did not mention what Operating system you were using. I would suggest going Windows x64, but you need to confirm that your plugins will work in the 64 bit version of Vegas.

Your i7 2600K has an integrated GPU that should nicely compliment your Nvidia card. Other users on this forum have reported blazing preview performance; however, if you intend to edit multi-cam using Ultimate S or Infiniticam, you may need to use Gearshift to create proxies. I edit multi-cam HDV and on my i7 970, preview cannot be set higher than good. Perhaps I should just buy Gearshift… .

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Danny Hays]

I can edit AVCHD 1080 60p .mts with my i7 viao laptop. Without effects I can set my preview to best full and it plays VERY smooth. I’m sure effects would change that, but It wasn’t long ago I couldn’t play an HDV 1080i .m2t at best full and get more that 5 frames per second.

[Dave Haynie]

[Keelan Balderson] “I need somebody to put my mind at ease. Will the following custom built PC allow me to work with HD video in Sony Vegas, using a second monitor for full screen preview?

Intel Sandybridge i7-2600K Unlocked Core i7 Quad-Core Processor (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache, Socket 1155)”

That’s a pretty decent rig for HD editing. I always recommend at least four cores, at least 8GB of DRAM, and you have it. The i7 is the fastest core at a given clock speed these days, too, so that’s another plus.

The graphics card you have listed is fine. GPGPU computing (General Purpose GPU) has been a growing movement these days, but there’s no great answer if Vegas is your target. Vegas 10 delivers a small but real improvement using a GPU to accelerate Sony AVC rendering — it’s not obvious that a higher end GPU adds much to this. The GPU is also useful if you’re using a modern plug-in set like Boris Continuum, which benefit from OpenGL rendering accelerated by GPU. My advice is what you’re doing — buy a decent card today, and upgrade to a better one only when it’s going to make a big difference.

The issue of hard drives is really an issue of maximizing data throughput. There’s a belief in the industry that you should leave your C: drive for programs, which used to be very critical, due to virtual memory page swapping. Today, you probably have enough RAM to avoid any swapping during a render, so this is less true.

However, the fastest rendering you can do occurs when the CPU is running as close to 100% as you can get. Rendering is still CPU (and maybe GPU) intensive. But keeping that CPU well fed means ensuring your hard drives can keep up the speed. When you load too many assets from the same drive at the same time, the drive will “thrash”, as the heads jump all over the place, and your render will slow down. The most obvious way to help here is, as you state, rendering with read-only assets on one drive, writing out to another.

However, if you have a very complex project, you may want to spread some assets to the C: drive as well, even if you’re rendering to it. Or render out to a USB drive or even a flash dongle… the bit rate is not the bottleneck for a render, seek time is when you have many, many assets on a single drive. I’ll admit to having built two minute music videos with over 40 separate video layers, some of which took over four hours to render those two minutes. I’m not suggesting this is a regular thing… but the system you’re looking at can handle that sort of load. In fact, my video would render faster on it than it did on my old Q9550 system…

-Dave

[Keelan Balderson]

Brilliant thanks for the help guys.
Mind at ease.

Now I’ve gotta try and put it all together LOL, thank god for Youtube tutorials.

[Brett Cole]

I have this same hardware but with 16gb of ram, and although for me it runs 5d2 1080hd projects fine enough, it’s not quite real-time editing. I use the excellent GearShift plugin from VASST for proxies and everything is super fast. The difference is dramatic, and it will make your life much, much easier. This i7 2600 CPU really excels at rendering. Blazing fast.