[Brad White]

Thanks for all your responses.
Brad

MB Intel DZ77-70K
CPU Intel i7-3770K
MEM 16Gb DDR3
GPU Quadro2000 1Gb DDR5
SSD 120Gb Sys Drive
HDD 2Tb Data Drive
SW Win7 Home Premium

[Brad White]

Thanks for the useful information John, especially the differences in Pro 10 and Pro 11.
I have been “tweaking” the various settings in Vegas, rendering short test clips with different templates, buring test DVD’s, then playing on various HD TV’s to see the different affects.
Brad

MB Intel DZ77-70K
CPU Intel i7-3770K
MEM 16Gb DDR3
GPU Quadro2000 1Gb DDR5
SSD 120Gb Sys Drive
HDD 2Tb Data Drive
SW Win7 Home Premium

[Brad White]

Thanks for your comments Mike and Roger.

I’ve tried your suggetions with success. A high definition upload of a large video file to a file sharing site such as Vimeo, takes a long time, even with a broadband connection. 1920×1080 files are too large, but 1280×720 seems a satisfactory compromise for speed and quality.

Thanks again,
Brad

[Brad White]

Hi Roger,

Cropping seems to work the best as the time stamp is fairly near the bottom of the frame. Since I shot this in HD, I really didn’t lose any quality due to the zoom/crop in the frame.

Thanks,
Brad

[Brad White]

Hi John,

The technique you suggested works well. However, the “color bar/mask” ends up being too distracting, even with a muted color. This will however, be usefull in another video I have.

Thanks for the reply,
Brad

[Brad White]

Thanks for the feedback Dave. I was reluctant to install Vegas 11 due to previous negative comments, so I’ll stick with 10 for now. Thanks also for the reminder on the allowable encodings.
Brad

[Brad White]

I did as you suggested and saw some improvement when I increased the RAM availability. However, I think I shot myself in the foot by testing with some footage I took from a moving vehicle. The vehicle vibration is probably contributing to the problem which I can see as I examine it frame by frame. So I’m off to shoot some tripod footage and remove one variable from the equation.
Thanks, Brad

[Brad White]

John,
I did look at the Hex i7-3930k but found it to be about double the cost over the Quad i7-3770k. I understand what you and Stephen are saying about Vegas and “more cores the better”. I’m trying to balance cost and performance.
The Nvidia Quadro series graphics cards look excellent, albeit expensive.
Re-reading responses to my original question; it seems the jury is split between AMD Radeon and Nvidia. Of course, there’s also the choice of various manufactures licensed to produce their cards.
Back to series pondering!
Brad

[Brad White]

Steve,
Yes to your question about running other software during editing. I generally always have Photoshop open along with Vegas as I’m editing .jpg’s on the fly and dropping them onto a video track. I record a lot of video that includes PowerPoint presentations which I strip down and safe as .jpg’s.
However, during render, I close all programs except Vegas.
Brad

[Brad White]

Thanks all for your spirited and informative comments.

What I didn’t say in my original post is that I’m moving away from my somewhat antiquated system, based on an Intel 6600 quad core 2.4GHz, running Win XP Pro OS with VegasPro 10. Two problems; 1) Microsoft no longer supports XP, so I would like to migrate to Win7, however my Intel MB is not compatible with Win7. 2) VegasPro 11 will not run on XP so I have to move to Win7 if I want to move forward with Vegas. This means at least a newer MB and new OS, so let’s build a new system with as much state-of-the-art as I can afford ($2K max). New specs include Intel “k” series processor, MB with USB 3.0 (external video file backup) and support for dual GPU’s (future upgrade) and multiple monitor support, 16Gb DDR3 1600MHz, SSD primary drive and 2+Tb secondary drive.

So my preliminary spec is somewhat decided, sans the graphics card. Again, I’m trying for a “balanced” system that handles large file rendering reasonably fast.

Brad