[Dave Haynie]

The “undetermined error” has always been there, as far back as I can recall. I used to think it was due to a mis-match between the GUI settings and the actual rendering engine. So I’d set a value outside the range of the rendering engine, Vegas let me, but the engine itself kicked it out.

Just a guess. But they’re just being lazy here, not returning any sort of useful error code. Something, somewhere in the system knows there’s an error, or it wouldn’t have stopped rendering. We’re just not given that information. And if it does relate to settings, that needs to be fixed in the Vegas UI.

Thing thing about Vegas 11… this has gotten worse, and it’s not GPU related. Could be the same problem I guessed at — we’re clearly running new version of the MainConcept CODECs, since these support GPU acceleration, the old ones don’t.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

As I suggested, I think Sony’s GPU spec is confusing… I just didn’t realize they were saying different things in different places. If they’re sensitive to nVidia spec like Compute Capability, that’s exactly the spec they should be quoting. I have absolutely no idea how to relate consumer models (GeForce) to pro-models. I know how to look it up, on a unit by unit basis, but after all, nVidia does publish a nice chart of capbilities. Sony ought to point to that chart and say something like, “we support every card above this line” or “with this value or greater in that column”.

Of course, if nVidia themselves doesn’t understand what their chips will or won’t do, that’s not going to make things any easier…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’ve seen similar bugs with Main Concept MPEG-2. For one, it seems bitrate related… I get the “reason can’t be determined” error instantly if I render to a 50Mb/s CBR preset I used extensively in Vegas 10. If I got a 35Mb/s variable bitrate preset, it renders awhile before failing. I may have seen something similar on Main Concept AVC as well… templates that worked fine in 10 but fail in 11.

The current problem is that the nVidia GTX570 graphics card, the very latest nVidia drivers, and a render to either Main Concept CODEC with GPU enabled results in a GPU-related crash.. not even the mysterious “just stopped” error. This doesn’t happen with any other CODEC.

I realize that Main Concept sells Sony these CODECs, and I don’t know the level of information available. But for a professional product, “it failed and I just don’t know why” is a totally unacceptable answer.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Everyone knows a new release risks bugs… it’s the nature of the beast. This is why businesses typically don’t update Windows until the SP1 level (if that).

And yeah, some of us take the risk. I KNEW I was taking a risk using Vegas 11 for my video completed yesterday, and I was nearly burned by it. Software is a complex things, and it’s not as if Sony rushed this out or anything, just that certain bugs aren’t always caught during the testing process.

The reason I’ve trusted Sony/Sonic Foundry all these years is because they do superior job of finding problems before a release, and a great job of fixing the product after the release. I’ve dealt with a number of companies who release a product too buggy to be useful, and then they’re off working on the next major release, no bugs to be fixed. You don’t always hear about them years later — this isn’t the kind of thing you can get away with for long.

As for Vegas, I found the “10” releases each an improvement.. 10e was to the point where I really didn’t see bugs in general use. It may depend on what you do… Vegas 10-10d was always a failure with Cineform, and that was a big part of my workflow (and may yet be again, if they’ve really fixed it, but I’ve been using MXF instead recently).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Thomas Roell] “It appears that Vegas Pro 11 wants to have CUDA Compute Capability 2.0.”

I think that’s exactly what they said, albeit in different words. The GPU requirements page says:

requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 270.xx or later with
a GeForce GTX 4xx Series or newer GPU.

I would claim that GTX 4xx series or newer, while not as scientifically descriptive as “CUDA Compute Capability 2.0”, is saying precisely the same thing. I think Adobe’s GPU support has very similar requirements.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Mike Brennan] “Hello Dave. I remember you from back in the Amiga days. Nice to see you on this forum !
“

Hi Mike… nice to be remembered for things I did that are way cooler than stuff I’m working on now (video stuff excluded, I am not planning to back to A/B roll editing and manual audio controlled by Scala MM400 and an Amiga 3000).

[Mike Brennan] “Do you have Vegas 10 and 11 both installed on your computer, and is the display so bad that you may find yourself doing the project in vegas 10? Is the display in 11 OK if you turn the GPU acceleration off? Is the acceleration that you get with the nVidia worth the “headache” ;-)”

The display quality is due to the nVidia hardware, not Vegas. As a videohead, I know that you eyes adapt to this stuff quickly enough, so now the nVidia display isn’t giving me a headache anymore, but it’s still pretty obvious. Like in typing this, black-on-white, I’m seeing some analog-like ghosting around the letters. Really something I haven’t seen since going all-digital, it’s kind of disturbing.

Could even be my cables.. but they work just dandy with the AMD card. I’m pretty ready to say the AMD HD6970 is faster enough than the nVidia GTX570 at all things Vegas to justify the slight limits I see with OpenCL only on the AMD vs. OpenCL and CUDA support on the nVidia. For example, the TMPGenc encoder I use sometimes… they claim CUDA accelerated support. But that’s only applied to video filters you add, not the AVC rendering itself. I also hear that the new Neat Video gets about 2x improvement with a fast enough CUDA GPU. But it’s faster anyway in Rev 3.0, and I don’t use this enough for that to be the deciding factor (and now, with an HDSLR added to my camcorder collection, maybe low-light won’t be the problem it once was).

As I almost discovered yesterday, going to the brand new Vegas can be a risk on a new project. Sony’s strict issue with .veg files not being backward compatible makes it a problem to regress to Vegas 10, if I need to. You can start the project in Vegas 10, of course. And more than half the video work I do is not for significant pay, so the deadlines are usually less of an issue (yesterday’s video was for “the day job”, but fortunately I found a work-around for the one real bug I ran into).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The GPU acceleration is a spotty thing, what you’ll actually see. I’m not done, but I’m qualifying both HD6970 and GTX570… they’re roughly the same price, and about what I’m willing to spend.

I found, for example, that GPU acceleration could actually slow down preview… I got 57.4fps on AVCHD 720/60p video with Sony’s Bright+Contrast plug-in applied, Vegas 11 (11% faster than Vegas 10… hurray!), but it dropped to 40fps using the HD6970 with GPU acceleration on. Go figure. On the other hand, layering four of these, converted to MXF MPEG-2, with transparency, I dropped to 2.4fps without the GPU. The HD6970 raised this to 5fps. But the GTX570 didn’t change it one bit.

GPUs love special effects and animated stills. On a segment made from a video animation I did awhile back, CPU-only Vegas 11 did 5.1fps, with GPU acceleration and the HD6970, I got 14fps.

On Sony’s VP11 Benchmark project, I see 8fps on plan Vegas 11, 28.5fps on the HD6970, 27.5fps on the GTX570.

Rendering can vary too. On a fairly straight AVCHD render, I saw the HD6970 acceleration slowing MainConcept MPEG-2 by 32%, but speeding up Sony AVC by 14.5%… this it the same project that has preview slowed by 22.5% … go figure. Moving to that layered project, I see a 79.5% improvement on MainConcept MPEG-2, but Sony AVC only improved by 22%. The GTX570 actually crashed on GPU-mode MainConcept MPEG-2, but did 11% improvement on Sony AVC.

Rendering my animation to Sony AVC only improved 25%, despite the fairly dramatic preview speedup. But going to the Sony benchmark, I saw 118% improvement in AVC rendering with the HD6970, which is closer to the speedup I see in preview. The GTX570, which gave nearly the same preview boost, only did 52% improvement in rendering… and that with both CPU and GPU use higher than on the HD6970.

Not quite sure what all this means, only that, while GPU acceleration is real, it’s not perfect, and sometimes not all that significant.

I also ran into a couple of bugs in Vegas 11. I’m getting the “Render stopped… I don’t know why” type message for a number of presets that work just dandy in Vegas 10; in particular, Main Concept MPEG-2 renders at 50Mb/s, which seem to fail instantly. No idea here.

I also ran into one segment that was just unrenderable. This is an an animated slideshow I did yesterday (very rapidly… I found I had one less day to work on, our marketing guy had neglected to mention his deadline). At frame 907, rendering just froze. Didn’t matter what I output to. Preview worked just dandy. GPU was not a factor. I may have preserved this, not sure — again, I was in panic mode at the time, and I still had music to complete. I suffled some stuff around, switched out a transition or two, and it started working.

So I’m convinced, if nothing else, we have a N.X revision product here, and there may yet be bugs to solve.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

What John said. Also, I wouldn’t rely on HDD as my only archival format. Certainly a USB HDD is about as future-proof as one can imagine for an electrical interface (do use USB; no guarantee SATA will still be around… some laptops are already using PCIe based flash modules).

And hard drives do last a long time. It used to be about five years of active operation, today, maybe ten or more. But just sitting there, there’s no guarantee. It might be still good in a 100 years. Or it might be mechanically compromised: corrosion in the bearings, stiction due to hardened lubricants, etc.

I have all kinds of stuff backed up on HDD. The critical stuff is also on optical disc. In particular, good Blu-rays are likely to outlast just about anything else: they don’t scratch as easily as DVDs, they use phase-change rather than organic dyes as a recording medium, etc. Of course, we don’t know about format rot… but it’s extremely likely Blu-ray sticks around for the consumer move to 4K video (BD-XL already exists, and is already large enough for 4K), so you can ask the same question in 10 years.

And that’s the real key to archival — upgrading your archives. What seemed like a good idea in 1991 (backup to tape) might have been a bad move in 2001, worse yet in 2011. The good news is, of course, that everything you had archived back in 1991 probably fits on a single BD-R. If in 10-15 years we’re decided that those cheap 10TB Memristor-based USB 4.0 drives most people use for their 8K video collections (all downloaded, since everyone but me had unlimited gigabit Internet to the home), then those archives will all transport easily enough.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m pretty durn sure the HD6870 is working… that’s one of two cards actually tested on Sony’s benchmark page.

I assume you do know how to enable GPU acceleration in Vegas. Are you sure you have the OpenCLI ICD installed? Did you try another OpenCL program (for example, the Luxmark 1.0 benchmark)?

I’m asking to help, but also because I have yet to see an AMD driver package install correctly. I get crashes, warnings, etc. and never managed to get the “Vision Engine” Control Center to run (when I try to start it, I see nothing, but my system gets really unstable and eventually crashes — wonderful). I do see OpenCL, but I did install that separately.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I have a GTX 570 in my system at the moment. The 285.62 drivers really did speed things up, versus whatever I had shipped. I’m comparing this to an AMD HD 6970, and so far, the 6970 is winning.

With the new driver, I found I’m getting GPU math errors, leading to crashes, with the GTX 570 and rendering out to MainConcept MPEG-2 or MainConcept AVC. No crash if I disable the GPU. I also found it crashes the Sandra Lite GpCryptBench benchmark.

Of course, that’s nVidia. On the AMD side, I found that the AMD installer crashes. So when installing, you actually have no idea if a proper install has happened. It crashed because I had a newer version of some optional Microsoft library, so the installer didn’t install, and the AMD installer isn’t properly checking return codes. Or some-such. I was never able to run the AMD Control program.

It’s not like these guys are new at this. I ran into this kind of stuff 15 years ago; you think they’d have it nailed by now.

-Dave