David Shirey
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
-
I’ve had the exact problem you’re describing, with the audio continuing while Vegas locked up and had to crash the process. I was going to skip 12 entirely but I happened to be building a new pc at work right when I came out so I figured why not just upgrade and then I won’t even have 11 installed, which of course is never a good idea since new Vegases are always buggy at first. My solution for now is like you said, just disable GPU acceleration, which I realize is not a “solution” but I’m hopefully they’ll resolve these issues with some updates sooner rather than later.
-
When burning blu-rays I always use h264 which can do more with less bitrate than mpeg2. So whereas my mpeg2 blurays would normally have an average mbps of 25mpbs back in 2008, my h264 normally does fine with 22. Technically the blu-ray standard for video stream goes up to 40, but I’ve seen cheaper players have trouble if you’re consistently going much over 30, so I wouldn’t go over that unless there’s some specific reason to.
-
I don’t believe rendering mpeg2 out of Vegas is actually GPU accelerated. Intel’s next chipset is supposed to have hardware mpeg2 encoding built in which is interesting, but that won’t be out until next Spring I imagine.
-
I also can’t recommend enough the use of SSD’s for your boot drive. Most people here will tell you to never put the media on the same drive as your OS/programs anyway, so why get a slower multi-terabyte hard drive that generates a lot of heat if you’ll never come close to filling it up. I find 120gb SSD is fine for my needs, but if you do find yourself using Premiere, it has a way of sucking up as much free space as you give it, so delete temporary files if you need more room.
-
I’ll throw in that I just put a new machine together with a gtx 650ti which played XDCAM EX (mpeg2 hd) footage just fine, but crashes constantly playing graphics or h264 footage from dslr’s. Turning off GPU acceleration in the preview window “fixed” this problem but I assume actually fixing the problem is on Sony’s to do list.
-
That’s very odd. I’ve never heard of someone requesting Sony’s XDCAM in an Apple Quicktime wrapper. I’ve had studios ask me for XDCAM files and they just mean the normal mpeg2 HD (usually 1080i) files that an actual XDCAM camera would generate. When in doubt I always try to bypass the client and speak directly to the person on the other end who needs the footage to find out exactly what’s best.
We shoot on XDCAM EX camera’s and I always import MXF’s into Vegas, but I wouldn’t just give another company mxf files because last time I checked Premiere didn’t handle them very fast and Final Cut Pro didn’t like them at all.
-
The things Nigel posted are all true, but that’s why I was asking about GoPro’s, since I assumed you’d be dealing with 100% h264 footage and rendering out to h264 720p mp4’s, the GPU acceleration would actually be a great boon to you. Of course if you guys are jumping out of planes with shoulder-mounted XDCAM cameras then… well good luck 😉
Networked rendering was a nice feature that I never used once but it’s a shame they got rid of. However if there are 4 editors working simultaneously I don’t imagine the other 3 would appreciate you stealing their CPU power.
-
As a quick follow-up, traditional hard drive prices are still pretty jacked up right now because of all the flooding in Thailand last year which really hurt production, so definitely investigate the cost of traditional hard drives vs. ssd. You can even RAID SSD’s together if you want some serious speed, but at that point your bottleneck may still be the processor rendering, not your read/write speeds. Another thing worth noting is that Vegas is going to use EITHER your CPU or GPU to render those videos, so there probably isn’t much advantage in buying really fast ones of each. You’d have to check some benchmarks but if I was you, I’d go a little cheaper on the CPU, and buy more expensive GPU’s. That way in a few years it’ll be super easy to just buy 4 new video cards since you probably won’t need whole new pc’s if you’re still using the same recording equipment and editing software.
Also your original post said Vegas Pro 10. Consider 11, that way it can utilize the fast GPU for the preview window. Overall I’d say figure out what you want then buy/build one of them. If it works and you don’t have any major issues, get 3 more.
-
This may not be conventional but here’s what I might consider if you’re working on multiple projects simultaneously. Just have a bunch of different internal drives. Have the SSD for the OS and programs, then since these are all 7 minute projects and you’re not going to keep raw footage around (although do you backup the 720p final renders in case clients lose their copies in the future? Use external for that,) just get a couple more SSD’s. SSD’s are getting cheaper by the month so if you don’t need large ones you can spend the money on the really fast ones. You could have 4 total, one for the OS, one for project 1, project 2, then one for a project to render to while you load/work on the other. Maybe I’m just SSD-happy but if you have such a specific workflow and never have to worry about getting bogged down in 3 hour projects, I’d make a really purpose-built machine. And if there are 4 editors crammed in close proximity you might appreciate not having all the heat that 20-some traditional hard drives raided together would generate.
Most motherboards today should have USB 3.0 ports but I wouldn’t worry about it much. You don’t want to be editing off that anyway and if you’re giving the mp4’s to clients on flash drives they won’t be usb 3.0 so that won’t help with the transfer time. If they’re give-away flash drives you’re probably not blowing cash getting usb drives with the fastest usb 2.0 transfer rates anyway, right?
One thing that you probably already know but is worth mentioning, is if you’re looking to increase render time and your output is 720p, make sure you’re shooting in 720p. I don’t know if you’re using GoPro’s or whatever and you’re probably shooting at 60p so that you can have great slow motion, but there’s really no benefit to shoot at 1080p if everything will be 720p when it’s delivered.
Skydive videos sure are fun to capture and watch, but it’s a shame you’ve got to crank so many out so quickly, kind of sucks the fun out of editing. Do they make you use Lenny Kravitz’ Fly Away on every video? 😛
-
Are you using the latest Vegas 11 build? They did recently add some new templates to the MainConcept h264 codec, worth checking out. I don’t recall Sony’s AVC having a variable 2-pass option at all.