Kell Hymer
Forum Replies Created
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I load all of my source material for the project I am working on at any given moment onto a PCI Express based SSD. I do not remember the random IOPS data, but my sustained read/writes are close to 1200Mbps. This is twice as fast as the best SATA based SSDs on the market.
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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I do have some experience with RAIDs but it’s not extensive. The RAIDs I set up were all hardware RAIDs. Software may be different but RAIDs typically require that the HDDs not only be the same capacity, but usually the exact same make and model. There may be exceptions, but it’s risky. I set up one with different HDDs and every time I did, it worked fine for days to a few weeks before it failed. It didn’t like 2 different drives.
To best answer your question, tell me what your goal is. Why do you want to set up a RAID?
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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I did a ton of research and inquiring about GPUs and hardware in the following thread. Mixed in it are comments about CPU and GPU utilization:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/984273
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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[Nick McMahon] “Reading thru an SSD optimisation guide on Windows (7 & 8) it justifies turning off the pagefiling system cos systems now have much more memory available in comparison to when the pagefile was designed.”
Good thing you are on a creative forum and not on a hardware/tech forum. Otherwise you might have started a war on this thread! For some bizarre reason, this is a volatile topic among PC enthusiasts. The debate to set a page file or not is as passionate as political debates; everyone and their mother has a opinion, but 99.9% of them have no freaking idea what they are even talking about. Having said that, I will now proceed to give my opinion…lol.
6GB is certainly not enough. I often fully saturate the 32GB on my machine. The windows page file acts as a buffer by reserving a portion of your HDD or SSD as a dedicated overflow in the event you saturate your RAM. This space acts as a virtual memory, albeit significantly slower than your RAM. If Windows detects that you are running out of memory, it will begin dumping memory to the page file to avoid a system crash.
Feel free to skip this paragraph if you are already familiar with how a page file works. Think of it this way, your hard drive or SSD is like a massive library of books. Your RAM is your desk space where you read the books. If your desk is small, you can only open one book at a time. If you need to cross reference a topic in your studies, you must close your current book, put it back on the library shelf, retrieve the reference book, place it on your desk, and read. Now that you have done that, you return the reference book to the shelf and then go and grab the original title and return to you desk. Repeat this process each time you need to reference another book. To speed things up, a large desk is required. With it, you can retrieve multiple books from the shelves and lay them all out for quick access to cross reference as needed. Suppose you decided to conduct a study on the rational of politicians (sorry, I’m on a kick here 🙂 ). If you do not completely fry your brain (CPU) in the process, you may find that even with a large desk, you still do not have sufficient working space. The page file is the equivalent of clearing some library shelf space near your desk to stage, if needed, some of the books you are referencing. Accessing them is not as fast as accessing the data on your desk, but it is much easier than walking the isles of the library to retrieve and return the same books over and over.
There are 3 primary reasons that disabling or limiting the page file size will “optimize” your SSD:
First = Space. SSDs have come down in price but even now, the cost per GB is far more expensive than it is on an HDD. As such, most SSDs do not have a large capacity. Allocating a page file renders that chunk of data unusable for any other purpose, thus limiting precious storage space for your files.
Second = Performance. Similar to HDDS, SSD performance (data transfer speeds) begins to drop as the drive becomes full. I read somewhere that performance degradation begins once 50% of the disk is filled but I do not know if that is an accurate number. After some point, the more data on the drive, the slower it gets. I have experienced this first hand. The performance drops are significant. The page file adds to the utilized space on the SSD. This was a much more serious concern in the early days when SSDs had limited capacity and did not manage garbage effectively. Modern SSDs now have TRIM to manage garbage. TRIM is a complicated subject but to keep it simple, imagine if you never took out the trash (deleted files) and instead piled it all into some corner in your house. Sooner than later, the clutter would build up making it difficult to move around your house. TRIM takes out the trash (manages deleted files).
Third = Durability. This is arguably the biggest concern of page file use on an SSD. SSD technology has improved significantly, making this less of a concern. However, the cells in an SSD can only handle so many read and write operations. A page file located on an SSD has the potential to wear out the drive faster with an unusually high amount of read and writes as it is treating it like RAM. While this is a legitimate concern, the life span of an SSD significantly exceeds that of an HDD. SSDs will last 10 to 20 years under typical use. The best bet is to set up the page file on separate HDD, or a dedicated caching (32 or 64 GB) SSD if you wish the page file to be fast
[Nick McMahon] “I did so and only came across an issue when i tried to render a vegas project and it crashed at 6% claiming I didn’t have enough memory to complete the task. Turned the pagefile back on with automatic setting and problem disappeared.”
This is not surprising. With enough RAM, Windows will usually function just fine without the page file, however, many programs require a page file, even if the allocated space is minimal. If a page file is not found, some programs may crash or may not even start. 6GB alone is not enough for both Windows and Sony Vegas. Vegas “might” be stable with no page file and more RAM. I have noticed that Vegas, or even my PC, will crash when I use all 32GB of RAM w/o ever using my 4GB page file. This could simply be because the RAM used to preview or pre-render creates a large data file, rather than smaller chunks of data, that are too large to move to the page file, but I am not sure.
In short:
Get more RAM. Get a lot more RAM.
Do not disable the page file
Allocate only a small amount of disk space to the page file or set the page file up on another (dedicated) drive if your SSD has limited capacity.
Keeping the page file on the SSD is generally not an issue unless you plan on using it for 15 years without upgrading SSDs during that time. Note that having a large page file, but limited RAM, will result in a more rapid degradation of your SSD.
Hope that helps!
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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[Russ Froze] “Export as image sequence then import individual frames into media pool select all and drop on timeline. Use crossfade to fade between frames”
This is what I was thinking as well. However, if the 30 second source video is sped up like a time-lapse, the differences between frames may be significant enough that the crossfades will look…well…like a crossfade. If the video is real time, exporting as images and crossfading them should look great.
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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Or just loop the video by dragging it w/o holding shift.
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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[Nick McMahon] “Also I have one of these Ribcage Gopro lens mount mod kits on order. This mod kit allows you to use any c or cs mount lens and really open up your gopro to get rid of fisheye distortion altogether. Not expensive especially if you do the mod yourself.
“Thanks Nick. That looks like an awesome product. Down the road I may do that with an extra GoPro. However, I still need to use all of the accessories, mounts, and sometimes I want the fisheye effect.
I am curious how others compensate for the stretched edges after fisheye removal. It does appear that shooting in 2.7K at 60fps will be the best bet if the lighting is good. That way I can crop as needed and I should not have bad rolling shutter problems. 2.7K just eats up data fast….especially once converted to Cineform. I think I’m going to need a pair of 6TB HDDs!
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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[Aleksey Tarasov] “I use a stand-alone application – Defishr. I am satisfied with the result.”
Do you get any stretching at the edges?
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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So how difficult was it to turn the GTX into a Quadro? I have seen a few things online but nothing that breaks it down to well.
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
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Sony once told me this is hard to diagnose and it is likely a bottleneck somewhere in the system. However, many of us have some wicked fast systems and simple Main Concept projects should not be too taxing. However, I used to have a GTX460 with my i7 3820 and I noticed that CPU only renders were faster than CPU + GPU renders! After some research, my best hypothesis was that my CPU was too fast….well, rather, the CPU could process the data faster by itself than the time it took it to process, determine what could be sent to the GPU, offload it from the cached memory, send it to the GPU cache and/or VRAM, the GPU process it, unload it from the GPU cacheand/or VRAM, send it back to the CPU memory cache, and then the CPU patch it into the appropriate place in the data stream. I think for some codecs, video that is not too compressed, or less complex projects, it is simply easier for the CPU to do it all. The GPU really helps when heavy processing is required on supported codecs. In such cases, the extra time required to transfer the data back and forth between the CPU and GPU is worth it because the CPU would require significantly longer to process it.
I think it was on this thread that I mentioned OpenCL 2.0. I am very intruiged by OpenCL 2.0 because it allows for the CPU and GPU (or other acceleration hardware/cards) to share the same memory cache. So instead of transferring memory between RAM and caches, both can access the same cache. I do not know if the GPU would have to access the CPU cache or if both can use the GPU cache and RAM. Either way, both processors will be able to access the same data, process it, and spit it back out to the same data location simultaneously. At this time, only Quadros and Firepros support OpenCL 2.0. However, AMD just released a new driver supporting it. Sony confirmed that Vegas 12 does support OpenCL 2.0, but does not take advantage of the shared memory enhancement. OpenCL 2.0 is still very new and software developers are only experimenting with it. Additionally, the firmware for various hardware would almost certainly have to support this as well. As such, shared memory might not be around for some time in Sony Vegas and it will likely require much newer hardware yet to be released.
Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)