[Sonic 67]

SSD are not great at supporting writes. Maximum 3000 cycles on selected models. So I would avoid putting video files to edit on it, it will kill it fast.

However, I made a RAM disk on my PC and use it as drive for editing. Faster than ant SSD/HDD you can get.
Shaved some 2 seconds on a 5 minute project 🙂

So no, faster HDD is not really doing too much if your system bottlenecks somewhere else.

[Sonic 67]

[Norman Black] “story. Video encoding is not a very parallel task and forcing GPU use to get parallelism forces compromises.”
That’s a fallacy. You have a data file that has repetitive points that are independent of others (the I-frames). The points between them are not parallelizable easy, but how hard is to read ahead 200-1000 of those blocks (between the I-frames) and give them to the GPU cores to work in parallel on them?
Actually parallelism works for 2, 4, 6, 12 CPU’s, why you assume that won’t work in higher numbers for GPU’s?

CUDA encoding was different from beginning, is basically C++ programming running on different processors. The fact that nVidia didn’t get it perfect in 2011 is irrelevant today, they updated the CUDA encoder constantly until 2014.
Only Sony is stuck in 2010 and that was my original comment.

Also, since 2014 the quality of included encoders in intel Hashwell and nVidia Maxwell (2nd gen) focused on quality.
Assuming that “GPU encoding is bad” just because cause in 2102 a certain OpenCL implementation sucked is just not OK.

[Sonic 67]

[Norman Black] “It is uncommon for NLE developers to develop their own encoders.”

Just two examples: Cyberlink and Pinnacle (Corel) have their own encoders, based on AMD, nVidia and Intel SDK’s.
And even if that was the case, why is not Sony requesting DivX to update the MainConcept encoders? Don’t want to pay, that’s why.
As for “gpu doesn’t match the cpu quality” – that’s just something that people say because they assume it has to be true.
Same software algorithms can be run of CPU or on CUDA/OpenCL cores, so the result should be identical.

[Sonic 67]

[Norman Black] “It is not Sony lack of interest here. To this day, Mainconcept has never updated their AVC GPU encoders to support newer architectures.”

So why Sony didn’t developed their own encoders to use GPU either? Is lack of interest in investing money, just in taking them.
nVidia and Intel have free SDK’s and libraries to build encoders using their hardware. Other companies use those successfully, even the free apps make use of them – maybe they should just hire the guy from Handbrake for example.

[Sonic 67]

Sadly, your brand-new video card is useless in Vegas. Thanks to Sony lack of interest in updating a critical piece of software from December 2010 until now. Basically if your GPU is newer than that date, the MainConcept encoder will not use CUDA.

If you have two PCI-E slots, you could just add another videocard from 400 or 500 generation of GeForce and gain hardware acceleration.
I have used with success a GeForce GTS450, GTX480, a Quadro 2000, a Quadro 6000.

As for your CPU (I7 4790k), don’t worry, it blows out of water older Intel 6 cores (including many Xeons) or newer AMD 8 cores…
See here a benchmark:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
Search for 4790K – it has a score of 11,249.

What is even sadder is that your CPU has integrated a video encoder that can do hardware accelerated up to (including) 4k encoding.
Same goes for the integrated nvenc hardware in your GTX970!

Sony has no clue how to use those (or no interest), but a small Taiwanese company like CyberLink (PowerDirector13) knows!
You can test drive their software for free 30 days (and maybe post back the results)…

[Sonic 67]

The 9650SE-4 is just a 4 port card. The -8i is the 8 port card (couldn’t find in UK ebay.
Example link on US ebay
Another example link.

[Sonic 67]

You can use how many you want. RAID options will be different (like RAID5 needs minimum 3 drives, RAID 10 minimum 4…).
However, The more drives you have in RAID 0, the more increase the chances for a disaster. The probability of a failure is multiplying accordingly.
For long-term storage try at least a RAID 5 (for redundancy) – with three drives it will have 2/3 capacity of a single drive, with 4 drives will have 3/4.

I am using now a controller that I got from eBay – 3ware AMCC 9650SE-4LPML.
It’s performance during video rendering is above and beyond what my Intel ICH10R could do (with the CPU used at 100% by video software).

[Sonic 67]

[Aleksandar Joksimovic] “My friend has older computer than mine, and he doesn’t have any problems at all.
He never had a problem with dark render or lag or anything on his computer.”

Me, like your friend, don’t have that issue either. So it would be fair to say it is not a Vegas problem, it is your PC problem.
Update your video drivers, uninstall any codec “packs”, look into Mirillis Action compatibility issues…

[Sonic 67]

John, what makes the difference between your result sand ours is that your test has GPU-accelerated effects. Those use the OpenCL (or CUDA) with the newer video cards (like R290).
But the actual encoding is not accelerated with them.

I think is ridiculous that Sony doesn’t do anything about this. Today nVidia released GTX960 with Maxwell 2 core, and it has full hardware HVEC / h265 encoding and decoding included. When it will be included in Vegas? At present development speed, I would say… 4 more years?

[Sonic 67]

Use MediaInfo to see exactly the details of the video files that you are dealing with.
https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo