[Sonic 67]

Sony claims that supports OpenCL. That would take care of editing and your two GPU should be used in that mode (but not in crossfire, that’s for games only).
However, in my experience, the actual encoding process doesn’t make use efficiently of the latest AMD (or nVidia) GPU’s.
Not sure who’s blame it is.
MainConcept encoder was top of the line in 2010. But it wasn’t updated since.
However, since then, nVidia and AMD released some new hardware encoders and associated code for them – which Sony ignored completely.
Their updates are far and in between, no real feedback to community (it’s a wasteland there)… Last software update in 11/2014.

I am using in parallel CybeLink’s NLE and sadly they are much more on top of their game. They release updates, beta fixes, listen to their forums… And we are talking of even 4K hardware accelerated encoding here!

[Sonic 67]

Vegas it scales up decently with both number of cores and frequency, but the “cores” that are resulted from Hyper Threading are not real cores, so they might be less used.
What counts in the end is pure multicore performance and you could find plenty of benchmarks on the net.

[Sonic 67]

For AMD I know that’s their encoder. It’s using the GPU cores though…

With nvidia, NLE have used CUDA long time before OpenCL was even an option. Cyberlink used the CUDA encoder provided by nvidia and when nvidia changed to the new nvenc (that uses the new hardware block), they adjusted quickly.
They did the same for intel Haswell and the new encoder block.
4K hardware encoding is a premium feature today.

I cannot see why is so hard for Sony to do the same. Are they just “sucking in” the revenue with no actual development?

[Sonic 67]

Jury is not out on that yet:

https://blog.euclidiq.com/video-compression-blog/the-video-codec-fight-h.265-vs.-vp9

[Sonic 67]

I have also on my PC Cyberlink’s PowerDirector 13. It is at least twice as fast at rendering compared to Vegas, uses latest GPU acceleration provided by nVidia, ATI and Intel, not a 4 year old encoder like Vegas.
Sure, it cannot be used for commercial work due to licensing of AVC, but Vegas could take an example from them using latest available software: nVidia with Maxwell 2 and Intel with Haswell can encode h264 up to 4K hardware accelerated!
Also AMD GPU’s can use GPU even for Windows Media Video files, not only for H264 encoded files.

[Sonic 67]

On the other hand, editing and then converting any other video format into ProRes will not improve the edit quality, it will still be a “hack”. Same for DNxHD or CineForm codecs – they have to be used during production, not just at delivery.

PS: There are also cameras that shoot directly into ProRes format but those are not cheap consumer type – Arri, Blackmagic, Atomos…

[Sonic 67]

What CPU/GPU do you have? On my system with 6 core Xeon and ATI HD7970 I see some GPU activity during rendering in DVD Architect, and the rendering time is 1:1.

[Sonic 67]

That influences only the editing process, does not affect rendering.
What render option are you using? Some have GPU capabilities, but need to be manually activated, some use only the CPU.

What I suspect is the culprit though is… overheating. My opinion – laptops are not to be used for sustained video editing or video gaming. Sure, manufacturers will sell you one, but just a few have adequate cooling for long term.
That’s why third-party cooling pads were made in the first place 🙂

You can monitor the temperature running something like Realtemp

PS: For your system you should use Sony AVC render, it can use the nVidia GPU or the Intel QuickSync encoders:

[Sonic 67]

I have linked here on forum the same product a while ago. I am interested in it’s performance, but for now I don’t have the need to shell the $70 for it.

Maybe you can report back here the results, if you decide for it?

[Sonic 67]

Maybe a dedicated MPEG2 converter will work better in preserving the VHS quality? Similar with:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116029