Stephen Mann
Forum Replies Created
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Without seeing what you are describing, I strongly suspect that you are seeing compression artifacts.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Just ignore the warning. Experienced users know that DVDA is laughingly conservative with estimating space requirements. If you know that your MPEG2 and AC3 files are less than 4.3Gb, then you shouldn’t have any problems in DVDA. (If you use lots of menus, extras folders or Jacket Picture in your DVD, you need to allow for those as well, but for most users, 4.3Gb will work).
To their defense, estimating filesize of an encode is just that – an estimate. NO program can accurately predict how well an encoder will compress a video file without actually encoding it.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
[i]”You’ll also notice that original Vegas knew not a thing about multiple processors, SIMD instructions (SSE, etc), or the x86-64 instruction set. Yet, it evolved to use each of these resources just dandy, and without most users really paying much attention to that fact.”[/]i
I remember when we (programmers) made the evolutionary steps from 8-bit to 16, then 32. Somewhere along the way we picked up multiprocessing in the O/S. In every step we were introduced to more instruction sets and system calls. But, it was evolutionary. Our programs required little rewrite to adopt the new technology and our underlying function remained largely unchanged.
The CUDA API is not evolutionary as it requires a significant rewrite of how the video is processed – an underlying function of the program. And, as you point out, the competing CUDA platforms have different, proprietary API’s.
Given that non-use of the GPU is probably the number one slam that Vegas-haters and some adherents use to denigrate Vegas, if it were as easy as you suggest, don’t you think that Sony would have done it by now?
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Thanks on the name.
Remember that Vegas started as an audio editor. (I believe that Video was added in Version 3). There was no GPU in the picture. No graphics, no GPU. Vegas was designed from the beginning to be hardware independent – it would run on any Windows PC and there was no special hardware requirements. It was this framework that Vegas developers were working with when they introduced video. It was an evolutionary addition to the audio product.
If Sony tried to rework Vegas to use the GPU for preview, it simply wouldn’t be Vegas any more. And we probably couldn’t afford it.
As I said, it’s all conjecture and I would welcome comment from anyone who knows the inside workings of Vegas Pro.
But, back to my earlier question. In FCP, Premiere or Avid, can you simply hit “play” and preview the whole video?
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
It’s been many years since I’ve used Premieret can you click “play” and preview the whole video in Premiere?
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
You need to tell us what processor, how much memory, hard-disk configuration – those specs.
Also what antivirus program is running? Some, especially those whose names begin with an “N”, are tremendous resource hogs. (I use Microsoft Security Essentials).
In Vegas you can go into options/preferences/video tab and reduce the preview RAM. Some people reduce it all the way to zero and others find improved performance with a small, but non-zero amount. (Mine is set to 512Kb.) This is ram that is set aside for ram preview (Shift-B), but it is unavailable for rendering or encoding. If you’re never using shift-B Ram Preview, then it’s wasted memory.
And you can try increasing your paging file size. It’s a bit difficult to find the settings, so here’s a map:
Open Control Panel
System
Advanced tab
Performance Settings
Advanced tabHere, select “programs” in processor scheduling.
Now, you can change the Virtual Memory. I would suggest a value of 1.5X the currently allocated value. The old advice of 2X or 3X your RAM is, well, old advice when a few MB of RAM was all that a PC had. The largest paging file that you can select in Windows is 4,095 megabytes (MB).
Hope this helps.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
The more I think about how Vegas non-destructive editing works, the less likely, I am certain, that the GPU would ever be used for preview. Or could, for that matter.
Vegas does not edit directly on the video media like Premiere, FCP or Avid. Instead, everything you do on the timeline is in the veg file (or memory if you haven’t saved the veg file). During preview or rendering, Vegas applies the instructions in the veg file for each frame of the media on the timeline and output to the resulting video or preview device. You never touched the original media. Vegas does this one frame at a time. To get anything to the GPU, Vegas has to first assemble the frame from the instructions in the veg file. There’s just nothing left for a GPU to do.
I wonder if the other editing programs use the GPU for preview because they have to? I really don’t think that GPU preview is the panacea people think it may be.
This is conjecture on my part based on my experience as a programmer in a former life, but no one with intimate knowledge of the program’s internals has ever said anything to the contrary.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Low Memory or Out of Memory does not mean “Not enough RAM”, though adding RAM can sometimes fix a “Low Memory” waning. A “Low Memory” warning usually means that you have exceeded your commit limit. You need either a bigger page file, more physical memory, or both.
One of the biggest sources of confusion over Windows memory usage is the whole concept of virtual memory compared to physical memory. Windows organizes memory, physical and virtual, into pages. Each page is a fixed size (typically 4 KB). To make things more confusing, there’s also a page file (sometimes referred to as a paging file and dynamic RAM). Many Windows users still think of this as a swap file, a bit of disk storage that is only called into play when you absolutely run out of physical RAM. In versions of Windows starting with Vista, that is no longer the case. The most important thing to realize is that physical memory and the page file added together equal the commit limit, which is the total amount of virtual memory that all processes can reserve and commit.
All Windows since XP (and Unix/Linux for that matter) always wants to have page space. Always. Programs (including drivers and codecs) like to and are allowed to pre-allocate as much memory as they want. Even if they are never ever going to actually use it. Sometimes those programs properly deallocate memory, sometimes they don’t (resulting in “memory leak”). Sometimes, programs leave parts of themselves in allocated memory just in case you are going to run that program again. (MS Word, Excel and other Office programs are particularly adept at this). If you have no page file and a program wants to commit some for itself, your PC will crash (AKA, BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death).
Paging file configuration is in the System properties, which you can get to by typing “sysdm.cpl” into the Run dialog, clicking on the Advanced tab, clicking on the Performance Options button, clicking on the Advanced tab (this is really advanced), and then clicking on the Change button. I would suggest a value of 1.5X the currently allocated value. The old advice of 2X or 3X your RAM is, well, old advice when a few MB of RAM was normal. The largest paging file that you can select in Windows is 4,095 megabytes (MB).
Also, Windows supports up to 16 paging files, but each must be on a separate volume, so if you have more than one internal disk drive you could try enabling a Paging File on your second hard-disk. DO NOT put a paging file on an external drive because if it’s not present when Windows boots, then Windows will crash.
For more information, see https://support.microsoft.com/kb/237740 and https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2267427
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Thanks, John. I had forgotten that WMV is edited by proxy since it happens so fast.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
I can’t think of why it shouldn’t be working. When you put a veg file on the timeline, Vegas treats it like any other media. Can you open the veg file in Vegas without problems?
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com