Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future)
by Kyle Johnson
on
Jul 9, 2008 at 3:13:01 am
I've been using Vegas on less-than-impressive machines and have grown attached. I'm looking to get a new desktop and am wondering what I should be looking at in order to maximize Vegas performance. Better render times would be great, but what I really want is to achieve higher frame rate/resolution. During more complex video segments (many composited tracks, etc), the frame rate drops so low (or I have to drop resolution so low to get frame rate back up) that I have to render the segment i'm working on, watch it in windows movie player, and then make changes. What hardware should i be looking at to keep frame rate high (or is there perhaps a more appropriate software package?)
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by Steve Rhoden on Jul 9, 2008 at 11:11:25 am
Really, sony vegas isn't hardware dependent....just get an overall
powerful computer, that has good processing power, enough memory (3-4gb), etc.
What needs to be taken notice of however, is the requirements of certain other software and plugins that you might be using. Some Compositing applications, high end plugins and visual effects
software, requires specific hardware and software requirements for
efficient workflow....(openGL, GPU video card,etc)..Those are the ones you have to build your system around.
Steve Rhoden
Creative Director
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by John Rofrano on Jul 9, 2008 at 11:54:05 am
As Steve said, Vegas uses raw CPU power and nothing else so get the most powerful PC you can afford. Quad Cores will help with rendering times. Here are the specs from my editing PC that I built a year ago. It's very stable and has plenty of power for Vegas.
For the future you might even consider an 8 Core PC because Vegas will being coming out with a 64-bit version that can use 8 cores. That will be my next machine.
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by Steve Rhoden on Jul 9, 2008 at 12:04:18 pm
Wonderful specs John....Boy, cant wait to give the 64 bit version a run.
(just add off-line editing feature, and Vegas will be industrial leader surpassing Final cut and Avid even for films)...lol
Steve Rhoden
Creative Director
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by John Rofrano on Jul 9, 2008 at 7:22:59 pm
I always keep that page updated with my latest specs.
I have held off on building an 8-core because the current solutions are extremely expensive and a slight "dead-end". In other words, the desktop motherboards that support dual 4-core processors today "i.e., the Skulltrail platform" are the last of their generation and the new Nehalem CPU's (8-cores on a single chip) will require a new motherboard. But that's always the case with technology so right now I'm waiting but I may bite of the prices drop a bit.
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by Kyle Johnson on Jul 9, 2008 at 10:55:52 pm
So with these higher end processors is preview frame rate evern an issue? It doesn't take much for my frame rate to drop significantly on my current putput system (Pentium 4, 512MB RAM), but, at least according to Task Manager the processor isn't being taxed all that much.
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by Danny Hays on Jul 10, 2008 at 12:27:33 am
Hello, We use a quad core at work and compaired to our old P4 3.6 gz dual, it's render time are way faster but the preview frame rate is still slow with alot of track and or effects. I really dont see much of a difference there. I drag my preview on to my 32 HDTV and when filling most of the screen it's slower than when I shrink it down. But compaired to non hardware based Avid or Finalcut systems, where you have to render alot of things before you can preview it at all, Vegas is the best by far for functionality and ease of use in my opinion. Danny Hays
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by John Rofrano on Jul 10, 2008 at 2:07:36 am
As Danny said, preview is unaffected by multiple cores in Vegas because it is a single threaded process so it will never be faster than one of your cores. This is not an issue for DV but with HDV you can easily peg the processor and get much lower frame rates. At that point you have to reduce your preview quality if you want to keep the frame rates up or use RAM Preview to quickly check small sections.
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by Kyle Johnson on Jul 10, 2008 at 3:15:56 am
Thanks everyone for your input.
Since prerendering is essentially the same thing, it would benefit from multithreading on multi core processors right?
It seems to me the ideal (for my system anyway) would be to have one core running the the standard thread, and the other/rest continue to render, (I think they called in background rendering in an old Pinnacle program i used). Is something like this possible with Vegas that I've just been missing?
Re: Building a new machine around Vegas 8.0 (and future) by John Rofrano on Jul 10, 2008 at 11:38:10 am
Vegas doesn't do background rendering like Pinnacle does. It has the ability to pre-render sections to disc and it can do a quick RAM render to check a small section like a transition, but these are both foreground tasks. I agree that background rendering with a quad core would be a nice option to have. You might want to make a Product Suggestion that to Sony.
