Newbie trying to get the right rendering settings!!
by Elliot Paterson
on
Jul 10, 2008 at 7:37:07 pm
Hello all, this is my first post so forgive me if I don’t give you enough information or am unclear!!
I have recently started using Sony Vegas and am having a problem trying to choose the correct settings to render files to quickly / efficiently.
I have a Sony HDR-SR1 which records in 1440 x 1080i to AVCHD (hard drive version so *.m2ts files).
What I want to achieve is rendering files into formats which keep the resolution and the ac3 5.1 surround sound for playing back on my PC and TV via xBox 360. I have TVersity installed so am not limited to WMA formats for presentation to the xBox.
Thus far I have chosen to render to wma Default template (which I have set up in the project properties to be 1440 x 1080 - 25 fps - Field order None (progressive Scan) - Pixel aspect ratio 1 (square) - Quality good - Motion blur - Gaussian - Deinterlace Interpolate [I got ghosting when I used blur].
The reason for choosing wma is because as far as I can tell it is the only one which is 1080p and 5.1 surround - if this is not correct please tell me.
Now the real problem I am having is that rendering is painfully slow and Vegas is not utilizing any where near all the PC resource. it takes over a minute to render 3 seconds!!! 4 hours for 10 minutes!! and sits on below 30% CPU usage.
I have not included many effects in my projects just really splicing the different videos together and cutting the rubbish out!
My PC specification is an HP XW6400 workstation with 2 x quad core Xeon processors @ 1.86 GHz 4 GB RAM, C: drive has windows XP 32 bit, separate 1TB drive for projects and prerendered files, all my raw video footage is stored on my NAS server which is connected on a 1Gb/s network. I have set the rendering threads to 1 (any more went slower!) and Dynamic Ram I have played around with and 64MB seems to be the quickest.
So the real question is.... Is there a way I can get the WMA to render faster or is there a different format I can use to achieve the same results (1080p 5.1 surround).
Re: Newbie trying to get the right rendering settings!! by John Rofrano on Jul 10, 2008 at 9:48:34 pm
> trying to choose the correct settings to render files to quickly / efficiently.
Quick and efficient are not two words that often go together when rendering. You can get quick but it won't be very efficient... you can get efficient but it won't be very quick. ;-)
> Thus far I have chosen to render to wma Default template
WMA is an audio codec so I assume you mean WMV and never use the Default Template. Under WMV there are several templates for HD. You should use one of them as a starting point. It may be all you need.
> I have chosen to render... 1440 x 1080 - 25 fps...Pixel aspect ratio 1 (square)
Those two parameters don't go together. 1080 HD is either 1440x1080 PAR 1.3333 or 1920x1080 PAR 1.000. So if you want a Pixel Aspect Ratio of 1 (square) you must use 1920x1080 to get the resolution correct. Personally, if your footage is 1440x1080 I would render at 1440x1080 with a PAR of 1.3333.
Bottom line: If you select the WMV template 6.7 Mbps HD 1080-25p Video you should be fine.
Re: Newbie trying to get the right rendering settings!! by Elliot Paterson on Jul 11, 2008 at 8:56:13 am
Thank you very much for the swift response, I guess from what you are saying that if I want the quality I need to invest the time!
Apologies, yes WMV is what I meant.
Thank you for the heads up in the aspect ratio, much appreciated. I changed the settings to 6.7 Mbps HD 1080-25p Video and it seemed to go a little quicker. It now averages out at about 1 frame per second rendering time, so each file takes 25 x real time to render. this still was using only about 25% of CPU and mem so I figured out a way to work more effectively. I open 3 separate instances of Sony Vegas and set them all rendering together. It takes the same amount of time per file but at least I am rendering 3 files together!! It also allows me to open a 4th one to work in while the other are rendering.
One last thing, I don’t suppose you know if Vegas works well / better on XP / Vista 64 bit as my CPU still has some more to give but with 4 Vegas sessions open it is the memory which is the limiting factor (limited to 3.5GB by 32bit) so I figure if I changed to 64 bit I could get a 5th session open before I get to 95-100% of CPU. What are your thoughts, again thank you so much for your help, now I am re-rendering everything in the correct aspect ratio!!!!
Re: Newbie trying to get the right rendering settings!! by John Rofrano on Jul 11, 2008 at 11:41:26 am
Glad to see you've got it worked out. Have you tried to serve one of these files to your Xbox yet? I would do that before you convert them all and find out that the XBox doesn't like the format for some reason. You should be pretty safe with WMV but I would check. I've had a terrible time with compatibility on file serving and I've given up for the moment. I did not try to serve to an Xbox though.
As far as Vista64 goes, you are correct. If you are using multiple instances of Vegas, Vista64 will give you more memory to open more instances. Also, Sony has announced that they are coming out with a 64-bit version of Vegas and only Vista64 will take advantage of this so we will all need to use Vista64 to take advantage of Vegas 64-bit. It couldn't hurt to try it now.
Re: Newbie trying to get the right rendering settings!! by Elliot Paterson on Jul 11, 2008 at 2:56:03 pm
Yes served it up to the xBox and it works perfectly, looks great and comes through in 5.1 sorround.
Have you tried TVersity for serving up files this is a very good bit of software and it if free!! What device are you trying to serve?
TVersity acts as a media server and enables you to retrieve your media from almost any device (be it mobile, notebook etc) with an internet conenection, the link to their site is
