Computer for Vegas

K

krw0731

Member
Hey all. I'm looking into buying a new computer just for Vegas. In looking at various dealers websites (Dell, Alienware), I'm unsure about what to get. My budget is no higher than 3,000, but would like to keep it below that.

Anyways, I discovered a local computer store (www.intrex.com) that can build a pc for me, and I went through and customized the specs. Please take a look at these and give suggestions as to how these should perform (or what you would get).

Processor: AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ Retail Box with Fan, Dual Core, 64-bit, Socket 939

Motherboard: MSI K8NNEO4-SLI, Socket 939, nForce4 SLI, 8ch Audio, GigLAN, SATA II, Firewire

Ram: 2GB PC3200 (400MHz) DDR Memory, via 2x 1GB

Internal HD: WD Raptor 74GB 10000rpm SATA Hard Drive, 8MB Buffer, 5-Year WD Warranty

Graphics Card: Dual (2 cards) GeForce 6800GS 256MB DDR, PCI-E Video Cards,
for SLI PCs
 
It depends on whether you are editing high definition or not. Vegas hasnt offered any support for dvcpro. Coming from Sony it wouldnt surprise me as they are greedy pricks. For standard def stuff its fine.

Having built a computer this is the advice I can give to you:

For editing most of the time is spent cutting and pasting with some rendering of transitions mainly. Therefore any old computer will do for this function and really most of your time is spent doing this. Its the rendering that takes a long time on any computer and its a pure function of cpu power. When you finish a project and decide to render most people leave it overnight to do so. Therefore having a super duper computer is not really necessary that much faster. Is a few hours overnight going to mean that much to you? The pro houses network dozens of computer to render quickly and this is not an option for you. Getting a cpu a step or two below the fastest will save you heaps and you wont notice that much of a difference. Dual cpu I have no experience but Vegas cannot use them anyway. Even network rendering for Vegas you have to beware as one computer will render audio and one for video. Whats the point? audio files are so much smaller.

Hard drives- cheap as anything. Get a couple of big ones, sata makes it nice and neat to install. You could use raid to backup but really you can just backup manually your project files and avi files without too much hassle.

Motherboards- get one with lots of sata support for hard drives.

graphics card- any old one will do but get one with dual monitor output

Get lcd for editing- its easier on the eyes and a video monitor for color correction.

good luck
 
Having a fast computer would be a dream for color correction but you only render short segments at a time to save time. In Vegas you can render longer tracts with more ram but it wont render faster just because you got more ram. One to two gigs of standard ddr2 ram should be more than adequate. For photoshop the more ram the merrier though.
 
translumination said:
Dual cpu I have no experience but Vegas cannot use them anyway.
Click to expand...

Actually, Vegas has been multi-threaded and capable of making use of multiple processors since it was an audio-only program (formerly known as Vegas Pro).

translumination said:
Even network rendering for Vegas you have to beware as one computer will render audio and one for video. Whats the point? audio files are so much smaller.
Click to expand...

From what I've experienced, each render computer takes a chunk of the project and renders it, and another computer is dedicated to putting all the rendered pieces back together. I've never had one computer take the entire video content and another take only the audio. That wouldn't make any sense as audio definitely renders faster than video in pretty much any situation.
 
Yeah, I'd agree with Jive on all counts, espeically on the dual-processor capability.

krw, I just built a system very similar to yours, and I saw *substantial* gains in render times and responsiveness in Vegas. Rendering a project is about more than just transitions unless you add NO effects at all, including color-correction, cropping, track motion, or anything else. It's also about more than just transitions if you're rendering to any format other than DV; then you're transcoding the entire timeline. The more horsepower, the better, no question.

The SLi array won't do anything for you for Vegas, though; the two cards may be nice for gaming, but it's not recommended that you use your editing comp for anything besides editing, especially gaming.

But, overall, I think you put together a good system. Do look for the capability of SATA RAID if you're planning to do HD content, though.
 
You only list 1 HD. You are going to use a seperate 200+GB for your AV drive aren't you? I'd get 2 SATAs, 1 for backup of those files. Good drives are dirt cheap right now.
Hope this helps.
Ken
the Screen Skins guy
 
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