Making Vegas Faster?

PerroneFord

PerroneFord

Deals in Lead
Ok, a general question here.

My editing machine is a bit old. Now that I am beginning to push around a lot more video including HDV, it's really starting to show it's limitations. My question is this... What can I do to spruce things up?

It is a dual processor (2GHZ) machine with 4GB of Ram. I do not have the option of installing a new motherboard. This is my work machine.

Will installing a new, high performance video card make a significant difference in rendering times? How about in simply playing HDV in real time? Right now I have a ATI Fire GL E1 video board in the machine.

Any thoughts on making this machine run Vegas a bit better are welcome.
 
Vegas doesn't work with the GPU so faster graphics card won't make any difference. Faster procs are your best bet as you have plenty of RAM.

Kill any other applications running, even background stuff when working in Vegas. Vegas 8 tends to hoard RAM and I've found running even Photoshop right now along with it slows it down. I don't believe this is the case for everyone though.

Separate your render / capture drives. Capture to one, render to another. Keep access to each drive specific to what you're needing it for.

Keep your drives defraged. I like to defrag memory about once a week using System Mechanic too.

The beauty of Vegas is it will run on just about any machine and is hardware agnostic. However speed is specifically based on RAM / Proc so the faster your machine the faster Vegas will perform.
 
LOL, figures.

Not what I wanted to hear, but I do appreciate your comments. I guess I can keep my money in my pocket, and try to figure out a way to get my hands on a faster machine.
 
Well Vegas isn't alone in not using GPU processing - most NLE's may use a portion of it but none are using GPU processing fully - effects programs like AE / Motion will tap into the GPU but if you're looking for "another" problem in Vegas, this isn't any different from most editors. The one thing Vegas could stand to work better with are hardware I/O cards. That's where you get your kickin' performance. However in the days of needing to be remote, most NLE's have to work with barebones essentials such as in a laptop and not be tied to multiple hardware pieces. I'm grateful for Vegas in this regard because I think it performs remotely better than any NLE.

If you're doing a lot with HDV, I'd suggest using intermediary files. They'll be much snappier and you don't take a hit in quality.

cheno
 
So how do I do intermediary files? Is this like doing an offline edit for 2k/4k work? And if so, I am guessing that I create a lowres version of my original files, do all my edits, and then somehow apply those edits to my larger file.

Is there a clean method to do this in Vegas? What's the workflow look like?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top