Advice on GPU choice for Vegas 10 or 12

PJS_HMC150 wrote on 12/13/2012, 2:48 PM

5 years back I bought a Panasonic HMC-150 as a hobbyist, mainly to film my kids sports. (Main goal was to cut up hightlight reels of them or their teams. I film everything at 720/60p in the pipe dream I could even create some slowmotion hightlights someday. ) But love videotaping, so thought I'd go from that to some more ambitious hobby projects.

I learned the hard way how naive I was, and basically 5 years later I've got dozens of hours of AVCHD footage that I never was able to edit.

At the time I bought a top end, state of the art Vaio-all-in-one PC (even had a blu-ray burner) that the sony salesepeople swore was able to edit video. I then bought Sony Vegas 8 (specifically because it was designed to handle AVCHD.)

But when I tried to start my highlight-reel creations, the rendered product always had a very pronounced stutter on some of the clips which comprised the total output. (Render times were also ridiculously long, which made it worse to discover the stutter.) I got super frustrated and quit trying for a couple years. Then I got remotivated and based on some advice I upgraded my duo-core PC to 4gb Ram and Windows 7 64-bit to help the stutter. I also updated to Vegas 10 64bit, but still got the stutter so I quit again.

NOW HERE'S MY DECISION, AND ANY ADVICE IS GREATLY APPRECIATED.

I'm ready to buy a new PC, and want to choose wisely this time. I've narrowed it down to 2 choices, both I7-3770 intel chips with blu-ray writers. One is custom built by Dell, and one is off the shelf and $300 cheaper. Both have 16 GB Ram, (slightly different speeds, 1600 v 1333)

The choice comes down to GPU. The dell has a Nvidia GTX 660 (with 990 cuda cores) and the stock PC has a GT630 (96).

Soooooooooo......

Does the GPU "acceleration" of Vegas help with rendering the simple projects I work on?

If not, I guess I get the stock PC and stick with Vegas 10.

If so, Vegas 10 says it can use Cuda cores of the GPU, but needs the "sony AVC plug in", which I probably don't have. So does that mean if I get the Dell, I'll probably also need to upgrade to Vegas 12?

Finally, is it possible I go through all this and improve my render times, but still get stuck with my stutter? Which means it probably has something to do with my 60p format choice all along (and I just need to abandon that and film in 24p)?

Thanks again.

Comments

astar wrote on 12/13/2012, 4:41 PM

The i7 you listed will render AVC much faster than any all-in-one you had back with VV8. The onboard GPU will also most likely accelerate faster than the All-in-one you had back with VV8.

Memory:
As a general rule of thumb I always look for the the highest memory speed that is not insanely overclocked. Using the fastest non-overclocked memory will give you the most stable system. So you would need to do the research on which is being used in each system.

GPU:
You want to buy the best card you can afford that does not overrun the PCIe lane speed. This should not be a problem with a new motherboard. You would want to match the video card to the PCIe version. I would say if your do a new system these days make sure you are getting pci3. Cuda and open-CL do a lot of back and forth communication, as oppose to just sending display information to the GPU. Optimizing this bus is as important as memory clock speed. Plus PCI3 would be future proofed a little. The site below might help with the ATI vs Nvidia, I find the open-CL on my ATI to work just fine, and I used to opt only Nvidia.

http://www.hwcompare.com/ - this site also shows % improvement which can help determine bang for buck.

Chipset:
G77 - Gigabyte, Asus, or Intel

Intel board (might have lower operating specs, but that can translate into stability.)

HHD:
Use something like Blackmagic drive test, and make sure you are getting around 100MB/s from each drive. High drive bandwidth is more important with for multiple streams of high data rate codecs like uncompressed. But diffidently use a separate OS drive and media storage drive. My config uses an SSD OS drive and WD black drives.

Sound:
onboard is good enough for most, and sounds like good enough for what you are doing. Opt for using on-board vs. some 10 year old uber sound card you still have. I had a high end creative card that caused issues editing AVCHD, which I believe had to with the Dobly support. AVCHD sound is dolby AC3.

Montor:
Dual monitor if possible, with one being IPS for the most WYSIWYG color.

Workflow:
Convert your AVCHD to XDCAM EX for editing, then render to your display format like h.264. or DVD.

john_dennis wrote on 12/13/2012, 5:13 PM

Here are the basics of the system that I built a few months ago. I decided to use the on-board HD4000 video adapter with Intel Quick Sync which is supported in Vegas Pro 12. I always have the option to add a plug-in card later. Others on the forum use similar systems. I assure you nothing you have to edit will be a problem at all.

astar wrote on 12/13/2012, 6:00 PM

I agree with John and forgot to mention that in my post. You may want to try the built in GPU before buying a video card. Most of the acceleration figures people talk about are percentage gains, and hardly real world gains. A video rendering a few mins or even 10 mins faster is not much of gain if it costs significantly more.

PJS_HMC150 wrote on 12/13/2012, 9:27 PM

Astar and JD --- Thanks for the insightful feedback. I'll look into PCI3 lane, and the dual monitor advice is a good reminder that I want to check that I'll get that since I may do some stock trading on the machine as well. And good suggestions for generally better workflow practices that I can consider with any PC, and I realize you are advising on the stutter problem specifically as well on some points.

I'll keep your recommendations in mind for what a suitable system should encompass, but first lets focus two choices I've already narrowed to and decide if both, either, or neither are suitable.

*******Do I buy the stock PC and rely on the speed of the top notch CPU to do all the work thru Vegas 10?

Or do I spend another $450 (300 price diff + 150 needing to buy Vegas 12 now) to get the dell with the same CPU but better cuda GPU (and slightly faster memory)?*****

Again, I'm just a hobbyist so if the first choice works well enough, then I'll save the money happily. If you tell me I absolutely need the best GPU acceleration, then I choose the second.

Here's the screwy part -- I've read on some forums that the better GPU's designed for gaming actualy don't help accelerate Vegas (or SLOWS it!), so it would kill me to spend the extra money for a better GPU, and then not even want to use the "acceleration" mode in vegas.

.

ddm wrote on 12/14/2012, 3:11 PM

I'm a little unclear on your problem. One thing about stuttering after rendering puzzles me. Does your rendered avchd 720/60p stutter in Vegas or in media player or in VLC? Doesn't seem like a horsepower issue to me. avchd 720 does not require a whole lot, even from a 5 year old computer. Now, a new machine with more power will always be faster but it sounds to me like something else is going on here. 5 years of footage that you can't edit?

Stringer wrote on 12/14/2012, 3:44 PM

I never did see what format the OP is rendering to ?

GPU rendering may be a non-issue..

TeetimeNC wrote on 12/14/2012, 4:06 PM

PJS, I shoot with a HMC150 and render on an I7 930 with 16GB. I have a lowly GeForce GTX550 Ti. With Vegas 12 Best/Full cuts-only previews generally run at full 29.97. The only problem I've had with rendered video stuttering is when I am playing it off my media server and I've rendered at too high a bit rate for my network. I can go to about 14Gbps.

/jerry

john_dennis wrote on 12/14/2012, 4:21 PM

"I can go to about 14Gbps."

I want to move into your neighborhood. I've been wanting fiber optic service.

Guy S. wrote on 12/14/2012, 5:57 PM

In my testing with V12, the 3770's built-in graphics rendered a 32 second timeline faster than my nVidia 550ti graphics card: 17 sec (high quality) or 11 sec (low quality) vs. 19 seconds and I was unable to discern a quality difference between any of the rendered segments.

john_dennis wrote on 12/14/2012, 6:34 PM

To Stringer's point.
Sooner or later we're going to have to stipulate a codec, I'm as-u-me-ing that some of us are talking about AVC.

Kimberly wrote on 12/14/2012, 7:19 PM

PJ:

A few questions:

What are your project properties?
What is your desired output? DVD? Blu-ray? YouTube?
How long is an average project?
What render template are you using?
If a DVD or Blu-ray, are you using DVD-A? Anything special happening in that?
Have you tried the proxy file feature in VP 12 to ease your horsepower requirements?

When some tweaks to your settings and workflow, you might be able to get by with your current computer(s) for a while longer.

Regards,

Kimberly

TheLaw wrote on 12/18/2012, 11:10 PM

For those of you curious and following leads here of good people. I have an i7-2600 CPU and bought on a ridiculous sale the GTX 560 ti 448 FTW card (an accelerated 448 CUDA core card, virtually equivalent with the GTX 570.)

I rendered videos both MPG and MP4, the video being around 45 seconds. While the clip might not be long enough, the GPU helped significantly with the filters turned on while rendering with 2 newblue fx filters (denoiser, which is always a killer) and 3 sony fx. Without GPU 4:07 and with GPU 3:46 or 247 to 226 seconds, almost a 10% render time difference. I don't generally care about 2% but getting at least 10% is a nice boost and possibly more if I use something like Neat's denoiser.