Again: Render Test V5 vs V6

fldave wrote on 12/12/2005, 9:01 PM
Hello everyone. Spot's latest Render Test probably resulted in a lot of people scratching their heads, including me. Also, with the numerous complaints of Vegas 6 being "slow", I wanted to find out the most efficient way I can perform a final render and obtain best performance during editing.

My detailed test page is HERE
No fancy grahpics or flash. Just info. I'll get there. I didn't want to post a huge message here.

From the link:


Obvious problem with the Vegas 6 with 16MB and 64MB Dynamic RAM settings!


(My) Conclusions:

"Dynamic RAM Preview Max" affects final rendering, not just "video preview"

Rendering if Dynamic RAM = 0 or >= 128
- Vegas 5 is very consistent
- Vegas 6 is very consistent
- Vegas 6 is ~10% faster than Vegas 5
- Maximum number of rendering threads > 1 makes little difference on Hyperthreaded/Dual CPU machines for final rendering when doing no other processing on the PC

Rendering if Dynamic RAM is > 0 and < 128:
- Vegas 5 is very consistent
- Vegas 6 has a problem if Dynamic RAM is > 0 and < 128; Much longer render times
- The Dynamic RAM problem is exacerbated if your number of threads is > 1
- This problem is not related to MainConcept MPEG-2 or Cineform AVI Intermediary
- I would assume this problem is in Vegas or a called module (i.e. not a Sony .dll): an "if" statement or loop ("for...next", "do...while", etc.) contains faulty logic


Final Conclusions:
- I will close Preview Window for final rendering.
- For Cineform avi Intermediate and Final MEPG-2 rendering: I will set V6 at 1 Thread, 0 Dynamic RAM, and leave the machine alone. Nothing is faster, as long as you do nothing else on the computer. ~10% time savings.
- For HDV detailed editing: I am setting my V6 at 512 Dynamic RAM and 4 Threads (512 allows smaller selections of HDV mpg/generated media/effects clips to preview at 29.97fps)
- I hope Forum Admin will forward this to developers to review, although I hope they have been looking into this already. Consider "fixing" this (or at least clarifying) for my wish list for Vegas 7.
- I wish Sony would choose an option name other than "Threads" and how it relates to "# of cpus". In another post, I noted that WinXP was processing 300+ "Windows threads" during a render I was doing. "Threads" does not equal "cpus".

I am going to have a good Holiday and get a life now! Hope this helps someone else. Happy Holidays everyone!

Dave

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 12/12/2005, 10:07 PM
Great tests Dave.

There is a preference in Vegas that you can set to not show a preview while rendering. It might be slightly easier to check that box than to close and open the preview window. But then, it's not hard to just close the window.

Maybe what Vegas needs is a combination of smarter rendering and an easy to get at tool to tweak performance. The smart rendering might involve flushing the ram preview (or rendering it first and then flushing it) so that it drops to zero during a render. For the most part, the RAM preview tax doesn't help with big renders so the first thing Vegas should be doing is flushing it.

The "tool" could be as simple as an easy to find slider to quickly adjust the ram cache. Maybe the whole thing could be just one more tabbed window that you could put all your favorite prefs into.

You're probably right about the "faulty logic". It's easy for these things to slip past QA if the tests are very short. It's when the tests are very long that you can really see the pain of things. A 10 second process doesn't seem so bad even though it out to take 2 seconds, but if it's 100 minutes that ought to take 20, that's significant.

Rob Mack
johnmeyer wrote on 12/12/2005, 11:05 PM
[Edit] I have removed my original post, because at this point I cannot repeat the problem.

mbryant wrote on 12/13/2005, 4:30 AM
Dave,

Thanks! I've never touched these setting on V6 and I have 64 MB Dynamic RAM Preview, and 4 threads... so these must be the default settings, and from your testing they arent good ones to use.

Mark
fldave wrote on 12/13/2005, 2:00 PM
Rob,

I hope Sony finds what ever is going on with the RAM preview/thread interaction, as well as publish in the manual/help on what the best settings are for what you are trying to do, be it creating an intermediate, keying, titles, final render, etc.

I know I sure don't want to do this testing again with Vegas 7!

Dave
Chanimal wrote on 12/13/2005, 8:38 PM
Where is the setting to not show the preview when rendering. I've checked preferences and a few other places. Can't find it.

***************
Ted Finch
Chanimal.com

Windows 11 Pro, i9 (10850k - 20 logical cores), Corsair water-cooled, MSI Gaming Plus motherboard, 64 GB Corsair RAM, 4 Samsung Pro SSD drives (1 GB, 2 GB, 2 GB and 4 GB), AMD video Radeo RX 580, 4 Dell HD monitors.Canon 80d DSL camera with Rhode mic, Zoom H4 mic. Vegas Pro 21 Edit (user since Vegas 2.0), Camtasia (latest), JumpBacks, etc.

jetdv wrote on 12/13/2005, 8:52 PM
Options - Preferences - Show progress in Video Preview window while rendering.

It's the 10th one down in Vegas 6.0c