Best Workflow for Multiple Renders - >1 PC or instances?

ken c wrote on 10/17/2004, 11:51 AM

I'm doing a big project and will be producing many different DVDs in a short timeframe.. looking for tips on how to do lots of simultaneous rendering from you pros out there...

Overall, is there a big loss of speed if you open up say 2-3 instances of Vegas on a single 2.4 gig 1meg PC to do simultaneous renders?

Or is it best to simply get 3+ pcs, install Vegas on each one, and render on separate pcs, (to external hard drives, which are then plugged back into main PC to use rendered footage in the final product DVD) ?

Appreciate any workload tips from you "Power Vegas" users out there, much appreciated!

Ken
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Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 10/17/2004, 1:44 PM

If your project is lengthy, and you have a network, you'd do better rendering over network. If it's not lengthy, and/or you don't have networked computers that are networked over a switch, then you'll do better locally.
Keep in mind that shorter projects potentially can be slower on a network render due to stitching.
If you have an HT machine, or of you have a reasonably fast processor, having 2-3 renders going at once is usually not a problem. I do this commonly, but rendering to different drives. I've not tried rendering multiple files to a single drive.
HTH

ken c wrote on 10/17/2004, 4:11 PM

Thanks, great tips, appreciate it ... makes sense re rendering to different drives... will try that too..

ken

OdieInAz wrote on 10/17/2004, 5:35 PM

For a single CPU render, open up task manager and try a few experiments. When I render, the CPU Usage will generally hit 100%. If one render hits 100% usage, and provided you're not overflowing memory, and not disk access limited, then you probably won't see much difference in total clock time to finish the job.

Also, look at the Processes and see what percentage of CPU each vegas session is receiving.

You can probably do X renders in Y hours, either sequentially or concurrently. Once something like overflowing the RAM or accessing the same disk, then total time will probably increase.

johnmeyer wrote on 10/17/2004, 6:09 PM

Several people did measurements on this a year ago. Bottom line was that there is not much inefficiency in doing multiple renders on multiple instances of Vegas, all at the same time. If a project took ten minutes to render on one PC, then if you opened the same project and rendered it identically on all three PCs (something, obviously, you wouldn't normally do, but it makes the test easy to understand), it took thirty minutes.

Rendering to a different hard disk, by the way, is the single best thing you can do to speed up renders. If you do much "cuts-only" production, it can literally cut your render time in half. If the CPU becomes the limiting factor (e.g., you have a lot of complicated fX), then the percentage gain is not as spectacular, even though the total minutes gained is the same.

MyST wrote on 10/17/2004, 6:26 PM

Another thing to consider is that you cannot install Vegas on separate machines and use them at the same time, as per the software usage agreement. So, technically, you'd have to buy more licences since you'd be using Vegas on 2+ machines at the same time.

Mario

musman wrote on 10/17/2004, 11:27 PM

For what it's worth, I've found with my p4 2.4 machine with 1 gig ram that rendering more than one thing at once increses the render time to outrageous degrees. Tried doing 2 mpeg renders and after 1 hour of rendering the time given to complete the renders was over 8 hours for 1 project and over 12 for the other. So I stopped the render and did each individually. Each one took about 1.25 hours individually.
Then again, I have very little real time performance (still haven't resolved the problem from my post, "What is killing my real time performance?") so maybe I'm not the person to ask about this.

ken c wrote on 10/18/2004, 10:34 AM

Yes, in testing it on mine found the same thing, last night, eg multiple renders blew out the per-instance render time to ridiculous amounts.. so nothing saved by running on same pc... eg two projects that would take 90 minutes each, done sequentially, for a total of 180 minutes done back to back, would take at least that long if I opened up 2 instances of vegas and ran both simultaneously..

good to know re hard drive makes a difference, I'm using different drives for both the temp files (different from c:\) as well as the final render-to drive .. that seems to speed things along a bit..

ken