Biggest thing I've noticed is what encoder is being used. The same project might utilize 100% rendering in AVC but 30% in MPEG-2.

Yep...I've seen the same thing. Some encoders only utilize a single CPU. Others utilize 2...and others use all 4. I'm fairly certain that it's not a Vegas issue.

This probably means the processor is flying and the disk is the bottleneck. Throw a heavy blur on the footage and You'll probably see it go up to 100%.

Not only do different encoders sometimes use one core and sometimes four, the FX you use might have the same issue.

If your HDD is running continuously (your drive light is on solid not blinking) then it's probably the bottle neck. If this is the problem - a RAID array and/or faster drives can speed things up, as can the use of multiple drives - one to read from and one to write to. RAID 5 reads pretty fast - RAID 0 or 10 can be written to at much higer speeds generally.

The amount of RAM installed can choke the processor as well.

If my disk would be the bottleneck (its one WD 1001FALS 1Tb SATA disk) , I doubt that it would be possible to use the computer like nothing is running during rendering and do anything as fast as I want.

Everything is still very instable too, projects that work fine all day all of a sudden give an error 'file missing' on load , a file that is still there 100% certain. A retry gives no erros, or an error on another file that is also just THERE., I mean, how can I work with a program like this...

I've seen others with the same problems here so it can't be just me.

I'm gonna re-install Vista 64 , but now I will use the Business version, I have the Ultimate version installed but don't use the fancy mediacenter any way, maybe that is the problem..

Ctrl+Alt+Del->Start Task Manager->Performance->Resource Monitor

Well, I think that as others have said, it's certainly possible that 20% is perfectly normal in certain circumstances. You could be using codecs or filters that aren't multithreaded, in which case you might see one core running near %100 and three running slack. Or 8 and 2 since you've got hyperthreading (but remember with hyperthreading that this is just a method of getting one core to do several things more efficiently. HT can actually be a hindrance if all the core is supposed to be doing is render)

It could maybe be Vegas, maybe Vista, maybe your codec choice or filter choices, maybe the number of tracks in the project, maybe a faulty disc, maybe a perfect storm of all of the above.

The fact that you say files seem to go missing makes me think that there's something up with the hard disc.

Rob Mack

Maybe a virus checker, disc cataloger...

I'm running an overclocked Q6600 quad. I don't have the numbers with me, but I did some testing with the converting my 1920x1080i qt 264 files in cineform into an AVI file.

I then took a one minute segment and rendered it to 1920x1080 24p with exact settings in vegas and microsofts encoder. Windows encoder was faster. Just a straight transcode, no edits, no filters.

I rendered to a striped 0 array with 2 drives. CPU usage in Vegas was around 50%-60%, CPU usage in windows media encoder was around 90%.

When I transcoded from Cineform, CPU usage was around 98%. Both used all 4 cores.

I concluded that Vegas wasn't as effecient as Windows media encoder on straight encoding. Sorry I don't remember the exact numbers. Hopefully Vegas will be quicker in the next version.