I was hoping there was a hidden thread priority setting that would allow 100% CPU on all 4 cores for rendering....I am using the same SATA drive but I hardly think that is where the bottleneck is.

My old CPU - dual core Athalon x2 6400 used 100% on both cores.

I am going to try changing the system buss from 200 MHz to 266 MHz and lowering the CPU multiplier to 12. this shoould allow synchronous DDR2 to operate at PC1066. Playing with the RAM setting had some effect on render speed so this is my next attempt.

If I can get under 2 min for every minute of footage I will be very happy...right now it is 2 min 10 seconds per minute of footage going from HDV MPEG-2 to AVCHD 15 Mbit/sec which is more than 2x the speed of my previous system (That was a painful 7 min / min).

Rob

If you hold Shift and open Preferences, every internal setting under the sun will be exposed. You do so entirely at your own risk, you understand.

I have Vegas Pro, so I have no idea if this is available in VMS. Again, the bottleneck may very well be at the codec level, in which case there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, except use a different one.

Thanks for the tip - I will try it Thursday night when I am back home as I am traveling on business.

My thought is the CPU is waiting on something....and it may very well be the DDR2 that it is waiting on. The reason I think that is when I changed the memory speed to DDR1067 from DDR800 while leaving the CPU clock base at 200 MHz the memory ran asynchronous and it rendered SLOWER! If I am right then changing the base CPU clock to 266 and multiplier to 12 from 16 should help and may get the CPU load to max out....might be the 20% I am missing.

The memory clock and Buss clock should match for optimum performance. This would also make the PCI clock 133 which is optimal for the hard drive.

I will say this - the Phenom 2 x4 955 is damn fast compared to my previous CPU (Athalon 64 x2 3.2 GHz dual core). 6 meg of L3 cache might be the reason.

Thanks,

Rob

9 times out of 10 the cpu is waiting on disk IO. I just tried a test using 2 SATA drives. The mts files were on G drive and I rendered to C drive. It took 6 min, 35 secs to render. The second test used a third SATA drive. So now the mts files were on G drive and I rendered to M drive. The time to render was reduced to only 3 min, 9 secs. I then went into Preferences and changed the temporary files folder to use G drive instead of C. This produced a render time of 2 min, 35 secs. So having more drives will improve performance.

You can also use Performance Monitor to view disk drive performance. You can find this under Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Reliability & Performance Monitor. Once opened, select Performance Monitor, click on the green + icon, expand the Logical Disk section and select Current Disk Queue Length for C drive. A reading consistently over 2 will indicate disk drive bottleneck.

> ... the Phenom 2 x4 955 is damn fast compared to my previous CPU (Athalon 64 x2 3.2 GHz dual core)

Check out the Intel Core i7 vs. the AMD Phenom II.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html

I tried rendering to a separate drive - no speed difference

Also tried system buss at 266, CPU at 12x, memory at 533 MHz - again no difference.

Shift + preferences does not show any new menu items

Still at about 80% CPU usage during render HDV > AVCHD.

So the bottleneck is not the RAM or Hard Disk...I still think it is a thread priority setting....but where is it??

Yes I know the i7 is a bit faster but it also costs big bucks. AMD has allways been best bang for the buck.

Rob

<Shift + preferences does not show any new menu item>

You have to hold shift and select options>preferences and you should see an 'internal' tab that does not usually show. Again - use at your own risk.

I found the bottleneck in my stsyem...it is my RAM or lack there of.

I have 1 gig of DDR2 and notice when rendering the system page file increases from 400 meg to 1 gig then drops back down when the render is done.

This tells me if I had 2 gig I could turn off the swap file and Movie Studio would use 100% ram and thus my CPU usage should max out and get me the extra 20% speed I am looking for.

I did not think RAM would matter for rendering HV video but I guess it does. If I shut off my page file with the 1 gig it crashes Movie Studio and I get a out of virtual memory error - so there was the proof.

Now to get some more RAM and faster DDR2 or 3 than what I have now.

FYI - the internal tab came up but nothing in there would have mattered....and yes there is a LOT of settings in there!

So moral of the story - use 2 gig minimum RAM and as fast as possible.

Rob

While you are under in the amount of RAM, which is clearly causing disc swapping and slowing you down, reading from one disk and writing to another (neither of which being the system drive) will clearly improve speed. It still may not peg you fast CPU, but it will improve things.

KK

I found the bottleneck in my stsyem...it is my RAM or lack there of.

First, even 2 gig of RAM is abysmal on your system.

Second, I'm no expert, but many times I have read that Windows needs a swap file .. no matter how much ram you have.

If I shut off my page file with the 1 gig it crashes Movie Studio and I get a out of virtual memory error - so there was the proof.

No, it only proves that Windows needs a swap file. I'm sure other programs will cause the same problem given sufficent cpu activitly.

You are certainly free to try to attain your goal (100% cpu use) but .. most of the rest of us here think that 80% is just fine and any decrease of render time at 100% will be minimal.

If you are running Vista 32 or above 1GB is not adequate, in spite of all your speculation over clock and buss frequencies.

I am running windows XP service pack 2. Will not install Vista because of the problems Vista has nor will I install 7 because it is not compatible with Movie Studio...If its not broken I leave it alone. That is also why I stopped updates at service pack 2 with XP. My video editing system will allways stay windows XP for the foreseeable future.

On another machine running Windows XP with 2 gig I was able to turn OFF the swap file and never had issues - Windows can run without if you have enough ram for what your application needs.

On my new laptop running Windows 7 with 4 gig ram I also have the swap file turned off - mainly because it has a Solid State Hard drive... again no issues.

When I tested rendering to another drive it made NO DIFFERENCE in speed.

I will buy some more RAM and report back.

Rob

If you really want your CPUs to run at 100%, may I suggest Underclocking them by about 25%

(ie: if they are running at 3GHz now, then change the speed to about 2.3GHz).

Clearly, with slower processors, you'll have greater utilization.
Does that make you happier?

My point is, it is a GOOD thing that your CPUs are able to process data faster than your RAM, HD, Bus, etc, can provide it. I wouldn't want data sitting around waiting to be processed.

If you get your CPUs to 100%, all that means is that you've moved the bottleneck, and now your RAM is sitting around idle and under-utilized. No matter what, some component of the system will be the bottleneck, and a different component will be under-used.

You are worrying about a problem that cannot be, and does not need to be solved.

If I get my CPU to 100% on all cores then I have optimized my system to go as fast as it can....think of it this way:

If you had a 500 HP race car and the engine was only running at 400 HP would'nt you want to fix it?? That is essentially what is happening with my system.

Underclocking is not the answer and will only SLOW it down.

I do a lot of renders when doing my projects and need the speed. I have 2 Gig more on the way which will make it 3 gig and I believe that is the windows XP limit. Should have it by the weekend and I will let you know the results.

Rob

I do a lot of renders when doing my projects and need the speed.

BUT .. how much speed do you expect to get at 100% vs 80%?

I'll be willing to bet that it will *not* be 20% faster/shorter rendering times.

In any case ... good that you are increasing the amount of RAM .. that will help.

I am also new to this forum and using VMSP9. I am trying to optimize my rendering times and could you please give more details? If possible specifically what settings to change or use to set what drive to read from and to write to when using VMSP9. Also should the VMSP9 program be loaded on the same drive as the system or another drive (Is that even possible?)

trisel, your question was basically answered in the other thread you posted in:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=694390

VMS can be installed on the system drive. Mine is.

MSmart, I probably should have said not only am I new to this forum but also new to using any forums and I now realize I have used improper forum edict by asking similar questions in two different threads. And what I should have done was started my own thread with the specific question I had. I do appreciate your response and after I read your response and the other response in the other thread I finally did what I should of done in the first place and do a search on the question I had. I came across this thread and thought that it related more to the question I had.. So I posted again trying to ask a more specific question based on the information that was given in the other thread and the information provided in this thread. I am still learning and I do appreciate all of the help that has been provided. And I hope I am not miss-stepping once again asking some clarification question is your VMS and OS on the same physical drive but on different partions? Do you think it would make any difference?