Its the combination of all things including processor speed, side bus speed, ddr ram speed, hard drive speed, motherboard speed capabil;ity for hard drives (DMA), hyperthreading, and the new extreme capability. If one item is old it negates all of the others. You have to engage the full shot and if you don't you will be taking those special pills again. But I know for sure you are about 10 times smarter than I am and an expert in phsycology and can probably spell it better.

JJK

Hi Zippy,

If I were you I'd get the fastest processor possible. The few hundred dollars you spend on a faster PC certainly are offset by time you save and and can use for other things. I got fed up with sharing PCs at home and having to schedule rendering so I bought a 2.8 Pentium with a gig of RAM, big drives and more DVD burners. Render the timelineto AVI on a USB drive, swap cables to the rendering PC and let it hum away. Burn the DVDs and copies on the rendernig unit. The way I looked at it was we clear about 1400$ for a :30 commercial and can do two in a day, start to finish so that PC cost us one day of our lives but has saved many days since it was put into service.

my 2 cents

Peter

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"You're making $672,000 a year with Vegas?"

That's about average, right guys?

That's on a bad year.

I had enough last year to buy the SoFo product line, but my wife said that trying a hostle takeover on Microsoft was enough for that month....

Alas, Zippy, commercials come in fits and starts but we do enough to get by. I guess we average between 30 and 40 a year. Fortunately that is not "core business". We make most of our money on industrial and training DVDs and CBT.

Peter

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Amazing Zippy, you claim to be so successful, yet to keep asking very simplistic, basic quesitons.

That doesn't compute. ;-)

I love it when people estimate costs in "Time Out Of My Life". It's the universal currency, isn't it?

Rob Mack

Sounds to me like some of the most important gear is a telephone.

Rob Mack

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as i posted in an earlier thread, i've got vegas4 cleaning my toilets(i'm not married). i'm still trying to teach vegas how to run the vacuum cleaner

>>> cleaning my toilets(i'm not married). <<<<

I can see why (hee-hee)

> Spots RenderTest took me 3mins 1 sec . 1. What does all of this mean? How do I make sense of this data? 2. How much can I improve with the best hardware out there?

The purpose of the render test is to compare with other systems. I get 1 min 30 secs with Spot’s rendering test on my PC and you got 3 min 1 sec on your PC. That means, on average, you could cut your rendering time in half by upgrading your PC to one like mine. I just put together a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz PC with 7.2K RPM SATA drivers. Today you can get a P4 3.4Ghz, and if you use 10K RPM SATA drives you may even get a better performance improvement.

The two biggest factors for AVI rendering is processor speed and hard drive throughput. The processor speed is obviously for rendering frames that have changed but if most of your AVI is unchanged, then Vegas is just doing a file copy (avi to avi) and disk i/o is the limiting factor. That’s why some people suggest you do your final renders to a separate hard drive from your source that’s on a different IDE channel (for SATA there is no channel to worry about but two separate drives on the same IDE channel will get serialized and limit your throughput). If you render to your source drive then you’re just moving the head on the same disk a lot and seek time is your limiting factor.

~jr

Will 10,000 RPM hard drives really up your performance a lot? I was under the impression that data transfer rates were limited by the SATA or IDE cables connecting your drives to your MB, the FSB, etc., so it doesn't really matter much if your hard drives are faster than 7200 RPM. I could be wrong, but that's what I understood.

Bill, just go buy a USB Vacuum cleaner. Vegas' Track Motion knows what to do. Be careful though, one misplaced keyframe and your television sucks. Or is that blows? Either way, something won't work right.

Data rates are limited, but faster drives have quicker seek times. I'm running 10000 RPM Ultra160 SCSI drives on my "special" computer, and the difference is very noticeable when viewed beside an otherwise identical machine with 7200 RPM drives.

Running striped drives makes an even bigger difference, provided you've got a good controller. My drives are all Quantum Atlas 10K3s (one 73GB on its own and two 36GBs striped together) and even though the physical drive specs are identical, the striped volume handles massive files in a fraction of the time the standalone one takes.

hehehe

7200 RPM ATA drives only use half the bandwidth of an ATA133 interface; 10k RPM drives definitely have a performance advantage.

I ran a bunch of tests of a 80GB 7200rpm PATA drive (rendering to itself) versus software ramdisk (RAM as hard drive- Insanely Fast). On real world renders the difference is 0-2%. However, if you kick the drive into PIO mode (avoid it at all costs) render times jump significantly (1:30 to 3:30...). I think the lesson here is:
Hard drive speed will make no difference unless the hard drive is a bottleneck.

For ridiculously short renders (converting still images to DV) then the RAM disk has a 9% advantage. RAID and SCI performance should fall somewhere between 7200rpm PATA and RAM disk performance. Just get 7200rpm PATA drives. I would stay away from 5400rpm drives.

What to make of the results:
You can roughly double performance by upgrading. The best bang for the buck is a Pentium 2.8"C'/3.0C/3.2C (C are Canterwood versions, they have 800mhz FSB and hyperthreading). The "E" version are Prescotts and not as fast as Canterwoods, costlier, and much much hotter. I'd avoid them until they pan out, and then upgrade when 3.8ghz ones hit (3.8ghz isn't really faster by much so maybe not upgrade). You might need a new motherboard like the Abit IC7 or Asus P4P800 for a Pentium 2.8"C", and maybe new RAM too.

On the other hand, a system that is half the speed of a top-of-the-line Pentium isn't really all that bad. You can still cut your projects, and render speeds aren't that bad either. Most people sleep when renders are going anyways...

2- CPU clock speed seems to be the main factor in determining render speed. Hyperthreading helps a little. Everything else has a neglible effect unless they are bottlenecks.

> I ran a bunch of tests of a 80GB 7200rpm PATA drive (rendering to itself) versus software ramdisk (RAM as hard drive- Insanely Fast). On real world renders the difference is 0-2%. ... I think the lesson here is: Hard drive speed will make no difference unless the hard drive is a bottleneck.

Yes, but if you have mostly straight DV i.e., footage that is mostly cuts, then you’re really not rendering but rather doing a disk copy of the AVI source to the AVI target and the hard drive *is* the bottleneck in that case.

Here is my test and my numbers:

Source is a 2 Minute DV AVI clip (no FX) rendered as DV AVI.

To a hard disk on another IDE channel 00:40 seconds
To the same hard disk as the source (SATA) 00:52 seconds.

That’s a ~20% improvement in performance in rendering to a second physical hard drive on a different channel. Now this is not a scientific test because I don’t have two IDE hard drives or two SATA hard drives in my PC, I have one physical IDE and one physical SATA, but you get the idea. The source was on the SATA and the first render was to the IDE drive and the second was back to the same SATA drive. Both are 7200RPM drives with 8MB cache.

If by “real world render” you mean a project with lots of modified frames (i.e., color correction, broadcast colors. etc. applied) then I agree with you 100%, the hard drive speed doesn’t enter into the equation because the processor is the bottleneck.

~jr