File organization with VP8. What folders/drives?

skiltrip wrote on 2/1/2008, 12:04 PM

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions, when working in Vegas Pro 8, which folders to set for what.

First off, I'll tell you what I have as far as drives go, and let you know my computer started out as a Pro Tools audio computer before I embarked on this new video venture, so the drive setup was according to what I needed for my digital audio workstation. All drive are on their own controller (no slaves, i have a Promise ATA133 pci card installed with two extra IDE controllers on it).

C: 20GB system drive (IDE 7200rpm), I obviously don't want any files being put here, it's just for software installs.

F: 250GB audio drive (IDE 7200rpm), this is obviously where my audio projects, .wav files, would go. this drive can be used for the extra big video files, captures, etc. Until i get another 500GB sata drive, this will be where i want most of my video action to happen.

G: 80GB BFD drive (IDE 7200rpm), BFD is a drum virtual instrument (VST and RTAS) for those who don't know. it's drive and ram intensive, so it's recommended to be on it's own drive. This takes up about 20GB so there is 60GB free on this drive to use when doing video as well. (I'd rather only use this for STORAGE, and not active video files used by my Vegas session).

So, being a newb of sorts, I'm unclear of which parameters I need to set.

Right now, i have my Captures going to F:\video\captures with subfolders off that to specifiy HDV24 or HDV, with other subfolders to seperate by project.

other than captures, what other "types" of files does Vegas need to be set for and what folders/drives would YOU assign them to?
should I be rendering to a different drive then my captured and working files are? again, newb-ish here, so school me if you'd like to!
Hopefully this post is clear, just looking for the most efficient way to organize my file activity with Vegas. Thanks!

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 2/1/2008, 12:13 PM

You don't have a lot of space on drive G, so don't worry about using much of anything besides F for now. Create a folder for each project as you start it and place all captures and renders in that folder.

There's extremely little benefit to rendering to a separate drive, not enough to be worth worrying about.

Best advice is ... do whatever makes sense to you.

skiltrip wrote on 2/1/2008, 12:26 PM

So it's perfectly fine (performance wise) to use F:\audio\ as my root and organize everything vegas does there according to what makes sense to me?

Chienworks wrote on 2/1/2008, 12:32 PM

Yes, that will be fine.

Now, it is true when you get your new 500GB drive that renders may go a little faster by rendering to a separate drive. I've played with this a bit and found that the time savings was somewhere around a few seconds per hour. It was an inconsiderable amount, so i don't bother considering it anymore. I find it much more useful to keep my renders in the project directory.

johnmeyer wrote on 2/1/2008, 12:53 PM

I've played with this a bit and found that the time savings was somewhere around a few seconds per hour.

Kelly, are you sure about that? I agree that when doing compute-intensive renders, the disk access time can be minimal compared to everything else, but it sure isn't measured in seconds per hour. Basically, if it takes one minute to simply copy a file from one hard drive to another, that should roughly equal the time saving of using a separate drive. Why? Because it is physically not possible to read and write to the same drive at the same time. Therefore, when both reading and writing to the same drive, the time doubles. Actually, as shown below, it MORE than doubles.

To test this, I just put a short (two minute) NTSC DV AVI file on the timeline in Vegas 7.0d. I rendered that directly to the same drive on which this file was stored. That took 1:17 (one minute, seventeen seconds). I then rendered that to a different physical drive, although this drive is connected as a slave on the same IDE channel. That render took 0:20. (If I had a drive on a separate IDE channel, the difference might actually be greater).

That seemed like even more of a saving than I would have expected, and it occurred to me that since the file was only two minutes long (512 MBytes) that some of it might be cached in RAM memory. So, I repeated the first render (to the same drive as the source files). There was a small improvement, to 1:11, so there was some caching, but not much.

Finally, I simply copied the file -- using Windows Explorer -- from one drive to the next. As expected, it took 20 seconds, the same as the Vegas render (because Vegas was simply copying the file, since it was DV AVI and I hadn't made any changes to the video or audio).

So, what did I learn? Well, on my computer, which uses off-the-shelf IDE drives, the savings on a two minute file was 51 seconds. That equates to about twenty-five minutes savings on a one hour file. In thinking about why the savings was so much greater than the time it takes to copy the file, the answer lies in the fact that the drive must constantly seek when alternately reading and writing, whereas when doing just one of these operations, it can usually write without much repositioning of the heads.

If I am missing something here, please let me know, but I am a firm believer in always using a separate drive (from the media source drive) as the target for the render, and based on the exercise I describe above (and which I have done on other occasions), the time savings are considerable and worth the extra effort.

skiltrip wrote on 2/1/2008, 1:00 PM

thanks for the input from both of you.

if performance can be increased, I can easily set up a \rendered folder on my 80GB "BFD" drive.

Would this be the only recommended folder to designate on a seperate drive? All other folder/drive settings could go to be F:\audio\whateversubfolder\?

Udi wrote on 2/1/2008, 1:14 PM

If you render to DV-AVI then it is a real copy, and no processing is involved. In this case the cache and disk performance determine the result.

Try to add a pan-crop, using best render and render to mpg - then compare the difference - now the bottleneck is the CPU and the time differences will be less significant.

Udi

johnmeyer wrote on 2/1/2008, 1:34 PM

now the bottleneck is the CPU and the time differences will be less significant.

Correct. If the render takes eight hours, the twenty-five minute saving is a small percentage.

Now, perhaps when the CPU time gets great enough, there is no longer a point when the disk is read at the same time as writing occurs. Perhaps Vegas gets a chunk, works on it for a minute, writes the resulting chunk to the disk, and then gets the next chunk. If so, the twenty-five minute difference I would see on my computer with a one-hour "cuts-only" DV AVI edit might get smaller, rather than remain constant. If I had more time, I could do a test on my two minute clip and see. A lot depends on how Vegas caches, and how it reads and writes. My suspicion is that the twenty-five minute difference is constant, regardless of how intense the rendering becomes, but if Vegas does less read/write overlap as more CPU time is required, then the savings might not be a constant. I can't tell without more testing.