Hard drive scratch disk

Artemis wrote on 3/18/2021, 11:36 PM

Hello everyone,

My setup takes for ever to render videos, so I am trying to upgrade my computer to speed it up.

I added a dedicated 240 Gb SSD for Vegas Movie Studio 17 Platinum to use as a scratch disk.

I have put all the file directory settings to that drive (3 in total in 2 preference and options menues) but when I start a Render I still hear my regular hard drive going crazy with activity... Where is the setting to set the scratch disk to the SSD??? I went over all the menues several times and cannot find an other place to change it.

 

Also, here is my setup:

AMD Ryzen 2700
32 Gb 3600 MHz DDR-4
GTX 970 video card (I don't use it to encode, everytime I turn that option on Vegas Keeps crashing)
2 7200 RMP HDs, 1 Boot SSD M.2 and 1 SSD 2.5" drive (this is the one I purchased for Vegas)

Right now, encoding a video in MP4 (4K, 30 FPS, VBR 40,000,000 average, 50,000,000 MAX) takes me in between 4 to 6 times the video lenght. So a 30 minutes video takes between 2 hours and 3 hours to render. I think that is crazy slow.

I was watching a youtube video about a new computer and they were posting speeds of 5 minutes to render a 11:30 minutes video).... so something is wrong and I don't know if the issue is that Movie Studio is really slow, or if there is an issue with my hardware.

 

My CPU stays pegged at 98-100% on all cores during the entire render. So if there is a problem, I would think it might come for the slow hard drive...

 

Any idea how I can put the entire load on that new SSD? Are your performances much better on your setup?

 

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 3/19/2021, 8:22 AM

The size or performance of your scratch disc has almost nothing to do with encoding speed. Period.

The things that affect encoding speed are:

1. CPU

2. GPU

Nozzle wrote on 3/19/2021, 8:47 AM

You can use task manager (in windows 10 anyway) to see the read/write performance on your disks. Are you seeing load on the SDD when a render runs. That you're seeing 100% on the the CPU during the run indicates you won't get any more performance out of it... unless for some weird reason all the disk operations are not DMA but PIO.

Nozzle

Artemis wrote on 3/19/2021, 11:53 AM

Yes I did a lot of testing last night. I put all the files for the project on the SSD and ran the Task manager to watch performance of the HD and SSD. You are right, the load is about 1% on the SSD and close to 0% of the HD during encoding. On the other hand, the same video that took 1h30 to encode when everything was on the HD now takes 45 mins on the SSD... still really slow but it doubled the performance somehow... not sure what to make of it. The HD still makes a racket when I encode...

Looks like I will have to find a graphics cards, somehow, if I want better performance, I believe that Movie Studio crashes of the GTX 970 because of the well known and documented memory issue in the last 512 Mb of it's 4 Gb memory bank. That last 512 Mb operates at a small fraction of the speed of the the rest of the memory and I think when Movie studios fills that part of the memory it freezes.

Been trying to find a replacement GPU for 6 months with no luck, just nothing available anywhere unless I am willing to pay 2 to 3 times the normal price of the card... crazy times ;(