Help Maximizing Performance

Bern wrote on 4/12/2010, 3:55 PM
Hello,

I'm fairly new to HD video editing and I'm hoping for some helpful advice on how I should get the best performance from my computer regarding playback preview and rendering.

Here are my computer specs.

Windows Version: 7 64-bit
RAM: 16 GB
Processor: Intel i7 2.8gHz
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 5850 1024MB
DVD Burner: Super Multi-Drive
Blu-ray Burner: Sony BWU-300S
Camera: Hitachi AVCHD

I've never had a dedicated video card before so I have no idea if I need to do so kind of special set-up to make the best use of it.

My monitor is connected directly to the video card with a HDMI cord. Is this a good idea. I could also connect it with a DVI or a VGA cord. I'm wondering if the HDMI connection will use more processing power the one of the other connections.

Is there anything I need to set up in Vegas Pro 9 to make best use of the video card?

My computer came with a couple of empty eSata hard drive slots. If I was to get another hard drive, would this make a difference for the preview, playback and/or rendering. My understanding is that I would save all my media, project files and renderings to this new hard drive. Is this correct? Is there more I should do with the new hard drive?

Is there any more advanced methods/suggestions that I might try.

I thank everyone for their thoughts and their time.

DWP

Comments

Bern wrote on 4/13/2010, 2:35 PM
I'm guessing no one has responded because everyone is either busy working out with version d or I've posted this in the wrong forum. I am working in Vegas Pro 9d and I see that there are so many technically savvy people posting in this area, I thought I would give it a try.

If you have a suggestion for a more appropriate area to post these questions, I'd gladly take any response.

Thanks again.
farss wrote on 4/13/2010, 2:43 PM
An extra HDD or two sure isn't going to hurt. Seems silly to use a 1TB drive for the OS so maybe buy a smaller drive and move the OS over to that and keep the big drive for all your media.

With Vegas nothing much else is going to make any significant difference and even the extra HDD drive is unlikely to make a big difference. I just find it makes it easier to keep things organised.

Bob.
robwood wrote on 4/13/2010, 3:05 PM
using 3 internal hard drives (OS / Source Media / Renders) will improve performance... not 1 drive partitioned but 3 separate drives (significantly better read/write functioning).

graphics card doesn't make a diff for Vegas: many users here get annoyed with that.
(being tied to 3rd party hardware isn't a good idea in my opinion, but that's all it is... an opinion)

you may want to check out Cineform which offers performance-optimized compression for video (meaning u take ur hard-to-play-smoothly AVCHD footage and create a proxy version with Cineform for editing, which will play back more easily).

look for Douglas Spotted Eagle book on using Vegas9 (find on amazon), consider buying volume 4 of VASST series about Vegas on Color Correction in enough detail to be useful... not so sure about the others in the series.

download AAV Colorlab free plug-in, equivalent to Hue/Saturation in Photoshop. handy.
Bill Ravens wrote on 4/14/2010, 6:49 AM
Clearly, none of the self professed gurus on this site have spent much time on Windows 7 64 bit. Fortunately, others have. Take a look at these tips from Anton. They really are useful if you are doing much video editing. While Anton is an Edius specialist, these tips apply, regardless of your editing software.

http://www.videoproductions.com.au/html/win7-tips.html
reberclark wrote on 4/14/2010, 9:18 AM
Bill - great tips! Thanks for the link.
jabloomf1230 wrote on 4/14/2010, 12:13 PM
Those are excellent tips and I've been doing all of them, since they involve common sense. Unfortunately, they make very little difference in performance under Windows 7 x64. Once the hardware is defined, other than possibly adding RAID arrays and maybe a small amount of overclocking (if your dare), you are pretty much stuck with a level of performance out of your NLE.

However, if you're like me and it makes you feel good, there's no harm in any of the suggestions made in that link. And maybe you'll get a different result than I get.
Soniclight wrote on 4/16/2010, 1:26 AM
DWP,

All the above are good tips. As to the one for the system drive, I'd add the following suggestion/example too (note that I have only one standalone computer, ergo I do everything on it, i.e. go online, etc.):

--- Use it only for the system and apps, not files (or keep the latter to a strict minimum such as shortcuts, word processing and other basic or temporary stuff that goes into My Documents type thing.

--- The smaller the drive, the better. Example:

While I use 1 and 1.5 Tb drives for video and music work, I'm still using an 80 Gb for my system which is actually partitioned -- 40 for system/apps only, 40 for what used to be My Documents, downloaded progs, other files and archives not related to video or music directly.

I'm purposely staying with such a small OS drive to keep my system lean and as efficient as possible.
If I get low drive space, it means it's time to clean out stuff. I always find a way :)

As to video/multimedia editing, I have one drive for .veg, music, 3D, etc files and footage -- and another for renders (tests or otherwise). Meaning that I'm more or less usually reading from one drive and writing to another.

Having multiple drives like this not only puts less wear and tear on the drive needle, it also uses each drive's pagefile.sys - which can alleviate some RAM (in XP one can choose whether one has pagefiles in non-system drives).

And in my case, none of these are partitioned either.