how does vegas utilise ram ?

jamcas wrote on 1/29/2004, 3:13 PM
HI,

how much RAM does Vegas need when rendering ?

for example does it need does it need enough ram to load the media files plus an extra say 200 mb working area where it does its calculations ?

The question I want to ask is woud one be better off buying 1gig of the fasest LL RAM or paying a little extra getting 2gig of 'slower' ram for rendering vegas projects ?


how much difference does LL RAM make when rendering ?

is it really unnoticeable and therefore Id be better off going for 2gig ?

what would you do ?

Regards
Jamcas

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/29/2004, 5:50 PM
About the only thing Vegas needs a lot of RAM for when rendering is if you have large still image files (and we're talking HUGE, like 6000x4000 pixels or bigger). Other than that, Vegas doesn't need much RAM at all. It really only needs enough to process the current frame it's working on, or a small range of frames when compressing to something like MPEG. When i upgraded from 256MB to 512MB my rendering times didn't change noticeably at all.
Grazie wrote on 1/30/2004, 9:56 AM
. . well Kellsie, I've now got 2gb RAM . . pphhoooarrr . . You should see what Dynamic RAM Preview does with that Real Estate?!? Blew me away . .
riredale wrote on 1/30/2004, 11:12 AM
It's true that lots of ram is very useful if you are doing huge "render to ram" previews. I have to smile though when I read some posts about how "doubling my ram to 1GB really increased my render speed."

It's very easy to see how much YOU need. Just download a simple little ram monitor utility such as "RamPage" and run it. It opens a tiny icon in your system tray that just sits there and watches to see how much ram is actually in use at that moment.

In my case, typical Vegas operations eat up maybe 20-30MB. Really fancy stuff pushes that number up somewhat more.

Where my 512MB really comes in useful is when I have multiple instances of Vegas running at the same time. If I'm really pressed for time, I'll do a couple of renders on a couple of instances of Vegas, and set their priority to "idle." Then I'll do my regular editing on a third copy of Vegas running in the foreground.

I don't use the "render to ram" feature for much more than checking out a short transition, which uses very little (4MB/sec). The only other program I use which eats a lot of ram is "SteadyHand," which I think can chomp 100MB if you steady over a very long interval.

Chienworks wrote on 1/30/2004, 11:16 AM
Grazie, yep! But ... that's dynamic RAM previews. These don't have much effect on final rendering time, unless your project is really short. 2GB RAM would only hold about 9 minutes worth of DV. And, the benefit would only apply if you just happen to have the needed sections prerendered to RAM when you start the final render.
Grazie wrote on 1/30/2004, 11:31 AM
. . true . . true . . true . . g
Maverick wrote on 1/30/2004, 12:12 PM
Further to what riredale said when I increased from 256 to 768MB RAM I didn't really notice any increase in render times but what I did notice is that things didn't slow down when I opened other instances of Vegas4 or even other applications.

Erk wrote on 1/30/2004, 1:56 PM
My results echo Maverick's. I've been watching Rampage for awhile now on my system. One instance of Vegas hardly consumes any RAM; but there's a definite RAM hit if I open one or more other programs with a Vegas open. I'm running 512 MBs of RAM.

Greg
Maverick wrote on 1/30/2004, 2:15 PM
I think I have got the RAM thing just right.

Never too much, never too little and met my budget:-)