How to render Vegas Faster? Multiple PC's or what?

will-3 wrote on 6/28/2008, 12:52 PM

How can we get the absolute max rendering speed from Vegas?

- Is there a special plug in card that will help it render faster?
- Which pc & configuration will get it done the fastest?
- Can we setup multiple-PC's to render? (if so how?)

We are doing a log of chromakey & compositing... hours per week... and need to invest whatever into absolute max rendering system(s)

Thanks for any help.

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 6/28/2008, 1:50 PM

For the most part there are no cards that will help. One exception has been Magic Bullet, which uses the graphics card a bit

Generally, the fastest CPU possible is the main solution for Vegas. Memory could also help and I guess I'd at least try to have more than 2 GB installed. Fast drives can also help a little as long as they don't incur more CPU overhead to run them. In that sense, a good scsi system can take a little load off the CPU. Probably not worth the cost though.

You can also look at specialized compositing solutions outside of Vegas. These are sometimes better tuned for the job than an editing application would be. You might find that AfterEffects or Red might better use a graphics card, for example.

At the shop I work at we've used Media100's 844x (not available any more) and PPro with Axio cards. The Axio cards can do a LOT of work but we have been finding that they don't speed much up for us overall because we experience too much crashing and rebooting. However, one of the local pro football teams also uses Axio cards and I think they're having much better luck because the scope of what they do is more limited.

Both these cards were intended to bring compositing grunt to editing applications, I don't know if there's anything special that accelerates After Effects. Boris now owns M100 so they ought to still hold the rights to 844x, but I don't know if they are doing anything with it.

Vegas has some network rendering features that might help, but you'd have to put some time into trying it to see if it really makes a difference.

Rob Mack

baysidebas wrote on 6/28/2008, 1:56 PM

Multicore processors will give you a lot of bang for the buck. You can network render, Vegas has built-in facilities for this. However, you can't use network rendering for MPEG.

johnmeyer wrote on 6/28/2008, 2:41 PM

Network rendering works great, but only if your bottleneck is rendering and not encoding. Rending is the process of creating new video bits from the fX and composites you have done in Vegas. Encoding is simply the process of creating a different video format, like MPEG-2. So, if you are waiting two days to render some green screen stuff, with a bunch of fX, etc., then network rendering is exactly what you need. On the other hand, if you want to speed your DVD prep from basic cuts-only editing, then network rendering is of absolutely no value whatsoever (although it could be if Sony could finally get the licensing deal from MainConcept that they should have done years ago).

Coursedesign wrote on 6/28/2008, 3:02 PM

If you're doing a lot of compositing and greenscreen, then After Effects with the fastest nVidia graphics card you can afford will make a big difference.

In practical work, Gridiron Nucleo Pro will also speed up such AE work dramatically, by doing a lot of work automatically in the background while you are setting things up and tweaking parameters. This involves not only speculative (intelligent) pre-renders but much more.

For intense paid work, this is a must-have.