How Vegas utilizes HD resources?

DWhitevidman wrote on 10/10/2006, 6:14 AM

I've been learning and using Vegas 5 on a home Dell about five yrs. old, & it does work good, yet takes time to render, understandable.

Now trying to configure the best bang for my buck with a Dell and my main question is as in my subject: How does Vegas access HD's? Is my best bet to load Vegas on my boot system drive, and put all the captured video footage and rendered files onto a seperate data drive? Would a 3rd drive help as well or not woth the extra cost? And last which should be the faster drive, the system or data drive?

Thanks for any input base on your previous experience with this.

Don

Comments

Former user wrote on 10/10/2006, 6:22 AM

Most people recommend that you capture footage to a drive seperate from your system drive. Applications such as Vegas should be on your system drive. (some people do otherwise, but I have not found a good reason to do so).

If you have to make a choice for speed, I would use the faster drive for the data. Capture and output of video data is realtime, so you need your best resources for that function.

Dave T2

DavidMcKnight wrote on 10/10/2006, 9:44 AM

Would a 3rd drive help as well or not woth the extra cost?

My understanding (from one of Spot's books or seminars) is yes it will help. Have Vegas installed on your system C drive, 2nd hard drive for source video files, and render your final versions to a 3rd drive. Is the performance increase worth the extra cost? I don't know, but I do know having more HD space is better than not enough, so might be worth it overall to have 3 available. Worth noting too that you can always add a 3rd and more as externals via firewire.

Jay-Hancock wrote on 10/10/2006, 12:12 PM

Just to add a bit to David's point.. There are two main reasons why having a separate drive for video data is important. With a single drive you can't read & write simultaneously, thus a render has to alternate between reading and writing. Second, video read/writes on the system drive are subject to frequent interruption by the Operating System, which kills your efficiency. Multiple drives can overcome these limitations and tremendously boost your digital video workstation performance.

While all of this may seem obvious, consider also that the same principle applies to the use of drive interface ports on the motherboard. If two drives share the same port, only one of them is read or written to at a time, basically cancelling most of the speed benefit.

If you are using SATA this is not an issue. If you are using IDE drives, it means you shouldn't have two drives on the same cable. Put all of the HDs on different cables, and you can be sure they aren't on the same interface port. And if you are thinking to get some advantage by using a 3rd drive, be sure you have a 3rd interface port to connect it to.

Some folks would say that this is further complicated by where you place your CD-ROM drives. I won't delve into that here.

With this kind of multiple-drive setup, I would say that using SATA for your hard drives will greatly simplify things. IDE can work just as well, but SATA is much easier to work with.

DWhitevidman wrote on 10/11/2006, 6:50 AM

Dave,
Thanks for the input, at least I'm on the right track.

DWhitevidman wrote on 10/11/2006, 6:51 AM

Thanks for your input as well. I would like to try the 3rd drive option, but may have to add later due to $$ contraints.

DWhitevidman wrote on 10/11/2006, 6:53 AM

Thanks to you as well Jay,

There are SATA drives and I'll configure them as you all are suggesting. I'll add a 3rd drive when they come down a tad more in price and test how that alters my rendering time.