If I hadn't seen it for myself...

Cliff Etzel wrote on 1/22/2006, 3:17 PM
Vegas utilizes 1/3 the memory of Premiere Pro?!?!?

Being a quiet sunday, decided to run a little test regarding a 60 second web video promo I had been working on.

The project was a simple one for a new client - a series of 320x240 QT clips from my still camera to be rendered to a promotional clip for their new freedive training site at The Blue Hole in New Mexico.

The project consisted of plain dissolves and some titles that superimpose at the bottom corners describing the various features of the training site. Nothing fancy. I created in Acid Pro a 60 second audio track to compliment the video and rendered it as a wav file to be brought into the project.

Now I have to admit - I really love PPro's interface - It has just been more intuitive for me than Vegas - even though I love Acid Pro and Sound Forge.

Hardware specs - nothing fancy:
WinXP SP2
2.4 Ghz P4
1GB RAM
40GB Boot Drive
160GB Seagate Barracuda Video Drive
40GB Audio drive
2GB page file

Having created the same project in PPro 1.0 & 1.5 and Vegas 6, I also ran each without rendering and with rendering - it made no difference in PPro - while previewing on the timeline, I ran task manager to see what the results were. The numbers blew me away!

PPro 1.0 - 350MB memory utilized
PPro 1.5.1 - 297MB utilized
Vegas 6 - 127MB utilized

Just to make sure the numbers weren't skewed, I shut down each application and reopened - the numbers were within 3% of the first run.

Then just for giggles - I ran the same project my my Dell D400 Laptop with 1GB ram.. The n umbers were even more shocking:

PPro 1.0 - 210MB utilized
PPro 1.5 - 225MB Utilized
Vegas 6 - 95MB Utilized

I'm absolutely stunned by the results. I knew Vegas was up there in feature set - I just didn't realize how efficient it really was until I did this test myself. What was a real eye opener was watching the CPU utilization spike to 95-99% with both Premiere Pro's, while with Vegas - it maybe spiked to maybe 24%.

Everytime I fall for the marketing hype of adobe, I always end up coming back to Vegas...

Please forgive my lack of faith in the Fellowship of Vegas.. :-)

Cliff Etzel
Blue Digital Media

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 1/22/2006, 4:32 PM
You've got two things going here:

1. Vegas is well-designed at its core.

2. Any Adobe product is designed in a way that ensures that it will be forever enshrined in the bloatware hall of fame.

I don't think there is another major software company that even comes close to Adobe's inefficient design habits.
apit34356 wrote on 1/22/2006, 5:24 PM
Actually, I believe that title is owned by MS, then in a close second, Adobe.
Sol M. wrote on 1/22/2006, 6:43 PM
Are these numbers during rendering or just while the program is running? How did your render times compare?

If this is during rendering, wouldn't it be a good thing to see your CPU go to max, as it indicates that the application is making full use of the processor (that is, if rendering time is shortened as a result)?

Also, in Vegas' options, you can adjust how much RAM uses. I doubt I'll find myself installing PPro any time soon on my system, so I can't compare, but I've had Vegas use over 700MB of RAM for a single timeline (of course, RAM usage is highly variable based on how much Vegas is set to use and the content on the timeline)
fldave wrote on 1/22/2006, 7:54 PM
..."I've had Vegas use over 700MB of RAM for a single timeline"

Spot's last Render Test ran mine to 1.7GB. Killer.
Cliff Etzel wrote on 1/22/2006, 8:11 PM
This was just running a preview from the timeline...

Lurking on the Adobe Forums, I had seen post after post about memory leaks and users working on large projects having major issues even with up to date hardware specs.

Now I know it isn't a "scientfic" test, but it sure made me re-evaluate my position on Adobe products - I still use Photoshop 7 just to keep from the bloat that was introduced with CS and above.

The new PPro 2.0 has even HIGHER hardware specs - hell - I couldn't even install it on either my desk top or laptop if I wanted to. Supposedly, my hardware is "ancient".

I use Acid Pro more than any other app, but as I dig intop Vegas more, I am beginning to see a consistency I didn't realize was there before - VERY user friendly, VERY efficient with system resources, and flat out some of the best software out there for the money. I am thankful I didn't give in to the Adobe marketing machine.

The ONLY thing I wish Vegas had that Adobe and Avid have is the ability to have a seperate preview window for clips - Using the trimmer has always been kludgy from my perspective - maybe Vegas 7 will address that.. who knows....
Spot|DSE wrote on 1/22/2006, 8:20 PM
The ONLY thing I wish Vegas had that Adobe and Avid have is the ability to have a seperate preview window for clips - Using the trimmer has always been kludgy from my perspective

This likely will never happen, simply because this is one of the benefits of Vegas for most folks. Rather than having a good 1/8 or more of the screen real estate chewed up by a sometimes used monitor window, particularly given than you can make the trimmer window as large or larger than a preview, saves a lot of space on the screen. Plus, unlike some of the editors out there, Vegas encourages timeline-based editing, rather than 3 or 4 point editing, and so the Source window is somewhat superflous. It would be a nice add if you could have the ability to toggle a Source window, but since the Preview Window becomes a source window the second you click media in the Explorer or Trimmer...again, it's somewhat superflous.
Cliff Etzel wrote on 1/22/2006, 8:42 PM
Good Point Spot - I guess it's just a matter of paradigm shifting with regards to workflow... :-)

Cliff Etzel
rmack350 wrote on 1/22/2006, 10:42 PM
Macromedia far exceeds Adobe.

But then again...
rmack350 wrote on 1/22/2006, 11:00 PM
There's no reason you couldn't have a source window in Vegas as long as it was free floating. Having it be tied to the preview window is annoying. Also, it seems like a source window isn't quite as relevant when you can stack 10 or even 100 layers of video. Which one is the source? But having a source window overcomes a conceptual hurdle for people who might come over to Vegas. I think they'd eventually turn it off.

I'm about to have Premiere Pro 1.5 or 2.0 or whatever put onto my system at work so I suppose I'll get a chance to decide how useful the source window is. I'm not sure how I feel about it but the three actual edit stations will be Axio systems so the satellite systems must also have Premiere. Mine will have Vegas too, of course.

I've done just a little poking at Premiere. Seems clumsy. Can't play certain media that Vegas wouldn't think twice about.

Axio brings up the main reason for using a system like Premiere. Hardware. Whether you think that's good or not, if the editors won't consider a software-only system then Vegas is just out of the running.

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 1/22/2006, 11:09 PM
The Acrobat reader is a real gem, just how much crud does one need to load to read a PDF, oh wait, why don't we just load everything just in case the document contains audio!!

And how much does Adobe want for something that'll do a basic conversion to PDF, $100s, how much did we end up spending for a virtual printer driver that does the same job, if not more, $25.

Bob.
PeterWright wrote on 1/22/2006, 11:33 PM
Good point Bob - I use a piece of "free" software from a magazine cover disc called Jaws PDF Creator which automatically plugs in to MS Word, Publisher etc and does a perfect job.

Stonefield wrote on 1/23/2006, 12:17 AM
..."Plus, unlike some of the editors out there, Vegas encourages timeline-based editing...."

Timeline based editing is pretty much what I base my entire work on. There's no way I'd be able to do my little videos with anything else.

Stan
Sol M. wrote on 1/23/2006, 2:17 AM
I'm exactly the opposite. I just can't bring myself to trim my media on the timeline. Everything passes through the trimmer first.

I guess I've still got my old habits from my time on linear editors, and then moving onto NLEs that basically transposed the same source/record metaphor to a NLE workflow (i.e. FCP, Avid, etc.).

While I don't miss having a source window, and I definitely enjoy the extra screen real estate, I wouldn't mind having two full size windows for certain types of edits (slip, slide, roll, etc.) where the edit points (or the content under the edit points) are changing. Having two views at the proper aspect ratio would be nice (rather than how Vegas "squashes" to views into the single preview window).
filmy wrote on 1/23/2006, 7:42 AM
>>>I'm about to have Premiere Pro 1.5 or 2.0 or whatever put onto my system at work so I suppose I'll get a chance to decide how useful the source window is.<<<

You know you can turn off the preview window in Premiere. Coming form a traditional edting background at first I sort of expected the two window set up - source/record - and it bothered me seeing only one window in Vegas Video. However now it does not bother me to only have one window and seems to be more of the NLE norm, plus in Premiere you have a little preview window in the media pool anway and now there is also the Bridge program that allows a more detailed view of "everything".
rmack350 wrote on 1/23/2006, 8:27 AM
I found the trimmer to be "the way to go" the last time I did anything involving a lot of footage. It kind of just depends on the project and how much tape was shot. We had looong interviews with not much in them and after a bit of struggling I settled on the trimmer and subclips. Too bad subclips have hard beginnings and ends. It's a hassle to try to add a little head or tail to one after the fact.

Next time I'll capture whole tapes and then use the trimmer to start breaking out my footage Scene detection wasn't helping me.

Rob Mack
PeterWright wrote on 1/23/2006, 4:23 PM
Rob - if you create and save Regions in the Trimmer, these are listed as "virtual subclips" in Vegas Explorer, can be in any order you wish according to how you have named them, AND their heads and tails can be adjusted anytime.
rmack350 wrote on 1/23/2006, 5:08 PM
This is the way that subclips ought to work. There are other problems with subclips as well. It seems like a feature that was grudgingly added in V5, but without implementing the things that would make them powerful.

It's very good that you can apply MediaFX to a subclip, as well as reverse it. It's not so good that you can't apply or see the mediaFX from the trimmer, nor that media pool clips don't give any indication that they have MediaFX applied.

The reason for even having media FX and subclips is so that a user can apply an effect to a clip and use it several times. The subclip gives you the option of creating variations of an effect on a clip, and using it several times. You can't apply three variations of a media effect to a named range in a clip, you need to use subclips.

Last project I tried to get into the habit of creating a range in the trimmer and then creating the subclip. That way I had definite marks to go back to. But you're right, it'd be more efficient to abandon Subclips in favor of the explorer -- it's just backward, and not a good way to attract new users since it'll disorient them. You prevent users from seeing the ranges in the media pool, and you prevent them from arranging those ranges into bins. It's a great feature to see the ranges in the explorer, but this also needs to be available in the bins.

Rob Mack
Coursedesign wrote on 1/23/2006, 5:39 PM
The Acrobat reader is a real gem, just how much crud does one need to load to read a PDF

Sounds like you haven't downloaded the V7 reader which is about 10x faster. At least.
They got it finally, perhaps after seeing other people create patches to stop the mega feature downloading.

And PP 2.0 now advertises "10-bit 4:4:4 RGB HD editing for film", and according to a competent independent source (Jacob Rosenberg) this actually works, and very nicely at that.

I really hope Vegas 7 starts supporting 10-bit. If they don't, they will be losing a rapidly growing base of 10-bit users, and the industry respect that comes with this (and that they could frankly use).

I was also surprised to see that you can access real Photoshop functionality in Premiere Pro 2.0, without leaving PP. You can also roundtrip stuff to After Effects and have changes there reflected immediately on the PP timeline.

Ditto for Audition and Encore, they call it simply Dynamic Linking.

PP has really come of age now. I couldn't stand it before, but putting their 2.0 efforts into workflow and a consistent, non palettosis user interface (instead of feature diarrhea) has really really paid off.

There are still many things that Vegas does better, but the opposite is also true.