John Cline's HDV rendertest revisited (briefly)

vitalforce wrote on 6/28/2007, 4:33 PM

This is a personal thanks to Mr. Cline for posting an invitation to forum members to try out our systems on a 1080i render test. I recently invested in a Mac Pro running a pair of dual core 2.66 Xeons (so a quad system) and was impressed that it could render out our 93-minute feature DV film (SD, not HD), which used to take 27 hours including all color correction, graphics, FX, etc., on a five-year-old pre-HT Dell 8200 with a 2.53 P4, in just over 3 hours now. (Rendering to MPEG-2 for DVD-festival use.)

But I wasn't prompted to remember until I did John's HDV render test that I had reduced the dynamic RAM preview setting to zero (to use Boris FX 7, the Vegas plug-in) and this affected render performance in a big way. Restoring dynamic RAM memory to 64MB, his render test time fell on my system from 7:35 to 2:02.

Then I decided to try rendering a second copy of the film. This Mac just rendered the entire film in 1 hour and 5 minutes. That is 30% FASTER than real time.

Making Vegas scalable to processor speed was visionary. This new system and Vegas together, frees up time for more creative decisions. You can tinker with color correction, FX, titles, whatever, knowing it will only take about an hour to redo the project (in SD)!

Vegas 7.0e, supercharged. I'm going to have to put air brakes on this thing....
.

Comments

LSHorwitz wrote on 6/28/2007, 7:12 PM

These are very interesting results, and suggest that the Mac Pro Xeon "Woodcrest" hardware runs a bit faster than the Quad QX6800 alternative. My Mac Pro Quad Xeon ran Vegas beautifully and put Final Cut Studio HD / Compressor to shame when it came to rendering speed.

Larry

John_Cline wrote on 6/28/2007, 7:21 PM

You're welcome. In all honesty, however, I just took Spot's original rendertest.veg, changed it to HD and posted it. Once the quad machines could render the old one in times approaching 12 seconds, I thought it was time to make the test a bit more comptationally intensive so the differences in render times between machines would be a little more meaningful.

Anyway, 2:02 is an excellent score and is right in the ballpark with the 2.66ghz Quad-cores.

I love Vegas, if it did 10-bit video, I'd marry it.

John

vitalforce wrote on 6/29/2007, 12:41 AM

Then thanks to both yourself and Spot.

When you gents are in the Burbank area and the occasion permits, beers (or glasses of wine) are on me.

P.S. About time I started doing the real-name thing. I'm Fred Smith.

Really, Smith. Honest.