I've never had more than 16GB of memory in my PC's and Vegas Pro has never come anywhere near using it all. I think 32GB would be overkill for Vegas Pro.

If you use Photoshop and Illustrator and want to keep them open while editing with Vegas Pro thats a different story but for just editing with Vegas Pro, you probably will never use more than 16GB of memory.

My current workstation for Vegas Pro is a 12-Core 2010 Mac Pro with 24GB triple channel memory running Windows 7 Pro in Bootcamp and again, Vegas Pro is only using a fraction of it even during long renders. I don't see a need for 32GB for Vegas Pro.

~jr

Thank you gents, You saved me some $$. I guess I'll invest more in precessor and less in memory.

Render multiple priokects at once ??? NEver thought about doing that (probably because of the memory) I use vegasur and set up a batch rendering....but never thought of openiong several SVPs.

i've done multiple instances of Vegas, Blender & Gimp open at once, many rendering & had 4gb ram & never ran out.

Windows is pretty good at managing memory. I have a Vegas project of nothing but generated media that can't render in Vegas 32-bit at all as is. Project complexity doesn't seem to have as much to do with RAM as generated media.

I've often had over a dozen instances of Vegas rendering in the background while editing another project, all with 2GB RAM.

So why would I een need 16GB? Should I fall back to 2 x 4GB ?
Currently running SVP 13 64bit
Win 7 Home
I7 860 chip
350 watt PSU (I know.. that's weak.,but hard to find a PSU to fit my Dell mATX case)
4GB Mem
120GB SSD for OS and Programs
1 TB HHD 720RPM storage and media files.
(Archives
on external drive)

[I]So why would I need 16GB?[/I]

With 16GB you can reduce the Windows 7 pagefile to the minimum hence reducing the read/writes on your SSD and also improve overall system performance. With 8GB you may run out of memory depending on what kind of work you do, meaning how many applications you have open at the same time.

One doesn't need a pagefile at all these days, since everyone runs a system that has way more ram than will ever be needed.

A pagefile was truly necessary back when we were building 512MB ram systems (not that many years ago). The OS would swap out to disk those chunks of code and data that weren't needed at the moment. Since a disk was orders of magnitude slower than ram this slowed down things but at least the system wouldn't crash.

To see how much ram you need, run something that would be a challenge to your system, then check the "peak commit" number. I think you'll be shocked at how little ram is truly needed.

This article goes into the subject in considerable detail. His conclusion is that no, you don't NEED a swap file, but it costs next to nothing to have one in reserve and it's the default mode in Windows. But you'll never use it.

[I]but it costs next to nothing[/I]

I don't quite agree with that. Under Windows 7, the page file was 2x or even 2.5x as big as your installed RAM. With 16GB that makes it a good 32GB pagefile and that does take a lot of space, especially on a SSD where ever GB is more valuable.

However, Windows 10 seems to handle this much better. I have 32GB of RAM and Windows 10 suggested "only" a max page files size of 4096MB; that is way better then Windows 7.

Win 7 made that huge of a page file??? Win 8.1 never recommend that high (couple gig's). I've found setting the page file to a set size (I normally use 3gb) lets the system perform a little faster.

Unless a major $$$ investment, why not put in the max GB ? Yeah, overkill for one instance of Vegas, but who knows what the future will bring in terms of ability to utilise more RAM, Vegas or elsewhere ....

geoff (16GB)

I have 16gb only because it wasn't much more $$. With 6 I never ran out of memory but with a heftier CPU (8 core) I figured I'd start pushing it's limits & more RAM would keep things flowing easier with my 3D stuff & generated media in Vegas.

16GB to 32GB. Windows does more with memory than just run foreground apps and taskbar items.

On my system with Win10, one Vegas HD timeline instance, + OneNote, Taskbar items, Edge + a couple tabs, IIS, PRTG, MySQL, and a Win2012S Hyper-V VM using 3.4GB, I am sitting at 9.2GB of used memory. The windows disk cache is sitting at 8.1GB. Leaving 22GB available for more instances of Vegas, blender, applications, browsers or VMs. Pulling information from cache memory will always be much faster than calling from disk.

These days I cannot imagine working on a windows system with less than 8GB ram and then tasking switching between multiple instance of Vegas. It must take you guys with 2-4GB of ram a coffee break to switch windows.

Memory and Cache Memory are fast words. Swap file is a slow word.

Running with 2GB and V9. Currently about a gig free. Each instance of V9 takes about 200MB for a typical 90-minute DVD project.

I have a little freeware utility called RamPage running in the system tray so I can see how much ram is sitting idle. It's hard to load up the system to the point that the ram drops to near zero.

Of course, every system is different, but that's how this system looks. Switching between instances of V9 takes about a blink of an eye.

I never had issues switching between instances of Vegas either. I remember editing uncompressed AVI on my old P3-667 with ~512mb RAM with Vegas 3 LE & switching instances. :)