[Mostly solved] Additional performance advice?

Gordon-Fecyk wrote on 12/16/2022, 8:08 PM

[This is mostly solved now.]

I was a long time Vegas user that just upgraded from v14 to v20 - I was entitled to the non-subscription upgrade.

What a major difference between v14 and v20, notably in the (lack of) performance. The UI is much laggier, unusable in a stock state, compared to loading the same project on v14.

I think I have the worst of the performance kinks worked out though, but I'd like to know any other performance improvement tips I might have missed.

I spent my first week digging through this forum looking for performance tips, and came up with these so far:

Turn off audio scrubbing with an obscure Internal setting (Pause Scrub = 0)
Turn off all GPU acceleration in Display and Video preferences
Turn off all legacy features such as Legacy Text
Use Alternate High DPI Settings under Display preferences
Avoid all GPU-accelerated rendering
Assign more RAM and rendering threads under Video preferences

Fortunately I found that the one TTF font I use the most, something called "Square 721," no longer requires the Legacy Text media type to work. Also, when any GPU rendering option was enabled, this one project I had would constantly stop rendering at a specific frame, but after disabling all GPU rendering I could finally squeeze out a final video. Granted that project had almost all 4k source media and the final product was only 1080p, but it did manage, and at a render rate comparable to the same project on v14.

I'm going to try cutting one more video in a series I have. Maybe using fresh media on a new project, instead of importing a project from v14, will help speed things up.

I'll try to fill in my system details, source media details, workflow, and intended final product as best as I can. I'd love to make a project archive available for people to inspect, if it wasn't 100 GB in size.

System:

Intel Core i9 10900 2.8 GHz, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB NVME OS drive, 4 TB hybrid drive for storage, all on a MSI Z490M mainboard
BIOS settings adjusted to give the GPU 16 PCIe lanes ("Auto" would cause lag in some games)
NVidia RTX 3070 Founder's Edition GPU, using Studio drivers and not Game drivers
OS is Windows 10 Pro 21H2, which I tend to keep very clean - for instance I have Software Restriction Policy enabled and I run my apps as a non-administrator where possible

Software:

VEGAS Pro v20 Build 214 (which I think is Update 1)
Goldwave for audio editing
Handbrake v1.5.1 for transcoding from Apple MOV to M4V AVC / AAC variable bit rate

Source media:

Apple iPhone 11 Pro, either 1080p60 or 4k60, hence the transcoding to M4V
NVidia Share captures to 1080p60
Random static images, WAV audio, MP3 audio

I do admit to getting silly with the 4k source material. To reduce the pain on v14, I would turn off automatic proxy generation, and instead import all source media into the project, followed by triggering proxy generation for all media that supported it. This would take a couple of hours, after which editing was not as much of a pain. I turned off automatic proxy generation on v20 as well, with the intent of importing all sources and generating proxies as a batch.

If all else fails to improve UI performance, I'll consider replacing this PC, maybe even using a RAID-0 array of SSDs for storage instead of the hybrid drive. I'm thinking even of building a dual processor PC, just so I can have the 16 PCIe lanes for the GPU plus a dedicated PCIe x8 RAID card for storage.

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Comments

john_dennis wrote on 1/16/2025, 4:48 PM

@ken-coughlin

With the machine in my signature:

Magix AVC/AAC Default UHD Settings

Voukoder AVC/AAC GOP30, No B-Frames Rate Limited

RogerS wrote on 1/16/2025, 7:01 PM

The 3080 is very power hungry with large transient power spikes so have extra power supply capacity for it if you go that route. I'd go for a newer generation at this point unless you see a deal.

ken-coughlin wrote on 1/16/2025, 7:21 PM

The 3080 is very power hungry with large transient power spikes so have extra power supply capacity for it if you go that route. I'd go for a newer generation at this point unless you see a deal.

The 7920T comes standard with a 1,400w PSU.

BTW, I found a way to improve my performance a bit with my current config. I have a second GTX 970 installed and doing nothing at the moment (no SLI support for the GTX 970 in the 7920T), so I assigned GPU Acceleration to that card.

RogerS wrote on 1/17/2025, 2:57 AM

Thanks Ken, yes it seems to have plenty of power for even power-hungry GPUs.

While there are many GPU options I think there are few bad ones, so you'll have a good experience with any modern GPU. More ram is good (12GB or greater should be enough for years for most uses).

If you want to try the second benchmark in my signature (VP 20 sample ad) it stresses the system differently than the first. You could see if CPU encoding using all your cores (Mainconcept) is faster than letting the purpose-built GPU do the encode (NVENC) under MagixAVC.

ken-coughlin wrote on 1/17/2025, 9:58 PM

@ken-coughlin

You're leaving a lot of hardware resources fallow. Download and try AVC/AAC renders with Voukoder (Link: https://www.voukoder.org/) to see if you can make better use of all the processor cores you have sitting idle.

Report back.

Sorry it took a while to get back to you. I found and downloaded voukoder 13.4.1 along with connector-vegas21-1.7.1. I tried playing with it a bit. I usually need to render in WMV for a specific recurring project I work on, but it doesn't appear voukoder can render WMV files.

I run the videos for a film festival, and every video cueing package I've tried, with the exception of VLC, require additional codecs like K-Lite, and everyone has had problems playing multiple videos in the same session. In order to get consistent cue list results, I find rendering the videos as WMV works best for me.

VLC will play multiple file types without external codecs, but that causes even more problems. It does have a converter, but unless you're converting to the same files type & frame rate, the audio goes out of sync on some of the videos.

RogerS wrote on 1/17/2025, 11:41 PM

For Voukoder you'd want to render to the most common format these days which is AVC in a MP4 container. (It's common for film festivals as well). Try x264 through Voukoder to peg the CPU at 100% and see how it compares to NVENC, for example.

ken-coughlin wrote on 1/18/2025, 11:11 AM

For Voukoder you'd want to render to the most common format these days which is AVC in a MP4 container. (It's common for film festivals as well). Try x264 through Voukoder to peg the CPU at 100% and see how it compares to NVENC, for example.

It's my experience that video cueing packages generally require additional codecs to play anything other than the native WMV container. Everyone I've tried runs into a problem when there are multiple videos in a playlist. For the film festival I'm involved with, I sometimes have to play 8 or more shorts in a row, and there are times when one of the videos will not play. My most reliable result has been converting all videos to WMV and deleting my additional codecs. While VLC has all the codecs built in, I've run into problems with VLC as well.

I also run lights, sound and video for a number of theatrical productions, and some of those have upwards of 30 videos. I've tried using 2 different computers, one running the lights & sound and the other running a video cue package and still run into issues with the video playback.