Movie Studio Processor Limit

ThomasTyndan wrote on 11/3/2005, 5:42 AM
I noticed something rather annoying today:

For a while I had my Vegas Movie Studio on a 1gig Ram 1.8+ GHZ Processor computer. as you can imagine it ran renders slow even when using 99% of processor resources.

When I upgraded to a 3.0 GHZ processor the renders ran about the same. I had not realized it until now, but when I look at my task manager when t is running I find that SVMS is using on 50% of the processor resource. Why is this? It can't be because of memory constraints, I'm not using much memory at all (I have 1.5 gigs RAM now - which over all with other forms of memory bring me up to 2 gigs).

Is there any way to overclock SVMS to use 100% or am I stuck with extremely slow renders?

I am about to buy Sony Vegas 6, does it fix this?

Comments

jtfrazer wrote on 11/3/2005, 6:15 AM
Hi,

Does your new processor support hyperthreading? This may be the reason you're seeing 50% usage. Just a thought.

Jim
ThomasTyndan wrote on 11/3/2005, 6:26 AM
My processor support hyperthreading and it is enabled, should I disable it?
Tim L wrote on 11/3/2005, 9:11 AM
This is just a guess on my part -- and I'm not very knowledgeable in this area -- but perhaps the render is limited more by the hard drive speed rather than the processor. The CPU can't process the data any faster than the drive can feed it, and while rendering there is a continuous need for file I/O.

Maybe rendering output to a different physical drive would help? i.e. reading the source DV file(s) from drive X at full speed, while writing the rendered file out to drive Y at full speed?

Again, these are just guesses on my part. I don't know how to check them out.

Tim L
ThomasTyndan wrote on 11/3/2005, 9:48 AM
I can guarentee you that it is not the drive. If I were to do a direct stream copy of lets say a 22 gig DV AVI file, it would take 2 or 3 minutes. The speed of the drive is not the bottleneck, and by the way I am feeding from one drive to another.

It is some limit being placed on the processor...

When i get home tonight I will see if turning hyperthreading off works. It is a good guess that this is the reason it is having a problem. hyper threading is good when you want to guarentee resources for more than one program, but when i render, that is all I do.
ScottW wrote on 11/3/2005, 5:32 PM
The most likely expl is that MS rendering is single threaded (I think this is in fact the case), so it won't take advantage of the fact that you have what appear to be 2 processors - hence you'll see things limited at 50%.
allyn wrote on 11/3/2005, 10:33 PM
i suspect the same thing that scottw just said. the 50% means half of your TWO processors, or in other words one processor is pegged. that's the thing with two processors: a single process only uses one and doesn't go twice as fast.
Clarke wrote on 11/4/2005, 4:12 AM
I used to note the same issue.
What I did was activate the task manager, select the processes tab.
Right click the VMS program and select high priority.

It bumped my CPU utilisation to about 70%.

Hope it works for you and is of help to you.

Cheers
dibbkd wrote on 11/4/2005, 1:00 PM
Umm, wow, I didn't even realize you could set the priority of a process in Task Manager...

Tried what you said, and sure enough, you can, like you said!

I haven't tried it with my VMS process yet, but this is good to know anyway.

Thanks for the tip!!
ritsmer wrote on 11/5/2005, 5:44 AM
About the question if Vegas 6 fixes the problem: Im My Vegas 6 platinum I can adjust "Maximum number of rendering threads" meaning that if a lucky guy has a motherboard with 2 dual core processors, then Vegas can render in 4 threads at one time in parallel .... A less luckier guy can adjust the "Max number of threads" to make the best of his systems abilities (i.e. hyperthreading etc).

About priority: If you want fast rendering, set it high - if you want to use your PC for other purposes while rendering (reading mails, loading more pictures from your camere etc) set it all the way down to LOW - and you will not notice at all that Vegas is rendering in the "background"