Cliff, I appreciate you're frustration on what seemed to be a simple question. I learned the hard and expesnsive way, Hardware wasn't my issue. At least not my PC hardware.

My specific problem was in the end related to Vegas and it's inability succesfully render P2 50M AVC-I source footage. For me it was a borrowed camera and footage I can't do over. So I had to go experimenting.

Their is never an easy answer. Because if the answer was easy, you probably wouldn't have needed to ask the question.

On my FX 8350, with neat enabled I got to about 60% CPU usage. For about the first 5 minutes of footage, then crash. On my TR 1950 X, I got about 1% CPU usage with neat enabled. Same 5 minutes of render till crash. The 28M AVCHD footage on the same timeline rendered at about the same speed and completed. Since the source camera was a Sony, it would have been quite embarassing if Vegas couldn't handle that. the best I seen with neat enabled was around 350 frames per minute. The worst was around 120. I experimented heavily as in vegas it isn't all that easy to determine which options will "smart" render. Only to learn that neat won't fully utilize the resources available anyway. By the way, Vegas won't even transcode P2 AVC I 50. I had to go searching.

Up until the last release of Vegas when it came to hardware, it was all about preference and patience. It appears now if you're not an Intel/Nvidia fanboy, it's time to start experimenting and see what works best. If you had a Mac and had just Pro Res as an option, then it's a whole lot easier to write software that works. The new BMD Pocket Cinema 4K only has CinemaDNG RAW, and Pro Res. It's kind of looking while BMD software will be agnostic, they definitely prefer Apple hardware. Windows 10 is fundamentally different than it's predecessors, even it's Pro version is missing stuff I use in my day job. I believe Win 10 is mostly to blame for the Vegas issues you and I are experiencing....but the other NLE's have already figured out how to make Win 10 work with out relying solely on QSV and NVENC

I should mention given my timeline sync issues I was attempting an intermediate render to make both of the cameras clips the exact same length on the timeline. In resolve I don't have those issues.

@wireless112 - I just rendered my current project with VisionColor and a LUT applied to all clips, Neat Video and the Vegas Pro Vignette. I bypassed using the Vegas2Handbrake script and it rendered without issues - I've rewatched the rendered video so far and it seems to be in sync completely so I think this is an issue of the Vegas2Handbrake/DebugMode frameserving causing the audio drift.

TBH, Vegas is still a paradigm I totally get - I begrudgingly used PPro because I could rely upon it - this comparison test within Vegas Pro and then comparing the exact same project rendered out in Premiere shows me how sloppy the code is for performance in Premiere even though I'm using a CUDA enabled card. Is Vegas perfect - that's readily apparent, but it does seem to work well if I remove the frameserving component.

My sneaking suspicion about other users having issues with Vegas stability seems to be from the latest tech we have available - my ancient x58 setup is rock solid - albeit not as fast as newer hardware - but I'm not made of money and I'm squeezing as much as I can from my current workstation as possible until I can determine what motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card to get. As I stated earlier - I'm willing to edit with proxies (although I'm not sure how that works since I still don't shoot 4K yet). Resolve looks good on paper, but when I look at the hardware configuration specs to run it well, It puts my budget into shock.

I feel like it's more marketing spin doctoring these days on these claimed performance gains - it seems like all the marketing is about gaming and all I want is a solid workstation to edit my work on.

@Cliff Etzel - Good to hear you got it all worked out. If I hadn't borrowed that P2 camera I would still be a happy dedicated Vegas user. and quite frankly still an FX 8350 owner. My CX900 is clean enough not to need Neat...not for the money I am getting out of this. I started my editing experimentation years ago on premiere, for the same reason others like me did at the time. It wasn't until I got my CX900 that I started using Vegas as the readily available versions of premiere didn't support AVCHD well at the time. At the end of the day if the NLE can't support the camera, it's kind of a deal breaker. I am simply a hobbyist who stumbled on a small paying job because no one else was doing it, that happened to have friends with professional cameras that I mistakenly thought were better than my CX900. Boy was I wrong :)

I forgot to mention my total project length is nearly two hours. Applying vignette to all clips suggest to me, your project may not be quite as long :)

@wireless112 - Installed and imported my 4:30 sec project into Resolve 15 beta and within a few minutes of tweaking stills, Resolve hard locked and I couldn't close it no matter what I tried - Had to reboot my desktop. Very Beta software still. Back to thorough testing of Vegas Pro 14 vs Premiere Pro CS6.

Seems like I'm sorta constantly getting an old car repaired instead of just getting a newer one... But it's what I have to work with at the present time and they both seem to work for the time being. I have a feeling that won't be the case when I finally upgrade to a newer desktop computer. And yes - I've debated switching to a previous gen MAC tower and moving to Final Cut Pro X but given that within 2 years Apple is planning on ditching Intel CPU's altogether, that doesn't seem a wise investment - HOpefully MAGIX will sort out all the issues of Vegas Pro 15 and when version 16 is released, they will have sorted out the issues - unless they are secretly working on recoding from the ground up but that takes time and resources they may not have.

Cliff, Resolve 15 beta was just released and is expected to be extremely buggy and just for those wanting to try out new features and help BMD debug the program. I recommend downloading the free version of Resolve 14 if you want to give it a spin. It's very stable extremely full featured for a free version. Keep in mind though it does require a certain level GPU to run properly and they have lists of what is the required minimum. That said my current system is 2 years old and runs it great.

Cliff, Resolve 15 beta was just released and is expected to be extremely buggy and just for those wanting to try out new features and help BMD debug the program. I recommend downloading the free version of Resolve 14 if you want to give it a spin. It's very stable extremely full featured for a free version.

I'll uninstall Resolve 15 beta as I do have the last version of Resolve 14 I can install - still I wonder about hardware requirements for the eventual 4K editing I will be doing once I upgrade to shooting 4K content. The amount of money I have allocated for the BMPCC 4K is what it will cost to replace my desktop - and I can't use a second monitor with the free version of Resolve - apparently I need to purchase one of their cards in order to get that feature whereas both Vegas Pro and Premiere Pro offer that within the software itself.

Guess there's no perfect solution

I just refreshed my memory on what x58 means, that can't even run a bomgar client smoothly without GPU help. I know I have one at work. I would never expect it to do a quality render of anything greater than 1080i 30fps. It's an i7 on a server board with 32GB of ram, which 6 years ago the company I work for bought complete in a 2U case for a big whopping $260. The FSB limitations alone should crash the render. Please don't take my positive experience with my AMD systems as a guarantee that the old Intel will still work with new software. There are many factors to consider.

I don't recall seeing you specify the processor, on x58 it could be an Atom or Celeron all the way to a Xeon. If you do have a celeron or i3, just buy the biggest CPU your Mobo will support on ebay for $40. Don't forget about the cooling, If your case will fit Noctua, use it. If not get a define R5 and you will have no issue.

As an owner of a Lenovo Flex 3 with an Atom, I wouldn't use it for anything other than reading email. I kind of regret buying it.

The price of a PC4K barely would cover my CPU/Mobo I just got. If you're looking to go 4K without the storage to accomodate it, you will need a hefty CPU to manage the compression required to get the bandwidth down to a point for it to be played smooth. One of the responders here said he's using an HEVC camera, perfect for low throughput storage. You pay the price on the CPU side though. I don't believe too much in compressing more than I have to, so CPU speed wasn't all that important to me. I only upgraded because of the crashes that I thought were related to my old 990fx setup which. I've found posts 3 years after the x58 was released inquiring when the 990fx was to be released. Point is I thought my system was old :)

After refreshing my memory on what x58 is, I can pretty safely say just about anything you can buy brand new today will be a definite improvement over what you have. When you're only storage medium is platters you definitely need a raid card with battery back up to get even close to the throughput required for the pro codecs. The reason I went threadripper over ryzen was so I could use the board I bought to full capacity. That's one thing I can credit intel on, to the best of my recollections, if the MOBO had the slot you could use it. With AMD, yes you can use the same RAM as Intel, but it get's throttled. I will specifically look at ram support lists and buy the fastest variant that's not underclocked. AMD is picky about what memory slots get used, throttles PCIe slots if you use all of them, disables nvm slots if you use all the pcie slots, disables pcie slots if you use the m2/nvm slots. Threadripper does none of that. I am using 4 of my 6 PCIe sltos, 2 of my 3 nvm slots, and 4 of my 8 Ram slots with no side effects. I am very happy.

Personally I could care less what's in the tower, AMD's price/performance has always been good enough for me. When the boss is buying, Intel all the way. My work LT is pushing 7 years old I think. Not much of it's original or still owned by the company, but it works and it's better than what the current management would replace it with.

I just refreshed my memory on what x58 means, that can't even run a bomgar client smoothly without GPU help. I know I have one at work. I would never expect it to do a quality render of anything greater than 1080i 30fps. It's an i7 on a server board with 32GB of ram, which 6 years ago the company I work for bought complete in a 2U case for a big whopping $260. The FSB limitations alone should crash the render. Please don't take my positive experience with my AMD systems as a guarantee that the old Intel will still work with new software. There are many factors to consider.

I don't recall seeing you specify the processor, on x58 it could be an Atom or Celeron all the way to a Xeon. If you do have a celeron or i3, just buy the biggest CPU your Mobo will support on ebay for $40. Don't forget about the cooling, If your case will fit Noctua, use it. If not get a define R5 and you will have no issue.

As an owner of a Lenovo Flex 3 with an Atom, I wouldn't use it for anything other than reading email. I kind of regret buying it.

The price of a PC4K barely would cover my CPU/Mobo I just got. If you're looking to go 4K without the storage to accomodate it, you will need a hefty CPU to manage the compression required to get the bandwidth down to a point for it to be played smooth. One of the responders here said he's using an HEVC camera, perfect for low throughput storage. You pay the price on the CPU side though. I don't believe too much in compressing more than I have to, so CPU speed wasn't all that important to me. I only upgraded because of the crashes that I thought were related to my old 990fx setup which. I've found posts 3 years after the x58 was released inquiring when the 990fx was to be released. Point is I thought my system was old :)

After refreshing my memory on what x58 is, I can pretty safely say just about anything you can buy brand new today will be a definite improvement over what you have. When you're only storage medium is platters you definitely need a raid card with battery back up to get even close to the throughput required for the pro codecs. The reason I went threadripper over ryzen was so I could use the board I bought to full capacity. That's one thing I can credit intel on, to the best of my recollections, if the MOBO had the slot you could use it. With AMD, yes you can use the same RAM as Intel, but it get's throttled. I will specifically look at ram support lists and buy the fastest variant that's not underclocked. AMD is picky about what memory slots get used, throttles PCIe slots if you use all of them, disables nvm slots if you use all the pcie slots, disables pcie slots if you use the m2/nvm slots. Threadripper does none of that. I am using 4 of my 6 PCIe sltos, 2 of my 3 nvm slots, and 4 of my 8 Ram slots with no side effects. I am very happy.

Personally I could care less what's in the tower, AMD's price/performance has always been good enough for me. When the boss is buying, Intel all the way. My work LT is pushing 7 years old I think. Not much of it's original or still owned by the company, but it works and it's better than what the current management would replace it with.

 

 

Well, it seems it's time for me to upgrade to newer hardware... I'm still using an EVGA x58 SLI3 mobo, Xeon X5670 hex core OC'd to 3.51ghz which turbos to 3.83 ghz when rendering in Vegas Pro 14 and 24GB Matched GSkill Triple Channel RAM. Boot drive is a 240GB SSD, my video editing drive is an external 2x1TB Raid 0 backed up to a single drive via a dock. I have a mix of spinning drives in the tower for misc data, temp files and project files.

I'm going to have to work with what I have for a couple more months until the big payoff from 3 projects I'm in the middle of. If I were only editing stills, I'd not even be having this discussion as I find my desktop still performs quite fast but I'm having to include video (and eventually 4K) in my work and that requires newer hardware... I've been an Intel user save one time I was using a quad core AMD processor back in the AM3 socket days... And it wasn't a great experience back then. I'm a little hesitant to give AMD another try...

Sounds pretty similar to my FX 8350 build. Down to the RAM Qty. A Xeon though should be stable enough as long as it has ECC RAM, it'll just take a while. I'd venture to guess it to be superior to my FX 8350. If you added a second RAID you could probably do 4k via proxies. One RAID to read and One RAID to write. Most pro 4K cameras do dual codec recording to make proxy use pretty effortless. The problem you're going to have is that the CPU is discontinued, Intel generally won't subsidize development for discontinued gear. If you want the current software to work completely as intended you would need to upgrade.

Disclaimer - I don't presently have any 4k cameras and have never attempted 4k workflow, I base my theory solely off of watching Resolve tutorials done on MacBooks circa 2013 which in the PC world mean around circa 2008 give or take. But like I said before, when you control the entire hardware supply chain, it's really easy to make software run well on seemingly under powered hardware.

My primary usage of my machine is not editing and I just couldn't stomach the idea of buying a Mac for something I do as a hobby. If it was my career and was considering buying a camera that only does ProRes, I would in a heartbeat switch to Mac. I say this because if for some reason you need to transcode to simplify workflow, you'd want to use the same codec. You can only encode ProRes on a Mac. Examples of simplify would be to make multiple clips into one to simplify multi cam work, make it easier to be sure you're timeline is synced and where you think it is. Which is how I discovered my VP issue, I was struggling doing the multi cam work with the resulting chopped up clips on the timeline. I knew that with two cameras one of which being unmanned that I could only start and stop the record once. This left a lot of idle time that needed to be trimmed.

The whole premise around this is to prepare for the eventual move to 4K acquisition. I'm primarily a photographer but do get asked to shoot video - I'm more than likely going to just upgrade my camera bodies to the latest that can shoot 4K instead of a dedicated 4K video camera as I can then move back and forth between stills and video more efficiently and easily. If I were steadfast on just shooting stills, I wouldn't even bother with all of this tbh... The most I would do for video if I had my way would be NPR style audio slideshows - and this I know Vegas Pro is far more efficient at using over anything else I've worked with...

Cliff, If you're planning on getting the new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k it comes with the Studio (paid) version of Resolve. The way secondary preview works in Resolve is different. They don't allow it completely on the second monitor like in Vegas. They do have full screen playback but it only works on the primary monitor where your timeline is so it's somewhat limited. There is also a 2 screen mode for real estate but its more limited where you can put things. That said my BMD card was under $200 bucks and plays back rec 709 to a HDMI or SDI signal. So my setup is two monitors for Resolve timeline and real estate and video preview to my 42" plasma. Works great.