Not quite sure what you mean by "background renderer". Do you mean the ability to render while continuing to work on other projects? If so, you've already got it. Start rendering, then launch Vegas again and start editing in the new window that opens up. I've had close to a dozen Vegas windows open at once, most of them rendering little things while tinkering on other projects at the same time.

Also, why the RAID setup? Just curious -- I had a RAID on my older machine and one of the disks went down -- that still stings. If you're planning to do RAID 0+1 I guess this is less of an issue (will the current crop of ATA100 RAID boards allow that function?) but otherwise, there's really no point in going RAID, provided your drives are 7200rpm, and in the event you get WD dives, go for the 8mb cache Special Editions :)

I have two, 120gb SE drives and I've never once dropped a frame.

- jim

I just got a SIIG ATA133 Raid controller card that supports 0,1 & 0+1 -- It rocks! --- At that for only $58, a little more than a regular ata133 controller card.

>>>I'm using a Hercules Prophet 64MB (Geforce2) AGP and an old leftover Matrox Millenium 4MB PCI card. Now I know that it works, I'll sooner or later switch up to a better secondary card.

I used to run the same setup. worked great! except the Millenium was a bottleneck. it actually slowed down my VV preview window when I used it on the secondary display.

I just upgraded a week ago and couldn't be happier. Windows XP now can treat one display card as two separate displays. I'm using an ATI Radeon 8500 64MB and I have my primary monitor at 1600x1200 75Hz and my secondary at 800x600 72Hz.

and with XP there is no more desktop management nightmare. under Win2k the dual head cards all had to run this awful software that 'caught' your maximize commands and instead of allowing the window to spread across both monitors (which would be annoying) it resizes the window to fit one monitor, but it isn't REALLY maximized. then there's the 'seam' effect where windows keep popping up on between the two monitors. and you had to keep both monitors at the same resolution/refresh rate. that's why I always used 2 display adapters under Win2k. the Geforce2 / Matrox Millenium II PCI were one of the only combos that worked.

finally there is a better way to go. Windows XP with a dual head card. both displays will be fast enough to keep up with Vegas, and you only need to take up one slot. there is no longer an advantage to using separate display cards. it's about damn time! :D

>>>4 100 GB WD Media Drive - RAID

as suggested by vitamin D, unless you are going to use mirroring for your RAID set up, you probably don't really need to do it for performance with DV editing. in my projects, the CPU tends to become the bottleneck long before the hard drive. I run a RAID 0 setup with 4 drives on a dual PIII 1GHz, but I'm always worried that one will fail. that's the thing... 4 drives working together means your 4 times as likely to lose all that data. (unless you are running mirroring)

I'm just sharing my experience... if I was to build a system right now, I'd probably try to get away with the WD 8MB cache Special edition drives suggested by vitamin d. I just got one for a friend and I'll be comparing benchmarks with my RAID setup.

Media Drive: $178 (googlegear.com)
Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (WD1200BB Special Edition) 120GB EIDE ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer

Cool! Now that I know it works, I just might save up for a better card. XP is still a possibility also....

just to be clear, I don't recommend a dual-head card unless you are running XP, or unless you have two identical monitors and you don't mind dealing with the maximize weirdness under win2k. but you will clear up a *major* bottleneck by going with a single dual-head AGP 4x adapter.

Yea, it would be great if vers. 4 had that feature - background rendering. Not only because it would be useful for me, so I could just print to tape asap. Also, to trump the other editing systems out there.

At most we have 2 big projects that require heavy editing of video every month. So, opening up multiple windows won't be much help. It's cool that we are able to do it, unlike Premiere however.

For instance. Just last month we finished a big project involving video for one of our clients. This involved 24 hours of raw footage, which we shrunk into a 20 minute piece. This was a big project for us. The transitions were fairly basic, with a nice special fx laden intro, and ending. BTW, we've been using DV500 w/Premiere. It was OK at first. It was initially bought to just convert video into wmv/real video formats. Found ourselves making intensive use of it however.

Right now, it's really painful to use, especially when doing long edits. I'm manually saving the Premiere file in 3 locations everytime. 1.cdrive 2.fdrive 3.networkdrive. Reason why is because of unrecoverable crashes in the past, which made me lose hours of editing time. Couldn't figure it out. Almost didn't make some of our deadlines. This program made me paranoid.

Thanks

Reason why I'm looking at a WD 100GB 2mb drive is I could get each for $138 at Frys. How is googlegear? Never heard of them. Not sure if Accounting will approve buying from an unknown online retailer. I could get away buying stuff from online vendors such as amazon,outpost,bhphoto,and a few others.

Can't I combine 2 drives together, and 2 other drives together? Wouldn't that improve the speed, and give me a little insurance so if one drive fails, I don't lose all me data? I will have to talk to our tech guy on what he suggests.

Thanks

>>>How is googlegear? Never heard of them.

I've used them a bunch of times. no problems. the best thing to do is find a site with vendor ratings. I've seen googlegear rated just as high as Amazon. my advice is, don't allow your 'approved' vendors make important buying decisions for you. choose a product based on the its merits (value to you). eventually availability has to enter into the equation, but it should be near the bottom of the list.

as for your other question, if I'm understanding correctly, YES you can use 4 drives and have two of them act as redundant backups. that is called RAID 0+1. you will get the performance benefit of striping your data across two drives, and you will get the safety net of having mirrored versions on the other two drives. that should be a good speedy reliable set up.

if you are looking for mirroring for redundancy, go for the RAID. if you just want good reliable fast drives, go for the simpler solution which requires less power, generates less heat, and takes up less space in your case. (the simpler solution being a couple of those phat WD 1200J special edition drives)

Gil,

Welcome to the forum and our happy Vegas Video community. I like your idea of a background rendering feature for the next version of Vegas. In fact, I think we could go even a bit further with that and ask for network background rendering. Let me explain that a bit.

In addition to being a beginning user of Vegas Video, I am also a beginning user of NewTek's LightWave 3D modeling and animation program. In fact, at some point in the hopefully not too distant future I will learn to combine the use of Vegas Video and LightWave on video projects. LightWave projects also entail extensive rendering effort and it is not unusual for a 3D animation render to take hours, days, or longer. Each individual 3D frame can require extensive computations. But LightWave supports network rendering. For that reason, it is not unusual for a LightWave user to employ more than one computer to complete a render in a fraction of the single-computer rendering time.

LightWave lets you render over a network of computers if you have them, and doesn't limit you to rendering your project on a single machine. Whether you have only two computers or hundreds of computers at your location, you can use all of them for rendering the same animation. To make this possible, LightWave 7 ships with network rendering software called "ScreamerNet."

With ScreamerNet, LightWave itself needs to be installed on only one machine. That is necessary, because LightWave is "dongle" protected. If you choose to do distributed rendering on a network, ScreamerNet breaks up the task into pieces and sends parts of your animation to other machines on your network that have the ScreamerNet process running on them. The ScreamerNet machines do not require dongles, because they do not have the full LightWave on them, only the rendering part.

Upon completion of all parts of the rendering, the individual parts are reassembled on the home (controlling) machine to complete the render. You don't have to use this network rendering feature, but animators in larger studios depend on it to meet deadlines by using whole "render farms" of computers. Sometimes a render farm is a single rack of computers. Sometimes it is a roomful of computers. In my case, my personal "render farm" will initially be just my computer and my wife's computer. Perhaps as time goes by we may add another computer or two to the "family." But in the meantime, doubling the rendering speed will help.

ScreamerNet is also useful on a single machine for batch-processing renders. You could set up several different renders to run one after the other. You can even run ScreamerNet on your home machine without running LightWave, for batch rendering existing LightWave projects.

The rationale for all of this LightWave/ScreamerNet stuff is directly applicable to adding network distributed rendering, background rendering, and batch rendering to a future version of Vegas Video. Network rendering would be a powerful tool for meeting deadlines on ambitious Vegas projects. While the basic Vegas Video would be licensed to a single machine, the Vegas Video "renderbot" would be licensed to run on many machines, enabling the use of render farms, both large and small, with Vegas.

-- Burton --

Yes!

How about this idea. Let's combine your idea and mine. Background network rendering? I'm not sure if it's possible, but by using multiple computer processors networked, your would be background renderinh using the power of multiple processors, while you work on the project!

We will be networking 2 computers together via a 10/100/1000 Ethernet card pretty soon. So this would be useful to us with some of our projects, especially the one's that contain a lot of special f/x and multiple layers.

Man, I'd link all the computers in the office to a remder farm! That's more than 30 computers! WOW. This sounds more feasible than buying a faster computer.

I don't think any editing system does this.

This network render farm thing really looks interesting but would you think the Sofo team would be interested in implementing it? How hard is it to code it?

If it's a feature for the VV4 it would blow any mid-pro video editing software away!

I love that idea! Maybe VV5.5

distributed processing is definitely a cool idea--usually seen in high-end 3d modeling software (not really a consumer/prosumer feature) by guys who need to render, say, feature-length movies in 3D. BTW, 3D takes a *lot* longer than even the most complicated video projects to render, so the feature is much more needed in that realm. Not that we couldn't use it, but it may be seen as less of a need by SF engineering.
I read about another high-end video program (purple maybe?) that does "background rendering", but this was different--it used idle CPU cycles to render the project you're working on as you were working. I mean, half the time we're just thinking about what to do next, scrolling, browsing menus, etc. It would require a massively multithreaded app, but I can see how that would be a great advantage. One thing the article I was reading said was that by creating a software-only solution (like VV), faster CPU's would only make the editing process faster; I think software-only NLE's will eventually dominate for this reason.

>>>it used idle CPU cycles to render the project you're working on as you were working.

I don't know that could be kind of cool but I'd be discouraged from changing my project knowing that I'd be resetting the render to 0% every time I tweaked something 'global'.

I think you're right about the distributed computing. it's not likely to make it into VV! it's more useful for 3d anyway because 3d modeling data is so tiny it can be transmitted efficiently over a rendering network. in the video scenario, I/O would quickly become a bottleneck in most projects.

I think the best we can hope for is the ability to render sequential stills to a common folder. (img001.tga, img002.tga, etc) you could have several copies of your project open on various pc's all rendering to a common folder. the trick is there would have to be a 'do not render existing frames' setting so that each copy of Vegas would see the files that have already been taken, and render the next frame that doesn't exist in the folder, giving you an effective render farm. it would be extremely simple (comparatively) to implement this particular feature into Vegas. SoFo would just have to add:

- output to stills functionality (why is this still missing?)
- 'do not render existing frames' option (a simple 'if exists' in the code)

AfterFX has this exact thing.

I've been using VV3 for a few days now, and I'm getting the hang of the interface. About the rendering. How about highlighting a section, vv3 background renders, and you can keep on going and edit your project instead of having to wait until it's finished. Wouldn't this be easier to implement?

Also, is the ripple edit awkward to anyone else? I'm still trying to get used to the implementation of this feature. In Premiere it was pretty easy. Drag a clip between two others, booom, it's there. Oh well, still learning.

Yes, the ripple edit feature is weak in VV. Very nice in Premiere. Submit your request for this in the Product Suggestion(Give us feedback under Help/SoFo on the web).