FWIW, I just migrated to a new workstation and took the opportunity to run a quick and dirty test to see what the performance gain was on rendering relatively complex video from Vegas 4.0e. I wasn't expecting astronomical changes since all the marketing driven speed numbers usually have less of a real world impact than if you just did simple math.
The test video renders to 8 minutes and has 5 video tracks and six audio tracks. Only the video should matter since the render was to the DVD Architect NTSC VIdeo Stream only. The video tracks had a lot of Color Correction going on to match camera images and two of the tracks are digital stills with lots of Pan and crop action. A fairly complex 8 minutes.
The old workstation was a genuine IBM with Intel Pentium 1.0 GHz and 512 MB of RAM running WIndows 2000 Professional. Had about 300 GB free disk space all defragged. I think the rendering time was largely an issue of CPU and RAM. I don't think hard drive speed or space would be much of a factor. The hard drives are all the 7200 EIDE RPM Western Digital drives with the 8 MB cache.
The new workstation is a Dell 4600 Pentium 4 2.6 GHz, 800 MHz front-end bus, HyperThreading enabled, 1.256 GB of the PC3200 DDR memory and 450 GB free defragged HD space.
Render times of complex 8 minute production to MPEG2 DVD Architect NTSC Video (only) stream:
Old workstation: 2 hr 54 minutes
New workstation: 1 hr 14 minutes
Strangely, the ratio between the two times, 2.35, is similar to the ratio between the two CPU ratings, 2.6. Of course you have to throw away any impact from the increased bus speed, HyperThreading (if Vegas is using it here) additional memory.
Wayne
The test video renders to 8 minutes and has 5 video tracks and six audio tracks. Only the video should matter since the render was to the DVD Architect NTSC VIdeo Stream only. The video tracks had a lot of Color Correction going on to match camera images and two of the tracks are digital stills with lots of Pan and crop action. A fairly complex 8 minutes.
The old workstation was a genuine IBM with Intel Pentium 1.0 GHz and 512 MB of RAM running WIndows 2000 Professional. Had about 300 GB free disk space all defragged. I think the rendering time was largely an issue of CPU and RAM. I don't think hard drive speed or space would be much of a factor. The hard drives are all the 7200 EIDE RPM Western Digital drives with the 8 MB cache.
The new workstation is a Dell 4600 Pentium 4 2.6 GHz, 800 MHz front-end bus, HyperThreading enabled, 1.256 GB of the PC3200 DDR memory and 450 GB free defragged HD space.
Render times of complex 8 minute production to MPEG2 DVD Architect NTSC Video (only) stream:
Old workstation: 2 hr 54 minutes
New workstation: 1 hr 14 minutes
Strangely, the ratio between the two times, 2.35, is similar to the ratio between the two CPU ratings, 2.6. Of course you have to throw away any impact from the increased bus speed, HyperThreading (if Vegas is using it here) additional memory.
Wayne