Don't muck about with affinity, it was created for a whole other purpose.

regardless of WHY it was created, it can be used for exactly what we want with no repercussions besides someone forgetting to put it back where it should be if they don't restart the app. It's the best part about multicore's. It allows us Vegas users a great advantage over every other NLE user out there: we can render on some cores & edit on others. They can do only do one. Sure, something else can use hardware render, but a 30 hour render is still 30 hours w/o doing any other editing. We can assign that instance to 3 cores, increase the rendering time to ~40 hours but still work on projects that could be done in that time.

Jim H, you do realize that you can continue working on other things even if you don't lower Vegas' priority, right? There's absolutely no reason not to use your computer for other things while rendering, other than that it will slow down the render slightly. The only advantage in lowering Vegas' priority is that it lets other programs run smoother and faster.

And if you set the priority to "Idle (4)", then it is paused altogether. I would suggest an alternate Task manager, like Process Explorer, which gives you more control over these things:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

It's freeware and it works great with all versions of Windows.

"In other words, let the computer do what the computer does best, running tasks and scheduling them according to your priorities. Don't muck about with affinity, it was created for a whole other purpose." ;-) Let the masses worship the micro OS king and follow their rules as law of the land. For surely, the weak minded is too mindless to grasp the greatest of the coding of the OS and it's operations.. '-) Surely, only the holy OS ans MS priests can understand the meaning of the "CPU affinity". ;-)

If I can every recover from laughing so hard, I've to made a point of meeting Terje at an AI or Supercomputing conference.

Let me get this right, "follow the OS ------ because it's designers know all things important of "computing"! " ;-) I'm posting this at IBM and few designers in Japan, this is better than brown-outs................ ;-) Let us get our robes.........

Thanks for making this forum interesting today! Terje!

Terje is right on this and your critcism is misplaced. Save it for something relevant.

Better to nice the process than adjust it's processor affinity. The result is something that works automatically for you and ramps up when you walk away from the computer.

(There are times when adjusting processor affinity is more effective. I find that Outlook can be using 2% of the CPU and yet still lock me out of any activity. Booting Outlook off a core seems to fix that when nicing the process doesn't)

Anyway, more to the point is a system that lets you pause a render, shut down the system, and resume after a reboot. Midwesterners in the US would love this since they get so many lightning storms.

This is a feature request that helps some and hurts no one. Sounds like a great idea.

Rob Mack

"Anyway, more to the point is a system that lets you pause a render, shut down the system, and resume after a reboot. Midwesterners in the US would love this since they get so many lightning storms.

This is a feature request that helps some and hurts no one. Sounds like a great idea." How about the whole world, where power is not always stable or the old laptop batteries start to fail during rendering.

Rmack350, I'm correct in my comments, this would be like me telling you how to do your job at work, I have little knowledge of your job or workflow. But although today I do more theoretical design work on CCD and Micro cpu interconnections as well as space designs, I cut my teeth on supercomputing hardware and designing their hardware microcoding then refining OS for parallel computing in the large scale machines. I do understand "processor affinity ". In one sense, non technical inclined individuals should avoid system settings, but those inclined to investage, should, with some pre-cautions. Learning improves one's world,(usually). ;-)

yes, the whole world, if you want to use a broader example. Mine was just off the top of my head since I'd recently talked to midwesterners online who were about to shut things down due to a storm. But we've had posters in Thailand looking for power solutions too. A pause/resume feature that could survive a reboot would be good for everyone.

As far as your being well qualified to a mature and well reasoned response...

Rob

There are buzz words and phrases in every professional trade that are the kiss of death to use with the upper 10% of professional crowd, you can guess what some are..........

"And about your "mine was just off the top of my head since I'd recently talked to midwesterners" comment, I agreed with you and my comment was more of a general supporting argument that the world market would probably benefit from a pause/halt and save option.... it was not a critical commentary on your statement.


"As far as your being well qualified to a mature and well reasoned response..." ;-) humor is not a bad thing ;-) I enjoy, on the side, doing documentaries and IDFlim projects the last 15 years, but the HD cameras and 3D modeling rendering farms is what keeps me interested because the applied engineering/science. The designing of data/image capture/transmission devices has lead me to met some individuals that can run&shoot video with unbelievable skills and they have gained a lot more respect from me after working/studing some news/sports crews, especially in the extreme environments over the years.

edited for meaningless content: AI=IBM research DARPA team, ---model of efficiency(?) :marketing of massive IBM's Tivoli software, ---postings:NDA's and employment contracts ;-)

Reply by: Chienworks

That's exactly what I found so refreshing. I could navigate in IE or work in Excel without waiting for my turn. On my computer at least it takes several seconds for another application to make a move when vegas is rendering. the second I lowered the priority it was as though vegas wasn't there yet vegas still managed to clock along at 98% CPU.

Thanks for making this forum interesting today! Terje!

I guess these Japanese engineers are pretty sophisticated when they are able to help someone with no brain at all actually post random gibberish that looks like English to public fora.

If you have something to contribute, ask Sony for a brain implant next time.

I could navigate in IE or work in Excel without waiting for my turn

That's the purpose of running "nice" as someone else called it (it's a Unix term). Most software uses very little CPU, which means that a "nice" process can chug along most of the time without you noticing. Even at very high CPU utilization. This holds true for single CPU as well as multiple CPU (core) systems.

This type of scheduling isn't hard, and it is designed to do exactly what you see, namely function as an automatic "pause" button for an app. For some reason another poster on this forum thought that it requires Artificial Intelligence (AI) to figure out the following concept:
"If someone else want's to do something, get out of the way".

I fail to see where the AI comes in, but perhaps the poster has some I to contribute.

I like the idea of Vegas holding onto partial renders... e.g. look at Final Cut. You can cancel a render and it will keep what it's rendered so far.

2- It might be good for Vegas to have an auto-render feature if it's idle for ____ minutes. It starts rendering if the computer is idle for ____. You do need the first feature though.

And Vegas needs to know what it's supposed to auto render. This is a point where Vegas diverges from other NLEs. For instance, while FCP and PPro might force you to render this and that, they can only do this because they expect a certain output type. Vegas is a lot more flexible but that makes predicting what to auto-render kind of hard unless Vegas could just be set up to auto-render to a reasonable intermediate. And that'd take up disk space so it's not for everyone, but it'd be a nice option.

Rob

Hmm I was going to suggest something like Cineform (or heck, Quicktime photoJPEG) but that could cause even more issues with levels wrangling (and Vegas would have to ignore video output FX... or perhaps otherwise deal with it intelligently).

2- I don't think the disk space of intermediates is necessarily a huge deal.

This is a big problem with Vegas. Compared to how sequences work in other NLEs Vegas is a muddle.
Project settings almost don't matter when you render, how confusing is that. Vegas is supposed to be simple to use and it looks that way. Reality seems to be it's all too simple to get things wrong.

Bob.

2-probably disk space isn't a big deal in reality but some may see it that way in principle.

A well defined internal render codec...could also open up prerender strategies. this is OT, but it might be kind of cool if Vegas used a codec that would allow it to dump frames into the files after caching to RAM-saving the data as it becomes available.

Rob