Performance on a Minimum Spec System

TSRBrad wrote on 2/28/2006, 5:21 PM
Here's the situation...

I may want to do some editing on the road. Nothing heavy-duty, just basic cuts, cross-fades, etc. I'm thinking of installing VMS on my laptop, but it's hardly cutting edge. In fact it could be the poster child for the mimimum requirements list on the box... 800mhz PIII, 256MB RAM, 20GB HD. I do have a fast USB external drive and I picked up a USB 2.0/Firewire card, so I hope the capture capabilities are adequate.

So where's the question in all this?

Does anyone have any experience using VMS on a low-spec system? What kind of experience can I expect? How much could I push the program?

Thanks!

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 2/28/2006, 5:49 PM
You can do most anything you want with Vegas on that computer. It will run very well, editing, slicing, moving clips around, etc. should all work pretty well. The only problem you should experience is rather slow renders. I used a computer with nearly identical specs for several years and edited videos 2 hours or longer, sometimes dozens of tracks, and always got the job done.

Make sure you set Vegas' temp directories to your external drive or that 20GB drive will fill up faster than you can blink.
TSRBrad wrote on 2/28/2006, 6:44 PM
Glad to hear! I'm not all that concerned about rendering. Any lengthy projects will wait until I get home.
Paul Mead wrote on 2/28/2006, 7:27 PM
When working with video things seem to work just fine (I suspect that VMS just hands off the video media to the video driver), but I have found that events like still photos, generated media, or events that have had pan/zoom or effects added, cause memory consumption to go thru the roof. So if you are doing simple video splicing then things should work OK, otherwise, maybe not.
davdee wrote on 2/28/2006, 7:35 PM
Just to throw in my 2c worth; I would suggest that you get 512Mb of ram rather than 256Mb. I think any performance would be improved with extra ram.

Good luck!

Chienworks wrote on 3/1/2006, 4:46 AM
"I suspect that VMS just hands off the video media to the video driver"

Actually not. Vegas does all the video processing itself. It makes no use of any video hardware or video drivers installed in your computer. This is one of the reasons it will run on just about any computer no matter what is installed.