Please help with advice about best Vegas computer and video format

thomas-foley wrote on 7/4/2021, 2:16 AM

Hi,
I have questions that have been probably asked a thousand times but I'm going to ask them anyway. I've been a longtime Vegas user since Vegas 4 came out. Yes, Vegas 4. I don't think a day has ever gone by, since Vegas 4 first came out, that I'm not using Vegas. I have to use it everyday for my work at a stock footage film company. I video seminars also, nothing fancy or complicated. I'm constantly digitizing video and making mp4s. As I'm writing this, I have six i7 computers rendering video and two AMD computers all rendering videos on Vegas 12, 14 and 18. I have all these computers because it takes so long to render video that I can work on another computer while they're rendering. I traded my two Vegas 16 activations for two more Vegas 14 activations because they don't tell you that you lose your Mercalli stabilization program, which was bundled with 14 and which works way better than the stabilization in Vegas, and Vegas 16 was crashing on me all the time.
Anyway, I've never noticed any real change in the rendering time over the years. All this CUDA, GPU acceleration, video card support etc blah blah blah, and faster rendering times that Vegas promises with every upgrade is bs nonsense to me. If anything, the program has gotten worse, bloated and more unstable over the years. My Vegas 10 and 12 render the same 2 hour footage in the same amount of time my Vegas 18 does and more reliably.
What I do is very simple. I import some 1920x1080 HD footage into Vegas, then I add a tad of color with color correction, then add a little sharpening and make an mp4. That's it. I video a guy giving a speech at a podium, add a tad of saturation in color correction, a little sharpening, and make an mp4. The average time it takes me to render an mp4 is at least double and half however long it is. A two hour 1920x1080 video, adding a little color and sharpening, will take me at least 5 hours to render. I have a computer on now rendering 90 minutes of footage with that NEAT noise reduction program which says it's going to take 19 hours to render! Every day I leave computers on overnight because it takes so long to render.
Video has never run smoothly on my i7 computers. As soon as I start adding fx, I have to switch to Preview then Draft mode. Forget ever playing any 4K footage. I read online many times that because of the way Vegas is constructed, AMD computers-video cards tend to work better with Vegas Pro than NVIDIA cards or the way Intel computers do.
These are my questions- What computer do I need to buy if I want to see Vegas run smoothly and render quickly? Do I need to buy solid state hard drives? I was going to buy this AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, 32GB RAM, 2TB PCIe SSD for $3000 on Amazon or some kind of AMD Ryzen 7 with an AMD video card. I also wondered if I would be happy with a cheaper Ryzen 5 with built-in AMD graphics on motherboard for $600. What do most Vegas video editors use? Do I have to spend a fortune to get a good computer? I also wanted to know what the best video format to use for editing and rendering and which previews the best when you add fx to video?

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TheRhino wrote on 7/8/2021, 8:18 AM

I have six i7 computers rendering video and two AMD computers all rendering videos on Vegas 12, 14 and 18...
My Vegas 10 and 12 render the same 2 hour footage in the same amount of time my Vegas 18 does and more reliably....
The average time it takes me to render an mp4 is at least double and half however long it is

@thomas-foley When I upgraded my desktops' internal components from 6-core I7-980X & comparable Xeons to my newer 9900K / VEGA 64 & 11700K / VEGA 56 combos I doubled my render speeds on any codecs not GPU assisted and more than doubled render speeds on anything GPU assisted... Since Vegas has yet to figure-out how to maximize CPU core & GPU usage during a single render..., I often open multiple instances of Vegas & batch render multiple client's various file requests at once while I continue editing another project on another computer.

I typically send clients DNxHR (or ProRes) intermediates plus HEVC & AVC MP4s. Since Vegas uses my VEGA GPUs to assist MP4 renders, the CPU cores are free to work on rendering my DNxHR intermediates, which do not benefit from GPU. Therefore if I get 3+ instances of Vegas all rendering at once I'm typically using nearly 100% of my CPU and 75%+ of my GPU... With the AMD GPUs I am not limited to how many MP4s render at once, so I have setup as many as (6) open instances of Vegas to batch-render while I leave... V18 has been so stable on my systems that when I return, everything is finished & waiting for me and nothing has crashed...

So if you were able to upgrade (2) of your computers with newer CPUs & GPUs, you may be able to edit on one and render everything else on the 2nd equally fast computer saving you from having to transfer your source files between (8) different computers. Also, if you setup a simple peer-to-peer network using (2) cheap $35 Mellanox 10G cards you could share files between computers a lot faster. I still keep (2) old Xeons for importing from tape, slides, etc. but I haven't been using them for rendering because it's just more efficient loading multiple instances of Vegas on the faster systems...

Although V18 ran about the same as V14 on my older systems, once I upgraded, V18 was much faster on the new hardware... I too used Mercalli a lot, especially to stabilize 8mm & 16mm film conversions with some templates I made that work well with those..., so I ended-up getting Mercalli stand-alone when it was on sale & included the Vegas plug-in... I actually prefer using Mercalli stand-alone prior to editing so I can just quickly choose which template looks the best with the least cropping vs. fiddling with it in Vegas...

thomas-foley wrote on 7/8/2021, 3:11 PM

That's interesting. I didn't know you can run multiple instances of Vegas at the same on the same computer. I'm going to try that and work on another computer. I'm going to try buying solid states drives for my fastest computer and see how that helps rendering time. I realize now that sharpening and noise reduction are rendering nightmares and will now stop doing it unless really necessary.

thomas-foley wrote on 7/8/2021, 3:22 PM

Hi Ross, yes the people in this Vegas community are really cool. It honestly amazes me how complete strangers are actually really nice and give you their precious time and expertise in trying to help you. (I can't say I'm so nice). I thought people in this Vegas community were going to be snobbish a-holes and not want to help me, but it turned out that I'm the snobbish a-hole. If you're just starting out in video editing, I would ask them any questions and they won't make you feel stupid. Great people!

thomas-foley wrote on 7/9/2021, 1:34 AM

Hey Ross, what kind of video are you trying to do?

thomas-foley wrote on 7/9/2021, 5:27 AM

Magix Samplitude, Magix Sequoia and most any audio/video program I've ever seen, have a transport control you can put anywhere. Some earlier versions of Magix audio products, you could even resize the transport control and make it as big or small as you want and put it anywhere on a dual monitor system. I saw a Vegas demo where this guy ridiculously claims that Vegas is the "most customizable NLE" there is. Customizable means I should be able to put things and tools wherever I want. When I want to customize the toolbar buttons, I counted 41 tools that are completely worthless to me. "Trigger from Midi Timecode", "Generate Midi Clock", "Promote Media Closed Captioning", "Import DVD Camcorder Disc", "Export Regions as Subtitles", "DriverUpdateGui", "Export Closed Captioning for Quicktime" etc...Who thinks of these things? and who, in their right mind, would ever use Vegas for recording and mixing music? The most important tool for a video editor, I would think, and the one I use more than anything is the SPLIT button. I need to slice up video, not "Trigger from Midi Timecode" You don't even have the OPTION of having a SPLIT button in your toolbar or transport control, ONLY in your Timeline Toolbar!!! That's insane. I have to click on the separator button like 30 times to get the Split button in the Timeline toolbar to get to the middle of the screen. If you have an hour of video on your timeline and want to cut out all the crap and ripple cut it all together, you simply just split the video at the beginning and end of whatever you want cut out. Very simple. I have to cut out titles and logos in two hour chunks of Newsreel footage and make individual 10-15 second clips from the two hours of footage. That means I'll hit the SPLIT button 1000 times for a two hour piece of footage (500 for starting points and 500 for endpoints) and then make mp4s of each 10-15 second increments. I would give anything if Vegas REALLY was customizable like their demo says. First thing I would do would be to be able to make the buttons bigger and have a movable transport like other programs have. I would have put a movable transport control in Vegas 1. I've worked around it by using the Windows virtual keyboard as a transport control and Splitter (hitting s on keyboard) but I guess what I want to ask is, is there a program out there, made for Vegas, where I can really customize it so I can have a Split button in the Toolbar? Are you able to customize and make your OWN tool buttons? Also, in these Otter scripts or whatever, has anyone made a movable transport bar for Vegas? Lastly, I know most people use the keyboard commands, but I can't stand keyboards or sitting at a desk and editing. I would say I spend 10 hours a day editing and I have to be comfortable. I'm upright, in a prone position in my bed with my dog and a diet coke, surrounded in a circle by 5 large monitors. I don't have room for keyboards all over my bed so I don't even own any. I just use my trackball for everything. (Actually, I have 7 trackballs in front of me)

Marco. wrote on 7/9/2021, 8:47 AM

If you use a script for the split command (or else) you could put it into the toolbar and you could create your own icon. There are (free) script(s) tools available which do the split command.

thomas-foley wrote on 7/9/2021, 4:40 PM

wow, that would be wonderful. Thanks! If I can have specific tools or scripts that would be great

Marco. wrote on 7/9/2021, 5:11 PM

SeMW Extensions is such a free tool which then allows to use its split command in the toolbar.

thomas-foley wrote on 7/9/2021, 5:12 PM

I'll check it out. Thanks a lot!