My conclusions are a bit different. I installed an extra 256MB of ram a few months ago, so I now have 512MB. Now I feel kinda foolish because the RamPage monitor sitting in my System Tray almost always shows a number such as "360," meaning that I have 360MB of RAM sitting idle. In other words, the extra 256MB is never used. Right now I have VV3 rendering in the background, and RamPage shows 346MB sitting idle.

The reason I installed the extra ram was because I was then in the middle of a big project. I was doing editing in one instance of VV3, and there were three instances of VV3 running with idle priority in the background, rendering out large chunks of my project. In THAT scenario, it was nice to have 512MB, and it was nearly all used. My PC still ran if just 256MB was installed, but I discovered that my CPU was only working about 60% of the time, since the rest of the time was wasted on disk I/O. It thus took longer to get everything done. Also, I have never relied on the RAM preview feature, since it doesn't seem to work very well for me for some reason.

So is having more than 256MB of ram useful? For me, for 99.99% of the time, the answer is no.

As for processor power, I think the recent render tests over at the cow forum show that, for complex projects, CPU horsepower is a major factor in rendering time.

When you render your video out for final output, especially if you are compressing it, then it is all about processor baby. The more cycles the better. I too have 512MB of RAM in my machine and I hardly ever hit 250MB of it. I/O can get intensive (especially with those 2-4G AVI's), but most systems can drag more video across the EIDE/SCSI bus faster than the proc can render it so that isn't the bottleneck. This assumes you have a decent 7200rpm or 10k drive. Mostly I would spend any upgrade money on a faster proc or a dual proc system. I am gonna be upgrading from my Athlon 1.4 to a P4 2.8-3.0G very soon to cut my rendering times in roughly half.

i didn't realize this about ram. why do people get systems with alot of ram?

Statas: because sales people like to sell stuff, and they can convince most people that they need all the RAM they can afford. RAM also only costs about 1/4 what it did a couple of years ago, so most people are willing to go for tons of it.

ok, but i still don't understand. why is all that ram available on new systems? what is it intended for? i'm sure there are people who know what they're buying. what is the maximum amount of processor speed a system can have (dual 3.0?) and at what point would processor speed be faster than drive transfer rate?

Try some picture processing, not digital photos but scanned. You will need all the RAM you can get, virtual memory doesn't help a bit. But with video, it's processor speed. But don't overdo it. You pay double price for the last 20% of CPU speed, and whatever you buy will be outdated and outperformed in just one year.

Download and install RamPage on you system (search Google for "Rampage memory monitor") and you'll see how much memory is actually needed for your programs.

Vendors install extra memory because it's a cheap way to generate impressive-sounding numbers. After all, if memory is good, more must be better, right? I bought my extra 256MB PC133 module for $20.

It really boils down to how MUCH you are doing with your PC at one time. If you don't multi-task, then 256 MB is probably plently. However if you're like me and you try to do six things at once more memory helps. It is rare that I don't have word going along with a spreadsheet or two plus Photoshop and of course Vegas all churning away at once and then in-between I'm using a newsreader or browser like now and my PC is still loafing along. I get by fine with 512 MB.

The reason that Vegas doesn't use a whole lot of ram is because most things are just streamed straight off the disk. Vegas only keeps track of what calculations it needs to make for color correction etc. There's no way you are going to be able to load a 6GB video file into RAM on most systems so they don't even try. If you do a lot of still image slide shows from Vegas you may see a benefit from extra RAM. I'm not sure.

On programs like Photoshop however, the entire image is loaded into ram, so whenever you make changes, the calulations are performed right then to the image. Therefore it is handy to have the image im RAM where each pixel can be instantly changed to reflect the new calculations.

Also if I'm not mistaken the new Sound Forge 6 loads the files into RAM instead of reading off the hard drive. I would suppose that opening 10 or so full length songs in Sound Forge would take up a large chunk of your RAM. So, in this case more would also be better.

JBJones

for photoshop and sound forge, how do you know how much ram you need? is more always better or is there a limit to how much ram the program needs according to the file size (using 100mb files as an example)? one reason i ask is because i'll be editing hour long recordings with sound forge (cut them up into tracks).

Helpfule and interesting info. I was thinking of going to 512 but will do some testing. Someone commented on processor speed cutting their render time in half. Got any "rough" numbers like from pentium III Mhz into P4 speeds?

Its getting harder to give estimates due to changes in CPU technology and marketing tricks like AMD no longer linking the number of CPU clock cycles to their naming scheme for a given chip. For example I recently built a system around their XP 1900+. On the surface the name would suggest that chip ran at 1900 Mhz, while in fact it only gets about 1600.

Intel and AMD have changed other things that impact on the power of the chip, so raw power isn't the only thing you want to look at. Someone a few days ago started a thread for people to compare, forget the name...

Anyhow a very rough estimate is if you double the CPU speed (renders will take half as long) Much also depends on what you do with transitions, changes in file format, frame size and how many filters you apply, etc.. So it is only a rough guess.

RAM has minimal impact. In other words a PC with 2 GB RAM won't render any faster than a PC with just 256 MB RAM. It boils down to CPU speed, the faster the CPU, the less time rendering a file will take.

More RAM is useful if you use your PC for other things while rendering is going on in the background. If you have Windows XP and you do Ctrl/Alt/Del to bring up the task manager you'll notice that Vegas hogs nearly all (usually 98%) of resouces IF nothing else is running. If you open other applications Windows will take away some resources so you can do other work, but at the price of increasing the rendering times somewhat.

one thing hasn't been mentioned... if you integrate lots of photos into your video, Vegas will eat up tons of RAM, to the point where it will slow to a crawl if you run out. so if you are making slide shows with panning/cropping and you integrate say 50 photos each at 1600x1200 (which gives enough resolution for dramatic zooms) you could easily be up above 512MB. I used to run at 512MB but had to add another 256MB to solve this problem.

3d modeling and photo editing are the biggest RAM hogs I can think of. I often run out of RAM while doing that kind of stuff.

Looking at two Dell Workstation systems which are nearly identical except

1) has a single 3.06GHz P4 and the other
2) has two 2.8GH Xeon chips.

Both running XP Professional and having 512MB ECC RAM. The RAM on the P4 is rated faster than that on the Xeon system, but both are as fast as their type CPU and Motherboard can handle. Both have one 7200RMP 120GB HD and one 7200RPM 200GB HD.

OK, guys, which would you rather have?

WHY?

The dual Xeon. It won't be any faster, but it will do background renders and leave a processor free for editing in the foreground.

Laurence Kingston

why wouldn't it be faster? what about using dual 3.06 p4 processors?