Why is it that Vegas can't

so you want something to be rendered so you can view it in real time?

render to new track or ram render.

Or just do a prerender. That's what ppro does, although I think PPro is more systematic about it and it also nags you to make prerenders a bit.

Rob Mack

Why is it that Vegas can't render all effects/transitions in the preview window, in real-time?

Huh??

It is real time... although if you have an older slower machine the playback is not very smooth. I do HDV and have no problem with most of the real time playback
For up-to-snuff machines it is only the more complex effects that slow you down a little.

I suppose Sony could make it more dependable by stating and creating a minimum hardware requirement in things like video cards and cpu's like Avid does... but that's the nice thing about Vegas... you can even run it on older slower machines if need be.

Well I don't really have what I would call a slow system. It is dual-core 3.0GHz X2 Athlon. Memory is on the low side at 2GB, and GFX card is Nvidia 7900GT 256MB. I can play HDV and DV just fine on the timeline. It's when I start adding effects tracks and color correction that the preview frame rate drops. It shouldn't drop to 5fps on a dual-core system.

DirectX and OpenGL takes care of the language in-between the cards and the software and makes it easier for programmers. It really doesnt matter if you have ATI or Nvidia to the software programmers. At least that's what I've read on the topic.

Perhaps if Sony could add GPU Acceleration and off-load it from the CPU?

I don't think you fully appreciate how much processing horsepower is required to process video in real-time. Particularly when you "only" have a "few" filters and effects applied. Even the mega-buck NLE systems will slow down when their limit is reached.

Depending on which effects you have applied and what preview quality setting you have selected, then it certainly will drop the frame rate down to 5fps on your dual-core system. I think it may have been John Meyer that tested all the Vegas effects and came up with a chart that showed the relative horsepower necessary to render each effect. (It's posted here on the forums somewhere.) Even with GPU acceleration, there will still be a limit to how much you can have going on in real-time. Premiere and Vegas approach the preview frame rate from different angles; Premiere will try to keep the frame rate up while dynamically turning the picture to mush. Vegas allows you to set the amount of image degradation you will accept and adjusts the frame rate accordingly. Personally, I prefer the Vegas method.

John

A few years back I think the "hardware agnostic" dogma made a lot of sense. Today things seem much different, the power of the GPU is being used to accelerate not just video, why we are locked out is a very interesting question.
After all, what else in this game is hardware agnostic?
It'd be nice if my VHS deck would play Digital Betacam tapes but I doubt that'll ever happen.

Bob.

I don't think you fully appreciate how much processing horsepower is required to process video in real-time. Particularly when you "only" have a "few" filters and effects applied. Even the mega-buck NLE systems will slow down when their limit is reached.

And this is EXACTLY the reason why Vegas is going 64 bit (soon i hope!).... more complex transitions and such in real time playback.

Even if you start making Vegas hardware dependent, it will STILL have problems with real time playback. Avid Liquid for example IS hardware dependent... and it still can't do real time. They use a process called background rendering.... one set of transitions do a pre render (for preview) in the background while you diddle with other things. Not a bad system... but it's not real time.

he may have an issue here...


I put three clips of DV on the timeline. Looped it. Applied CC & lens flare to the track. Messed with random settings (everyone was blue). My preview dropped to 15fps but no lower. I'm have a lot less machine then he does.

i don't know why there's no GPU acceleration either. I've been wondering that since the 3dFX cards. It's just another processor. Back then the excuse was because it's impossible & a waste of time to figure out. And now... who knows (not a good $$$ to time ration I'd assume).

Oh... i'm not debating his argument at all. I usually run my preview on "Best" but when I start adding multiple tracks and more complicated effects, I have to start cutting back on preview quality.... which is why I have been itching for the 64 bit vegas. When they demonstrated the 64 bit system, they were running 4 hdv clips on the time line without bogging the system down.

But given my choice between what we have now, and a system like the avid liquid non real time back ground rendering.... I would still much rather have this.

Today things seem much different, the power of the GPU is being used to accelerate not just video, why we are locked out is a very interesting question.
It's not that you're locked out... MBE uses GPU acceleration for example. It's just that Vegas isn't designed for GPU acceleration.

That being said it might be interesting to see a GPU-accelerated version of Vegas. Some of the high-end systems that do it run significantly faster than Vegas / are more responsive (I know Mistika does; presumably Flame is the same). Though there may be other factors to their performance.

he's saying with simple things he's getting really bogged down on DV. that makes no sense.

maybe a project FX is applied or something?

I think there's a number of factors. Certainly one is what kind of 'video' we're talking about. If it's a highly compressed format then it's the CPU that becomes the bottleneck. If it's uncompressed HD then it's the disk I/O system. As John has rightly pointed out, just a few tracks with what seem like simple FXs can involve huge amounts of calculation that'll swamp any hardware.

Also not to be overlooked is the GPUs are primarily optimised for rastering vectors. That's great for video games and CGI but of no value to processing video. Even more of an issue, when you use the GPU for that task you're stuck with whatever quality it provides, that's why most (all maybe) CGI applications use the GPU for preview but give you options for software rendering for final output.

All that aside though, most editing is only one track, doesn't involve many if any FXs either so for the task of basic editing some form of hardware acceleration would seem in order. When you get into high end grading systems they seem to be very optimised for the task. On some even the range of CC tools on offer seems to be cut back simply to ensure it'll always be real time.

The one interesting thing is how the wavelet codecs perform, they do offer some interesting options that I'd really like to see Vegas make better use of.

Still maybe in the end we should just enjoy what Vegas has to offer, if you've got paying clients who want to 'watch' then you should have the dollars to buy what it takes to keep them happy. That's not just the hardware, the projectors, the imported Italian leather furniture or the 'skirts', just the rent on the building to house all that is pretty staggering down here and unlike working from home you've got to meet that overhead every week, clients or not. Man did I just get off topic or what :)

Bob.

Bob, perfectly on topic, illustrating that almost anything anyone has ever asked for is available ... for a price. Maybe the 90/10 rule is applicable here. 90% of the features are available for 10% of the price. To get those last 10% of the features takes the other 90% of the money. Well, actually it's probably a much steeper curve than that. Probably the last 0.1% of the features takes 99.9% of the money. I'm sure someone could build a system right now that would render 50 tracks and 250 effects in real time. It might bankrupt Sweden to do it though.

The fastest performing systems right now are ones with custom hardware (e.g. FPGAs). e.g. Quantel iQ, da Vinci Resolve for color grading

Comparing iQ to Vegas, it has a bigger feature set for motion tracking, paint. And it doesn't do native editing like Vegas does (you ingest via SDI, image sequences, DPX).

You can definitely bog down these systems though (e.g. just throw lots of effects on; tracking multiple points is not real-time). Though they are certainly faster.

And this is EXACTLY the reason why Vegas is going 64 bit (soon i hope!).... more complex transitions and such in real time playback.

I wouldn't hold my breath. Yes, 64bit has some effect on some video processing, but you will probably not see enough of an improvement to really notice. 64 bits has some effect on some maths operations, but that is assuming that these operations need a 64bit register to be performed. A huge majority of operations are more than happy enough in the 32 bit space, and these will not be faster under a 64 bit app on a 64 bit OS.

The main advantage of 64 bits is going to be a larger memory space, but then again, rendering isn't all that memory intensive. The main advantage here is probably that you can do a bit more RAM pre-view renders if you have 4G or more of memory. Not a huge issue, and it still requires a pre-render.

Ulead Media Studio (way back when) had a feature where you could select areas of your timeline and render these to disk, if you didn't change them, they would play off the disk when you were pre-viewing. This would be a nice feature to have in Vegas.

You'll probably see a better improvement in rendering speeds by upgrading your disk system to a high-speed system, let's say a modern, hardware-based RAID than upgrading Windows to 64 bits (motherboard RAID is usually so-so). Add your RAID on a SCSI chain, and you'll see an even better performance increase.

Again, don't expect 64 bits to do for 32 bits what 32 bits did for 16 bits, it won't. In fact, most people won't notice the difference at all. Very few people work regularly with 64 bit numbers.