Yes. Open up the taskbar and watch Vegas suck up ram as you play through a 1hr video. Watch what happens when you hit the credit roll and also your still pictures. My one hr video ends up using 1.4 gigs after playback.
I have 2 gigs and some of the frames are blacked out toward the end of the video. If I could I would put in 50 gigs of ram. Then watch the render.
You can't have enough. I have another 2 gig but my Intel D875PBZ chokes on it. Intel never thought anyone would use 4 gig of ram so they never fixed
the video card suck (3 times aperture from 4 gig only). It plays hell with the sound on V5 and Acid pro and the media player.

JJK

I don't know about you, but I am using AMD XP CPUs with the cheapest ECS motherboards, and haven't had issues with my 512MB of DDR PC2700 RAM.
Only when I open DVD Architect, 2 copies of Vegas 4, and Acid 4, I see that a little bit more than 512MB is used.
I will see if anything changes when I put 1GB of RAM though.

So, one person says, "NO", one person says, "YES", and one person says, "I don't know".

No, they are saying it depends on the type of work you do.
Things like credit rolls and big pictures will use more RAM.

Run some of your big projects and monitor mem usage. If you are getting close to your available ram, then add. If not - it just extra money.

For me I have 1gig and have yet to stress it with Vegas. I have with other programs (3D Models).

I tend to spend my extra dollars on cameras and accessories. Or Extra harddrives.

Well, I bit the bullet. Sunk a couple of hundred bucks for an extra gig of ram.

I rendered a project (a photo montage) of 4 minutes with lots of pans, color corrections, etc... on my system previously, and it took 45 minutes.

I renered the same project with the memory installed and it took less than 20 minutes.

Now, let me explain that there was ONE difference being that I had a number of the pictures sitting on lower tracks, but not in use. They were just there in case I wanted to add them later. Anyhow, the re-rendered version was done WITHOUT those pictures sitting there. If I'm right that Vegas is only using the upper track anyhow, that means those pictures should not make any difference. Am I right?

If so, the extra GIG of ram did make a difference. Does anyone know if the removal of the pictures on the lower tracks could have made the difference?

I'm trying to see if my purchase should be kept. You see, I can bring the memory back if I'm not satisfied.

In any event, something made a big difference to the render time.

I've got another 5 days that I can return my memory for a refund.

Ssoooo, is it possible that simply adding memory can boost rendering performance? If I understood the previous posts, it shouldn't, but yet it seemed that it did.

Does anyone know for sure?

Why not try puttin those pictures back and see what happens. It does seem Vegas's render times are affected by stuff that isn't being used but that's just my gut feeling. I'd like to see how you fare.

Sounds like you have the perfect opportunity to test it yourself. Pick a few RAM-intensive tasks, do them with the extra RAM installed (and time them), then take the extra RAM out, *don't change anything else*, and try them again. Others can offer opinions, but this way you can see any differences first hand. Looking forward to hearing your results.

farss is right - put your project back in its original form before the RAM upgrade. You changed two parameters of the test - more RAM and a modified project file, so it is hard to say where the increase in performance originated and how much either parameter added/took away from the results.

It might be simpler to create two new test projects just to determine how much the extra memory is helping your times. A smaller, less complicated project that represents the lower 25% of your project sizes and a larger one that gets into the upper third quartile of your projects. It doesn't help much to test a really small, uncomplicated project that only represents 3% of the projects you do on a daily basis. By the same token, there is no need to test a really large project when you are unlikely to deal with one that size except for a very rare occasion.

I have 1GB of RAM and have considered bumping it up to 1.5 GB's (the board will support 2GB), but like many others here, I don't feel that I've come even close to "filling it up" before a disk page file comes into heavy use. Vegas remains very responsive throughout my editing sessions. If I eventually see a performance bottleneck that I can definitely attribute to available memory, I'll deal with it then - and hope that prices are still reasonable!

Let us know the outcomes of your experiments (and whether or not the extra memory winds up back at its retail home!).

Tbone

Now why didn't I think of that. I will try with and without the extra RAM and compare.

I've got a somewhat busy schedule right now, so it might be a couple of days. Hold on tight.

Sigh, not really. I wish it did though. I thought maybe the render times would decrease but I see zero difference other than a bit of a speed increase when working on something else while a project is rendering. Anyway, it was dumb to buy the extra RAM. A gig on a P4 2.8 is all you really need. I think if you can overclock your PC you will get more speed but you need a techie like BB to explain how it is done.

Peter

To the best of my knowledge the amount of ram doesn't affect the "speed of rendering". It will affect Vegas during the render if runs
out of memory, it will stop rendering and the ""out of memory" menu will pop up and you will have to start the render again with either changes
to your project eliminating memory grabing items (credit rolls, composites, large still pictures) and/or ending processes that are not required during the render. My projects tend to suck up a lot of memory as the stills are usually 500k or more. You won't find this out until you do a couple of projects with about 550 still pictures dropped on the timeline. I use a 10 second duration which equates to about an hour running time and it just about chokes V5 unless you keep the pictures below 500k. I still would like to have about a zillion gig.
If I gave you the perception that it speeded up rendering I apologize for that.
JJK

Ok. Here are the results.

First to let you know what I've rendered: 48 PNG files of about 2,500 KB each. Lots of fades, color corrections, pan & zooms. Track running time is 4:00 even.

With 2 GIG of ram, the render time was 19:45.
With 1 GIG of ram, the render time was 35:58.

It certainly is obvious that the extra RAM is speeding up the rendering. Is it only because these are pictures files? Would it make a difference with straight video as well? I don't know.

In any event, I'm keep the memory. I got a 175% increase in render speed. A few comments were to the effect of "don't waste you money because it won't make enough of a difference". Well, I guess this test settles definately settles things.

I don't have time to keep removing and adding memory for additional test. ie. video only.

Perhaps someone can comment on these findings.

I REALLY am an easy going person and not one to nit-pick....heck, I might be wrong. I think 175% is inaccurate, but it DOES seem to be pretty darn close to a 100% increase in speed, because it cut the render time almost in half.

In any event - I'd keep the RAM too. Thanks for posting the results, I'll know what to look for when I upgrade my vid pc next time.

DM

Oops, sorry about the math calculation error.

You are right, it's actually a 75% increase. Guess I got a little too excited! ;-)

I think the single thing that sucked up all that RAM was the size of your many stills.

I've done video montages with maybe 30 stills, but each still was perhaps 100KB in size (I did many tests based on a 3x zoom-in or -out and concluded that additional resolutuion was never used). Vegas did fine on 256MB, and at least 100MB of that was eaten up by XPpro and all the other processes running in the background. I know it did because the little "RamPage" monitor in my system tray never got even close to "0," which meant there was lots of unused memory still available.

Very interesting! Thanks for doing the test and reporting back.

There's been lots of dicussions about scan resolutions. I like to often zoom in tight to different faces, etc...

Consequently, I take a regular 4x6 picture and scan it at 300 dpi and find I get the best results. If it's a really small picture ( 1.5x1.5 ), I scan it at 600 dpi.

It's probably overkill, but hey, with all my testing, I've found that scanning setting to work best.

Perhaps the benefit of the extra RAM is only due to the fact that my pictures consist of large files. Regardless, the RAM DID make a huge difference.

I would be willing to bet that you wouldn't see the same results using a project of just video files. It would probably be faster, but not by 75-100%.