As a Mac to PC switcher, I would love the same information. Geeks unite and bring forth wisdom!

There is very little you can do in windows to increase Vegas performance if you have a stable machine. You do need the basics like a fixed swap file size, etc.

You also need to monitor your CPU & memory performance during a few renders and previews to see if your utilization is acceptable.

Most optimizing would be done in Vegas. That can make a huge difference. Check your rendering threads and RAM preview, etc.

However, you are wasting your time using a dual core CPU in Vegas since it works so much better on a quad core. It's dirt cheap to get a Quad core and greatly increase your speed and reduce your stress.

Also, to see if your machine is in the ballpark with similar machines, run the rendertest and review the entire thread to see if your machine is similar to similar CPU equipped machines.

You might want to check out the Black Viper's configuration guides for Windows/Vista.
http://www.blackviper.com/

There is also a good tweaking guide at videoguys.com .

Here are " 10 tips for a faster computer" from the Sony Newsletter (March 2009):

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/news/article.asp?articleid=70&keycode=64138#cont

Jøran Toresen

Also, I found that V9 loads XDCAM support when launching. I don't use XDCAM so I went into the Options/Preferences/Internal tab (click shift-preferences to see the Internal tab) and set Enable XDCAM Explorer to FALSE. Now V9 loads up much quicker and I'm sure takes up less memory. If you are looking for Enable XDCAM Explorer, it is way down the list of parameters near the bottom. But it is 21 parameters before the parameters for BAKE CHEESECAKE, BAKE PEACH COBBLER, BAKE APPLE COMPOTE, BAKE LEMON TART.

Now, I KNOW Vegas is one hot video editor. But, I never realized it could cook dessert too! :-)

I have configured system with NO SWAP FILE but Task Manager is still showing that Vegas has some virtual memory allocation and I can see that during BUILT DYNAMIC RAM PREVIEW there is a lot communication with HDD.

Does anybody know how to eliminate this ? In my opinion this is a couse that Vegas can't use 100% of multicores power.

Operation is easy : just render to RAM. I can't understand high transfers to HDD during this operation.

Resolving this problem could be very usefull. I often use RAM preview before rendering (I have 12G RAM so I can get realy big part of movie). Then rendering is acctually only memory bump to HDD and its going very fast.

Recently I have measured rules : (file size doesn't matter, it's relative) :

- building RAM preview takes about 20 min
- bump to HDD (render with RAM preview ready) takes only 1 minute !!!

So general question is : hot to tweek rendering to RAM (how to eliminate unusefull HDD communication) ?

Regards,

More on Preview optimizing:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=4&MessageID=670389

Put your pagefile back. Removing the pagefile does not eliminate paging (because not all paging is to the pagefile). In fact, it causes paging to be less optimal.

blackviper's "guides" are generally ill thought of by people who actually know how Windows works (say, anyone who has read and understood _Windows Internals_ by Solomon and Russinovich).

Simply disabling a bunch of services just because someone on a website told you you don't need them is a great way to end up with support issues later on.

Bring up your normal, un-"tweaked" Windows system with no user apps running. Take a look at the CPU usage in task manager. It should be no higher than about 5%. Now understand that even if you could eliminate all of the "unnecessary background" work, those 5 percentage points are the most you can ever add to your processing power.

"Memory savings" are another red herring. The memory used by processes in a virtual memory OS is an extremely dynamic quantity. In particular, memory in an idle process (such as a service that you're not using) can be quickly reclaimed by the OS and assigned to something else if something else (like Vegas) needs it.

See http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&f=99609816&m=665003375931 for someone who actually ran some benchmarks before and after applying BV's suggestions and came up with no measurable benefit.

What CAN you do? Well, first, if you're on a 32-bit OS, max the RAM to 4GB (but know that Windows 32-bit client versions won't be able to see more than 3.2GB of it, typically; sometimes less). On a 64-bit system 8GB is a minimum. This will help even if you're using the 32-bit version of Vegas.

Multiple hard drives are a great idea. Ideally you would want separate hard drives (not just separate partitions) for each of:

- operating system , Vegas application, and pagefile
- project source media files
- project output files
- Vegas temporary files (configured in the Options dialog)

You will often see recs to put the pagefile on a separate drive, but since Vegas tends to do the same thing over and over its code is not paged often (the code tends to get paged in and stay in)... so if you just and the OS and Vegas on one drive that drive would be idle most of the time - might as well put the pagefile on it, which will not be accessed that often anyway if you have enough RAM.

Putting the pagefile on a partition by itself is a terrible idea, unless the drive isn't being used for much of anything else. Otherwise you are just increasing the access times. The myth of "pagefile fragmentation" caused by the system's "constantly expanding and contracting" the pagefile is indeed a myth as long as the default pagefile size is large enough (typically 1x to 1.5x the RAM size, which is how Windows sets it at install).

Also: Ignore any "tweak guides" that mention registry settings such as Irq8Priority (doesn't exist, does nothing) or IoPageLockLimit (hasn't existed or done anything since Windows 2000 RTM) . And Ignore anybody who tells you to "clean out your prefetch folder." These sorts of suggestions do serve one purpose: they are highly reliable indications that the authors don't know what they're talking about.

Here are some suggestions I posted in a thread in the VMS forum more than a year ago:

"When I working on video editing I tend fire up the Services control panel (from Administrative Tools) and stop non-essential (usually non-Microsoft/Windows) background services that I won't be using during that time. Examples of such services might be: Bluetooth, iPod, printer management, SQL server, VPN, cell phone sync service, etc. All these services running in the background use memory and sometimes steal CPU cycles.

@jeh: I learned a lot of stuff from BlackViper's guides, and I consider myself fairly knowledgeable. While I don't use that as a doctrine to follow, I use it as a reference when I need information.

Perhaps I did not make myself clear:

Services you are not using do not use CPU time.

If you're not printing anything, the print service will not use any CPU time.

If you're not using a Bluetooth device, the Bluetooth service will not use any CPU time.

In claiming otherwise, BV is simply raising FUD. It isn't so.

Worse: if you disable BT and then sometime later buy a BT mouse, it might take you some time to remember "oh yeah.. I disabled that."

etc., etc., etc.

"All these services running in background" - clearly this is a different use of the term "running" than we are used to. Just because a process exists does not mean it is executing code, regardless of what "BlackViper" thinks.

Yes, those services will appear to be sitting on some amount of RAM right after boot. However, if they are really not doing anything, the OS can reclaim that RAM for use by other things, like Vegas.

And if they ARE doing something, then you probably don't want to disable them...

In particular, turning off SQL server while trying to use Vegas is a really bad idea...

Most of this would be moot if there were credible benchmarks showing significant performance benefits after "tweaking" according to BV, or any other "tweak" guide. I'm not aware of any. (n.b.: I don't consider boot times or "available RAM right after boot" to be useful metrics.)

Yes, virus checkers can start up to do a weekly scan, or whatever, but those are not configured through the Windows Service control panel, are they? A weekly scan should be scheduled for times when you're not working. As for live scanning (scanning whenever you open a file), just tell the virus scanner to ignore .mov, .avi, etc., files - most of them do anyway.

Being rude doesn't help to prove a point of view

did i miss something? who was being rude?

i think jeh's points very well made and quite thought through.

thanks

leslie

Hi,

I suppose you are right. I have the same structure of drives but built as a logical strucures according to assumptions :

- HDD1+HDD2 = system / software / projects are in RAID 1 to achieve safety and eliminate daily backpu
- HDD3+HDD4 = project media inputs / project media outputs to avoid simoultanous reading and writing to the same device.

Services are marginal - it's very easy to asses percentage of processor power consumed by services (just open Task Manager, abandon actions and observe indicator - usually it's on 1% level).

Just for academic study I'm trying to do something to eliminate communication with HDDs during Build Dynamic RAM preview. I have made the same conclusion that this is not possible to turn off definitively swaping to HDD. And I suppose it's a Vista (not Vegas) charm...

Workflow like this :

1) render to RAM (HDDs not involved)
2) dump RAM to HDD (processing not involved)

is in my opinion logical. Stage 2) is working perfectly :-) Vegas exports almost 50 frames per second (I usually use 50fps for animatons and it means that I have "real time dump"). But stage 1) is sluging (utilization degree of processor is usually balancing between 50 and 70%). It means this stage could be pushed to better performance. Overal time of operation could be 12 minute insted of 22.

Question is : what is the cause of intensive communication with HDD during rendering to RAM ?

Regards,

Recently I have measured rules : (file size doesn't matter, it's relative) :

- building RAM preview takes about 20 min
- bump to HDD (render with RAM preview ready) takes only 1 minute !!!


Neat trick... i remember doing that on my single core P4 !!!

Question is : what is the cause of intensive communication with HDD during rendering to RAM



Cause? Umm.. its reading media... it needs to chec to see where that source material is coming from regardless of how many drive you have. As an example, if uve got drive F with video and Drive G with audio if its ONLY reading drive F then the render says "hey, there stuff on G u need to see" that latency will affect Drives F performance. To alleviate the issue, the project is scanned as it renders and drives are always beeing accessed during render (youll see this happen)

Rendering out as a one way stream through the IDE/Sata bus to ram is fast as its using the systems FSB to full capactity ONE WAY.

Theoretically AND practically, it should have a wider bandwidth straight to ram as opposed to drive to drive, (if its drive to drive u can halve that FSB time) however this is PURELY dependant on the motherboards FSB. Overclocking can help, but this is again dependant on your board.

@jeh:

It seems you have something against BV. It doesn't bother me, so let's leave that out of the picture to simplify things.

The first paragraph of my reply, was in no way related to BV's web site, I stated several things all based on personal experience and practice.

Your response makes it sound like shutting down or stopping a service is the same as disabling it. Of course it isn't - it is just as easy to start a service as it is to stop it. I shut down these services when "working on video editing." I either go to the services console or run a PowerShell script to shut down a pre-defined set of services for me, which includes shutting down an Apache server among other things I mentioned above. On the next reboot things are back to normal, or if want the services enabled just after the editing session, I can just run a script again to enable the ones I shut down.

Your response makes it sound like I recommended shutting down services that are in use. I didn't. Quoting myself: stop non-essential (usually non-Microsoft/Windows) background services that I won't be using during that time.

Your response makes it sound like I said that services are constantly using CPU cycles. Quoting you: "Services you are not using do not use CPU time." and after a few examples, you said, "In claiming otherwise, BV is simply raising FUD. It isn't so." As I said earlier, these are my statements - nowhere did I quote BV. Now here's is what I dis say: "...services running in the background I asserted that these services use memory, and that they would only sometimes run on the CPU. I chose my words carefully.

In my second para, a paragraph completely unrelated to services, I mentioned virus checkers interrupting work. Somehow you managed you correlate the two & went on to dispute a unclaimed statement: "virus checkers...are not configured through the Windows Service control panel, are they?" After that you went on to re-state something similar to what I said, which is to configure a virus scanner to exclude certain files/file-types.

Quoting me: "You may want to configure them to ignore certain types of files and perhaps exclude SVMS folders/binaries from checking if you feel confident doing that."

Quoting you:"just tell the virus scanner to ignore .mov, .avi, etc., files - most of them do anyway. "

Maybe we agree on this one thing!?

Everyone here is capable of making their own decisions what works for them or what doesn't. I have no interest in convincing you of anything - so feel free to have the last word.

All that being said, a general note to add to this thread: search for performance tuning tips on Microsoft's web site and you'll come across a few articles, some specific to certain apps (exchange, SQL & IIS servers), but you'll also find general articles like this one: [url=http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab377598-a637-432c-a3c8-1607ab629201&DisplayLang=en]Windows Vista Performance and Tuning,[url] which among other things, lists disabling unnecessary services for performance.

Hi,

During Building Dynamic RAM Preview need of communication with HDD (where DATA are located) is clear. It's not possible to avoid that - but I suppose my organization of data is effective enogh (input and outpup drives are separated from system disck (where also swap file is located)).

I'm trying to understand what is the cause of intensive communication with drive C - as Task Manager is showing it's connected with swapping and proces of increasing swap file size allocated to Vegas (during render to RAM) is parallel to proces of rendering to RAM. It looks like there is no benefit in rendering to RAM bacause exactly the same portions of data are still sent to drive C and all proces is sluging. It's not possible to avoid that even if you turn off swap file. Of course this is only a thesis but I can't find any other process which can push processor do not use high utilization degree during rendering to RAM.

I use i7975 with HT and generally I'm satisfied with UD which is about 90% on every core in case of very short previews. But in case of long previews in the beginning UD is 90%, after some time it starts to ballance between 50 and 70% and keep this effectiveness to the end. In place of FSB I have QPI with theoretical transfer on level 26G/s - this is capable to fullfill all my demands and I suppose the core problem isn't here.

And another rule in my config :

(render to RAM + dump to HDD)time < (render or prerender to HDD)time

The difference is about 20%.

Regards,

JEH, I have tried multiple configurations of using multiple drives for different files in Vegas as you suggested and have seen essentially no difference in performance - it may improve performance on an older computer with slow drives but practiacally with newer faster drives I think anyone with 4 drives available wil see more benefit from configuring them as RAID 10 if available through their southbridge. RAID 0 is even faster but I personally wouldn't use it as with 4 drives there is 4x the probability of HDD failure and data loss. When setting up RAID with large drives on a system optimized for video using the largest stripe size offered will increase performance by reducing IOs with a little space sacrificed on the array for smaller records.