Comments

mbryant wrote on 9/26/2006, 4:28 AM
That is odd. I have a modest laptop (Pentium M 1.6, 1 GB RAM). Just tested preview of a single m2t clip. In V6, I get around 2 or 3 fps. V7, between 20 and 25 fps (I'm in PAL-land, so 25 fps is full rate). I didn't do anything special. How fast it is of course will depend on the PC, but I would expect that on any PC V7 should be faster than V6.
Mark
Wes C. Attle wrote on 9/26/2006, 5:08 AM
A Pentium M (suped up mobile) should outperform an AMD 2000. But I still would expect better than a 2 fps perf. Peter, can you check your hard disk? If it is 5400 RPM then you may be out of luck with a disk bottleneck. Or maybe try to run defrag?

Of course your best solution is to just bite the bullet witha full PC upgrade. Now is a fantastic time to buy. CPU's are whacky cheap now. Here you go from Newegg.com:

-AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ $151.99
-GIGABYTE GA-M55plus-S3G Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 ATX $82.99
-HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 HDT722516DLA380 (0A31637) 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $53.99 (you want two for vegas, one for OS, one for swap file & media) so $108.00
- G.SKILL 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) System Memory $119.99 X2 = $240.00
- PC Case Rosewill R804BK Black Steel ATX - $26
- Power Supply - RAIDMAX RX-420k120 ATX12V 420Watt $26.50
- (Optional) Video Card JATON Video-PX7600GS-256 Geforce 7600GS 256MB $105.99

You get an awesome new dual-core PC for video editing from under $650.

Of course that does not answer your question about Vegas 7 being designed for faster PC's only. My opinion is that your CPU is over 4 years old and you should expect to need to upgrade to edit HDV and soon run Windows Vista if that's your thing.


PeterWright wrote on 9/26/2006, 6:28 AM
Thanks guys - I would be happy to upgrade my CPUs, but I'm not sure the max that is is possible with my motherboard (Tyan Thunder K7) - there again, maybe its time for another MB -

It does seem strange though that my dual AMD 2000s (which I think are in fact 1.6) can't manage more than 2 fps whilst a single Pentium M1.6 can do 20-25 (The Hard drive involved is an external 7200 rpm via firewire).

As I said, whilst I find all this out, Gearshift is ok - it renders proxy avis whilst I sleep .....

farss wrote on 9/26/2006, 7:04 AM
The firewire thing might have something to do with it.
Have you tried from an IDE drive?

Bob.
Wes C. Attle wrote on 9/26/2006, 7:57 AM
My price quote above included a motherboard by the way.

Ya, that is strange. But a 1.6 Pentium M is a little faster than a 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4, which in turn is a little faster than a Athlon XP 2000+. (Pentium M's have special sauce so you cannot compare clockspeeds of Pentium M's with desktops. The same special sauce is what makes the latest Intel desktop chips such high performance by the way).

I didn't have much luck with firewire disks myself. You could try adding an IDE drive. Maybe run Sisoft Sandra "System Report" to help you find any configuration problems. Either way I think you should expect at least 1/3 less performance than a Pentium M.
Wes C. Attle wrote on 9/26/2006, 8:06 AM
Also, disk performance drops very fast after a disk becomes 60 to 75% full. Over 75% generally crawls to a near stop with media like HDV. Check your space.
PeterWright wrote on 9/26/2006, 5:05 PM
I hadn't tried IDE but I just did, and no change - about 1.4 fps. In a way I'm pleased about that, as I work almost exclusively with external drives these days.

Sounds like time to upgrade.
fldave wrote on 9/26/2006, 5:43 PM
Something definitely is optimized for the newer processors.

P3 dual cpu 1Ghz: 0.75fps - 1.0 fps, even draft-auto or best auto.

My P4 3.2Ghz HT machine gets 29.970 on with Best Full external.
Wes C. Attle wrote on 9/27/2006, 5:32 AM
"P3 dual cpu 1Ghz: ..."

You have P3's that still work? Amazing!
fldave wrote on 9/27/2006, 6:12 AM
It ran Spot's newer HDV render test in a smoking 10+ hours.
My P4 3.2Ghz HT machine could never complete that test.

It's my everyday news, stocks, email, etc machine. Can do audio, vid capture, etc. just fine. With my new cheap nVidia video card (6600), I can output 720p wmv to my 65" HDTV using Nero Showtime 3. It's also great for color correcting DV footage.

Solid as a rock.
mbryant wrote on 9/27/2006, 8:18 AM
Pleased to know my Pentium M has "special sauce... -)

I get the same (decent) speeds using a firewire HDD.

While Peter's machine may be slower, it still seems odd to me that he doesn't see ANY improvement from V6 to V7. I'm not sure how they managed to create an improvement that only works on faster machines (or ones with special sauce...)
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 9/27/2006, 9:16 AM
firewire *shouldn't* have any affect on this it's a small stream (25 Mbit/s) Same as DV, it just requires more processing to see what's going on.

Dave
PeterWright wrote on 9/27/2006, 5:32 PM
I've now heard an explanation from a kind Sony employee:

"The key problem is that the HDV reader relies on SSE2 for a fair bit of its performance gains, and K7 generation Athlon processors do not support SSE2. If you upgrade, modern Opteron/Athlon64 and Core/Core2 processors will give you much improved performance."

So, that explains that. I've had a chat with my local PC builder, and rather than replacing MB & CPUs, he suggests a new machine, including a SATA raid, which I think is not bad advice - I'll be able to "demote" my Dual AMD 2000 to "Internet and Miscellaneous duties", for which I'm still using a P3 / 450 machine.

mbryant wrote on 9/28/2006, 12:51 AM
Thanks Peter... I didn't know what SSE2 was, so I looked it up..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2

Pentium M, and Pentium 4 (amongst other processors) support SSE2. The wiki link has a list of those that do and those that do not.

Mark