VASST HDV Rendertest in Vegas 8 Pro

Cheno wrote on 8/30/2007, 9:10 PM
Alright, time to chime in on the updates to render times that we ran at the VASST studios today - This is purely the render test in one of the adjacent threads started last spring by John Cline.

I think you'll all be rather amazed at the new and improved Vegas engine under the hood and we'll probably need another test here shortly :)

System Specs are:

2.66 Quad Core Xeon, 2 gigs of RAM - render to 7200 rpm SATA drive separate from system drive

For those of you with 8 core MacPros, I think you'll be laughing out loud this is so cool and so fast.

HDV 1080 60i project template / render to HDV Mpeg2 1080 60i, just as John describes –

John’s rules “…set the project properties for "HDV 1080-60i" and rendered it out as HDV using the default MPEG2 "HDV 1080-60i" template.”

The default setting is set for “Good” – I chose to render to “Best” (which I think I did initially for my test a few months ago in Vegas 7 – anywho…


Vegas 8 / 8 bit / 1 thread / full 1024 available RAM - :22 seconds

Vegas 8 / 32 bit / 1 thread / full 1024 RAM - 1:10

Vegas 8 / 8 bit / 4 threads / 1024 RAM - :23 seconds

Vegas 8 / 32 bit / 4 threads / 1024 RAM - 1:23

Vegas 8 / 8 bit / 8 threads (internal setting) / 1024 RAM - :23 seconds

Vegas 8 / 32 bit / 8 threads (internal setting) / 1024 RAM - 1:23

As you can see, this is an amazing testament to the power in HDV rendering in Vegas now. I’m anxious to see how the number roll in in about a weeks time. This alone, has just increased my efficiency when rendering for clients. Even at 32 BIT, this came in :40 seconds quicker than my last benchmark on this same system. At 8 BIT, you're looking at almost 6 times the speed!

I also ran tests with Project Settings at HD 1080 60i settings and they were only a few seconds longer so for HDCAM mastering, it’s truly a remarkable upgrade in speed and rendering to larger format projects.

Spot has tried to explain threading to me and I’m not a math guy nor do I understand exactly what the differences are but as you can see, settings on this particular machine are best when Render Thread is set to only 1. Your settings and system configs may differ. Sony default is 4.

Hope that helps wet your appetites. It’s almost time to have a V8!

-cheno

Comments

DJPadre wrote on 8/30/2007, 11:17 PM
im REALLY curious as to why one thread is faster than 4... be it 8 or 32bit

im looking at building a dual quad core, but if it doesnt increase my preview and render times, i might just stick with a single quad and get afew more HDD's
RBartlett wrote on 8/30/2007, 11:34 PM
Alternatively you could look for a dealer who warrants the system at an overclocked rating
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-048-OK&groupid=43&catid=781&subcat=
(Systems at Overclockers.co.uk)

Sometimes it pays to have someone else take the risks and present the figures than going through all the learning and tweaking for yourself.

I'd imagine there is an e-tailer in almost every country that uses overclocking as it's USP?

And enjoy both the highest speed CPUs and with the option of quad cores for when the software is optimized for more cores again. This could be Sony, MainConcept or the interaction between the two causing this. It also might vary with the audio codec and whether you encode with the embedded audio or not (or clearly, for PTT to HDV you need embedded audio in the M2T that goes out).
DJPadre wrote on 9/1/2007, 6:54 AM
i hear you rbarltett, but it still doesnt answer the question why 2 cores are as fast as 4...

lets face it with technology the way it is, what im lookng at spending is chump change for a decent editign system .Cosndiering the workstation wil be payed off after one job, the issue isnt cost vs performance, the issue is performance in general.

This also leads me to future upgrade requirements, and to give you an idea, i still edit on one of my major workstations here which has only had a GFX card, Mobo and CPU upgrade and nothing else aside from HDDs and PSU

To this day, after 2 yrs of running this system build, with the original built around 5 yrs ago, this system renders as fast as a dual core system, even though its still a single core HT extreme 3.0 with 1gb corsair ram @400mhz

For DV, it does the trick, for HDV, i have a different system but the core of the issue is that this "old" unit still performs surprisingly well (and by me talking about it now, ive probably jynxed myself and will suffer a major crash any minute now... lol)

Either way, i wotn bother with quad core if it does nothing to increase preview or render performance

with the hardest test available clocking at identical speeds for one particualr build, i dont see any benefit of quad... not yet..

im hoping someone can enlighten me
RBartlett wrote on 9/1/2007, 9:37 AM
The setting in Vegas says it all really. It talks about how many threads. The number of threads spewed out should be relative to the project dimensions and the content itself. Not even slightly approaching being limited to 1,2 or 4 threads. Perhaps it isn't like this. It might be a poorly named setting.

You see, NewTek VT and SpeedEDIT can readily spawn out a few hundred threads to preview or to render a single piece. What I'd hope to see in Vegas would be an affinity setting. I'd hope for multithreaded to a similar level as NewTek manage but to be able to choose in preferences either which or how many CPUs the Windows OS despatcher (the OS 'execution engine') is permitted to use. If only to assist my next PC purchase as to whether it is a upper 3.x GHz unit or a pair of quad core Xeon or Opteron based machine.

Features before raw grunt. I mean, nobody claims that Vegas is realtime, full resolution ALL of the time. We hope for most of the time and it is great if an hours worth of footage can be rendered out in less than an hour in decent quality.

I'm probably too forgiving. I'm keen for features, stability and then optimal performance. Otherwise SpeedEDIT or EDIUS would have been more of a focus for me. Both those apps aim for realtime full res all of the time. If your system can't keep up, then the edit experience suffers and the edit environment has to work and you wait for some catching up to occur.

Part of why I invest in Vegas almost every year is also because I've spent so much on it already. I can usually use the new feature or I've been working around the limitations of not having that feature in the older major release.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Vegas8Pro that we've seen performance issues with (when set for more than 1 or 2 threads) isn't simply because the R&D time at Madison and Toronto has been spent putting features in and stabilizing them. The optimization phase could well be something that is yet to come. Once the heat from 'marketing' is off. Then we'll see VegasPro8-b announced with some other wonderful titbit thrown in. (possibly a SonyYUV-HQ 32bit-FP format or more Blu-Ray awareness in the suite as a whole, something like that).

I've answered another thread pointing out that processing of A/V data is a tough act. Drawing comparisons to the great migration across the African Serengeti where the herd only really arrives when the last ones towards the back stop resorting to their running. A faster CPU will result in a faster migration. More cores result in the migration being broader and in the wrong circumstances (such as the render test - be it artificial or practically) the whole transfer becomes almost bureaucratic.

I'm hoping that it is simply that, as with Vegas6, that multi-threaded refinements and 3rd party hooks are yet to be optimized beyond the stability requirements of Sony's quality control. Do note that the network rendering feature of earlier versions of Vegas may have actually been a pointless exercise now that we've moved into an MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 and dolby-AC3 world.