Vegas 5 Rendering Performance

planders wrote on 6/6/2004, 10:27 PM
Well, just did a neat little project that revealed some interesting results.

I had to put together an appealing promo reel for a community theatre that I'm involved with, giving info about our upcoming season. What a world we live in, where I can do something like this in five hours sitting in a hotel room with a laptop and USB DVD burner.

Anyway, rendering this 6-minute reel (essentially all generated media) to an MPEG-2 stream for DVDA on my P4-2.5GHz notebook took about 2:20 (that's hours and minutes, it was a two-pass render). Didn't finally get to bed until about 3:00 AM, after the DVD was in the can. Oog. And I had to be on the road again by 6:30...

Anyway, after the disc's premiere Friday night I had to make a few changes, and since I had returned home I could do them on my uber-PC--3.2GHz overclocked to 3.52GHz. The identical two-pass render took only 40 minutes.

So, with only a 40% faster CPU, the render task took less than a third of the time. The difference between computers was nowhere near this dramatic with previous versions of Vegas, so clearly hyperthreading makes a significant difference, nearly doubling the difference in CPU speed in this case.

Bottom line: I can find no fault with Vegas' rendering performance. Anyone else having similar speed-demon experiences?

Project specs:

-Five tracks: two for title cards created in Photoshop (PNGs), one track with a Vision Series Sampler background reused numerous times, sometimes time-stretched, a track for the promo stills (gotta get our booking guy to start asking for video clips from acts), and one audio track.

-Transitions on the title card tracks used Pixelan SpiceMaster 2 to extraordinary effect--they literally look like a million bucks, and probably would've been a few years ago.

-Track motion in use for one of the title tracks, allowing for some fancy animated intertitles. Got to pick up Graffiti soon. More TM on the stills track.

-Broadcast Color filter put on the Master, guaranteed to drag any render to its knees.

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/7/2004, 5:26 AM
Well, 3.5ghz isn't almost double 2.5ghz. :) Anyway, that's nit-picky.

Your bus speed will make a big difference too. And RAM sped. And HD speed will affect rendering (if the CPU can output frames faster then the HD can write them, then it will go slower). Plus, if you're using the comp it will take longer (does for me when I use the net durring a render)

I've got an AMD XP 1800, and I get faster render times if I use footage on a seperate drive as the render, & not the C:.

Of course if it was me I wouldn't of waited up all night. It was a 6 minute file: it'll take a few minutes to burn ointo DVD, I would of gotten up 15 minutes early & burned it then. ;)

Do you still have V4? You could try rendering a simular project on both comps to see how it goes. :)
AudioIvan wrote on 6/7/2004, 6:17 AM
"so clearly hyperthreading makes a significant difference, nearly doubling the difference in CPU speed in this case."
Well that is because the MainConcept Encoder in Vegas & standalone is optimized for hyperthreading.
Using different drives(one to read, the second to write) gives best performance in all applications not just Vegas, because if you use single HD
the drive has to change from read to write mode all the time.
"Do you still have V4? You could try rendering a simular project on both comps to see how it goes"
Rendering the same project in Vegas 4 will be slower for sure because the encoder in Vegas 4 is the old MC(not optimized for hyperthreading).

AudioIvan
farss wrote on 6/7/2004, 6:40 AM
Just a small point but if you're going out to DVD the BC FX is a waste of time, the players will keep it legal anyway.
planders wrote on 6/10/2004, 3:00 PM
Fair enough on the broadcast colours. Figured it couldn't hurt. It definitely renders a lot faster without it. Still, someone might request a VHS copy at some point, and now I've got a suitable source file.

As for staying up all night, I think my sense of logic and proportion gave out around 11:38 PM. And you should've seen me when I arrived where it was supposed to be shown, only to discover that no one had bothered to track down a suitable screen. Ah, volunteerism...