oh, ok thanks

what else have we got..

Ok. As long as we're doing pie-in-the-sky with no price tags:

Motherboard: X299 SLI PLUS CPU:
Intel X-Series i9-7900X Skylake-X 10-Core 3.3 GHz
RAM:32GB HyperX Predator
Graphics Card:NVIDIA GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G
SSD:Intel 256GB Solid State Hard Drive
HDD: Seagate BarraCuda Pro 10TB
Hard Drive Water Cooling:Cooler Master MASTERLIQUID 240 Case & Fans Cooler Master H500P
Power Supply Unit:Cooler Master V750

 

what is the key to this, the cpu, the gpu, the ram... what is it?

 

 

All of the above, plus fast disks... and, as @Musicvid said, be prepared to use proxies or low-compression intermediates in some cases.

Personally, I favour AMD threadripper + Vega 64 FE card with lots of RAM and a RAID subsystem; others will likely recommend high end intel/nvidia parts with high clock speed. I don't own either, but manage to have a good 4K editing experience on an 8 year old PC by using cineform intermediates/proxies.

Ok. As long as we're doing pie-in-the-sky with no price tags:


SSD:Intel 256GB Solid State Hard Drive
HDD: Seagate BarraCuda Pro 10TB

I would depend on how often you edit, but I find my 265GB ssd is expiring too quickly when using video cache. I have written 17.6TB of video in the last 1 year, & based on that average write the drive will have a health rating of 0% in another year. I think 2 years is not very good so I believe you should buy a larger drive then the capacity you need to give you extra life for your drive as the larger the drive the large the Lifetime writes before failure.

You already have an excellent editing machine. But in some cases neither CPU, GPU or memory will solve. Depending on the complexity of your project only patience.

You can even try to use Proxies, but you will also need to be patient, as the creation of proxies is also time-consuming. In compensation you will have a real-time visualization of your project.

For me, the key for being able to playback larger projects (one I just did had 36 layers) is 2 things.

1. Put everything on an SSD. If it is M.2 NVME, even better.
2. Create proxies. Without proxies, there is no way I could have watched my project smoothly.

In my experience, when I used 15+ tracks and my video files were on my NAS (roughly 100MB/s read/write speed) it always slows down (even with proxies). For this reason, all the files I want to work with are put on my Samsung 960 EVO before I start.

i'm not using SSD, i'm stuck in the past.. i've always known that's been a bottleneck, but i've heard stories of dead drives and expiration dates on them and it turns me off. they literally have a finite amount of writes available. what? yet they're the standard. hard drives dying are like house fires.. catastrophic. even with backups it's a major problem. i'm still using SATA.. in 2019.

i suppose that's the first thing that needs to be upgraded... ok.
then what.. all i can think while i'm trying to watch a preview is "what does it take.... more $, more BS, how about premiere? should i finally go mac?"

i've never heard of proxies until today, i don't get why you'd want to degrade your stuff ever. sure, smaller sizes but.. it's in the final edit... why would you do that?

what do i need to do

let's pretend money isn't an issue, i just want crystal clear previews. that's all i want. tired of useless rendering.

"let's pretend money isn't an issue..."

I've been hammering the predecessor to the 905p for two years as a source disk for my project media. I fully expect to reuse it as the boot device in the system that I build in January 2021. By then I will have a bigger, newer, faster work disk. I'm uncertain if it will be an Optane as money is an issue for me. I got my current Intel 750 in January 2017 at a very reasonable price. 

"...i've always known that's been a bottleneck, but i've heard stories of dead drives and expiration dates on them and it turns me off."

Buy a quality product and get on with your editing. Everything has an expiration, especially you and me. 

Optane 905p

Samsung Pro

Samsung EVO      Crucial MX500

@right-w if you use the Vegas Pro built in proxy feature (except for the time building the proxy and viewing resolution) it is pretty much seemless and does not effect the render resolution. Once the proxy is built and you place the clip on in the timeline, if you preview at 'Good' of 'Best' quality you will be seeing the original source media. If you preview at 'Draft' or 'Preview' quality you will be seeing the lower resolution (720p) proxy and it will playback smoother. When you render out Vegas will use the original source media.

If you first convert your source media to an intermediate file such as Cineform or Avid DNxHD, these files will most likely preview smoother and faster than your originals and are visually lossless so there is no reduction in render quality.

Either way, you have two methods to possibly increase your playback preview smoothness and speed without replacing your current computer system, and/or methods to improve the playback of a complicated project in a new more powerful PC that still may choke when you add a lot of tracks and FX's.

"what does it take.... more $, more BS, how about premiere? should i finally go mac?"

I doubt you'll find many people here who suggest premiere. As a recent convert from Premiere to Vegas, I can assure you that without a high end Intel CPU and a high end Nvidia graphics card, Premiere is worthless. I had crashes with a 3 layer multi cam session in Premiere, now I can get away with 8-10 layers in multi-cam mode (using proxies of course.) That being said, I use AMD CPU and GPU. I don't want to have to spend $500+ on my CPU and nearly $1k on a GPU for my software to function. That's why I joined Vegas. Premiere offers no hardware acceleration for AMD.

That said do you understand how an SSD works? A typical HDD (hard disk drive) has a physical disk that it actually reads and writes to. This is why dropping it is so much more dangerous than say an SSD which has no moving parts. An SSD, if I'm not mistaken, is essentially flash memory, similar to a stick of RAM. It has no moving parts. For this reason there is nothing to deteriorate (like a disk) as you read and write to it over and over.

I also second the idea that buying an SSD means you need to buy a high end product from a reputable manufacturer. I use a Samsung EVO with no issue, but if I were to do it again, I'd buy the Samsung Pro or an Optane drive. They are just better.

That said, as others have said, proxies are not in the final render. If you use Vegas, and you create proxies, when your preview is in preview or draft mode, it shows the proxies and when it is in good or best it uses the original footage. Make sure you don't render in draft or preview mode and the proxies will never end up in the final edit but could help make editing much smoother.

Prices of SSDs have dropped so low now that it seems to be no longer a reason to keep going with old fashioned hard drives (except possibly larger sized one for backup). Modern OSs use TRIM to even out wear on SSDs and the latest drives have something like 500TB read/write lifetime cycles quoted which would be along the lines of about 30TB per day for 50 years.😃

 

That said, as others have said, proxies are not in the final render. If you use Vegas, and you create proxies, when your preview is in preview or draft mode, it shows the proxies and when it is in good or best it uses the original footage. Make sure you don't render in draft or preview mode and the proxies will never end up in the final edit but could help make editing much smoother.

For clarification from my experience, it makes no difference what the 'Preview Quality' is set as during rendering, the original source media will be used. There is a small difference of quality if 'Full-resolution rendering quality:' in 'Project' setting is set below 'Best', or if 'Video rendering quality:' in the 'Project' tab of the render 'Template' is set less than 'Best'.

For clarification from my experience, it makes no difference what the 'Preview Quality' is set as during rendering, the original source media will be used. There is a small difference of quality if 'Full-resolution rendering quality:' in 'Project' setting is set below 'Best', or if 'Video rendering quality:' in the 'Project' tab of the render 'Template' is set less than 'Best'.

So I honestly don't know, but I always have my presets saved with "Best" instead of "Use Project Settings" because I'm paranoid. I have never noticed a difference in render quality between "Use Project Settings" and "Best" but being that I don't know why I wouldn't have it set to best, I just do as a precaution. As I understand it, if you did have this set to Preview or Draft though, it would render out the proxies which may be useful in a collaboration if you need a quick render/upload to send to a colleague.

Of course I'm not an expert on Vegas, I'm just being extra cautious.

In the proxy workflow the final render will always use the original source media not the proxies, no matter how the preview is set. In the proxy workflow preview setting is used for playback only.

So I honestly don't know, but I always have my presets saved with "Best" instead of "Use Project Settings" because I'm paranoid. I have never noticed a difference in render quality between "Use Project Settings" and "Best" but being that I don't know why I wouldn't have it set to best, I just do as a precaution. As I understand it, if you did have this set to Preview or Draft though, it would render out the proxies which may be useful in a collaboration if you need a quick render/upload to send to a colleague.

Of course I'm not an expert on Vegas, I'm just being extra cautious.

If you render with the 'Video rendering quality:' in the render template is set below 'Best' (or 'Use Project Settings' if in the 'Project' setting the quality is set to below 'Best') then the render quality is going to be reduced from what the 'Best' setting would produce (smaller file size and lower bite rate) and there is of course a small difference viewing in Vegas scopes, but not because the render is using the proxy, it doesn't.

The larger resolution of the original source and the larger difference between a render in 'Best' compared to a render in 'Draft'. For example there is a small difference with 4K, and a very small difference using FHD.

I just wanted to point out there is no quality loss when using Vegas Pro proxy feature when rendering. Rendering in other than 'Best', such as 'Good' or 'Draft' set within the render template can make a small difference in quality, but this is not connected with or hooked to the 'Preview' quality setting of the 'Previewer'.

 

That said do you understand how an SSD works? A typical HDD (hard disk drive) has a physical disk that it actually reads and writes to. This is why dropping it is so much more dangerous than say an SSD which has no moving parts. An SSD, if I'm not mistaken, is essentially flash memory, similar to a stick of RAM. It has no moving parts. For this reason there is nothing to deteriorate (like a disk) as you read and write to it over and over.

 

Flash memory wears out. My cheap Hitachi 256GB drive has a write life of 36TB, in 12 months I've written half that, so 2 years total life until it should be replaced. Buying a more expensive & larger drive extends the total write life of a drive

Buying a SSD is not a solution to the question.

Drive throughput is not a bottleneck for your project.

Filters, especially those running single threads are your bottleneck.

Real-time rendering at full fps preview is asking for a lot of any CPU.

Proxy, prerender, but don't sell the farm for new equipment that "may" not do any better.

thanks for all the replies, i'm going to grab an ssd, 30tb/day for 50 years put my mind at ease, and i need to figure out the proxy stuff for sure. thank you.

Filters, especially those running single threads are your bottleneck.

what does this mean? filters = fx? single threads?

another thing.. i'm also still using windows 7. i've tried 10 but didn't get into it. is it time? that'd probably help eh?

I'm using Windows 7 with Vegas on one laptop.

I have performance issues when editing high-demand source with effects. I do not blame it on Windows 7. Or the hard drive.

Or the laptop. Or Vegas.

I make good proxies. And good prerenders. Which preview really nice!

Welcome to nonlinear editing...

i tried out the proxies. i did 5 video files. here's the before/after sizes

133mb/406mb
23mb/206mb
1.5mb/54.9mb
2.46gb/1.36gb
786mb/413mb

i don't see how this helps

not to mention it still runs like garbage

i adjust all the stupid little settings and it's just useless. i guess this is just how video editing is. this is what the guys in hollywood do too. we all have to turn down the settings so we can actually watch an awful version of our footage, or just deal with glitchiness, or spend half the day just waiting for rendering to finish, just so we can look at what the preview should've shown us in the first place.. this is what the whole world deals with i guess. computers just aren't ready yet. got it. i'll try this again in maybe 10 years.

Preview (Auto) + proxies on all video tracks = a fuzzy 1.8 frames per second. awesome. having a blast here. the ssd better make me smile.

@right-w are you working in 8bit or 32bit full or even ACES?

no idea.

it's the FX that cause the problem. 100%. i've got some images in here that have multiple cookie cutters on them, and it's killing it. i mute them and it's better.

wow would i love to seamlessly preview 25 tracks with 5 fx each. but it's literally impossible. no amount of money can make that happen. i need to wait for the future ha ha ok.