If you're only rendering a short clip then your results can be bogus.
Vegas may already have the decoded frames in RAM.

Bob.

The TI9900 was a great CPU design, much inspired by IBM's 360 architecture, but it was slow.

I nearly always benchmarked the Z-80A ahead of the 9900, but the 9900 was more elegant to code for.

A 64 bit application can load twice as much data to be calculated per operation, as a 34 bit application. So, for certain operations, things will run much faster, up to twice as fast.

It really depends, not mostly on how fast data is loaded, but what is done with that data and what type of data it is. If the type of data fits fine within a 32 bit register, it will not be able to take advantage of the 64 bit registers, but it will still have to fill them if it is optimized for it, which might in some cases actually slow your computer down. It has to manipulate more data than it actually has to.

So, really, the question about 64bit vs 32bit performance is, and will always be "depends".

Look at graphic cards, they already are 128 bit.

They are indeed, and they are blazingly fast at some tasks, the ones they are created for, but GPUs are in fact notoriously slow at some general purpose computing tasks, so this isn't really a good measure. The question is: Is video editing work a lot like gaming, pixel shading etc? If it is, then 64 bits might be it, so might offloading work to the GPU be. For some rendering tasks it seems reasonable that the GPU would be faster but whether this is because of the massive parallelism capabilities of a typical GPU or the 128 bit registers depends.

64-bit processors calculate particular tasks (such as factorials of large figures) twice as fast as working in 32-bit environments

Indeed they do. The question is, does your NLE calculate factorials of large figures? Probably not. In fact, your NLE tends to work with much smaller integers. Again, depending. A 32 bit integer can be used to represent most video pixels, and since you are working on video pixels, your NLE might be unable to make use of the 64 bit register. What would you put in the additional bits? More color information?

The problem is, again, a question of "what do you need to do"? Any video editors out there that need 64 bit registers? For what data I am not sure. Any video that needs 64 bit registers to represent a pixel? That would be 16 bits for R, 16 for G and 16 for B, with an additional 16 bits available for transparency. That is A LOT of color space.

There are a lot of benchmarks out there in the wild that shows how 64 bit binaries in general are slower some times by a margin as large as 20% than 32 bit binaries on the same hardware.

If only CPU design was about the register size :-). Taking advantage of a 64 bit CPU also means taking advantage of all the other improvements in said CPU. Things like much larger on-chip cache (which will benefit video editing tremendously), deeper execution paths, better branch prediction, improved parallellism etc and so forth.

I believe this is because some 64 bit optimizations take place here.

Perhaps, but there are another set of factors that might point elsewhere. For example, what is the overhead of running a 32 bit application under emulation in a 64 bit Operating system. This might be non-trivial and therefore contribute to the difference in speed.

Please re-install Vista 32 and try again :-) <-- smiley if you didn't notice.

Given the short time 64 bit Windows has been popular, and it is getting more so by the day I think, I seriously doubt that renderers have been written to take advantage of the 64 bit'ness of the CPU. There hasn't been time. I doubt that a simple re-compile of a renderer written in C, probably with lots of 32 bit assumptions in there when video data is loaded into register variables (I have never seen code that didn't have some such assumptions) is going to get some automagic boost.

Hopefully we'll see lots of improvements in 2010 or so, once stuff has been ported over. Good to know that the NLEs are leading the way, now the other guys just have to go optimize. This is not something that was economically viable in 2008, and it is probably not going to be that lucrative in 2009 either.

I hope that the 64bit is getting more attention from the software guys and that there will be a real advantage one day.
For now I have made more tests and so far nothing makes me think I have to stay with 64bit as OS AND Vegas. This does not mean that there is no advantage in using 8.1 for someone else but for my kind of projects and my kind of project length (roughly all under 20minutes runtime) I don't benefit from 64bit OS and Videosoftware.
In general even a blown up project time line with 55minutes runtime is not rendering faster in 64bit than under 32bit 8.0. The one and only small advantage was given in a project line with a lot of picture in picture and heavy cropping, which is not my main intention.
Mabe you have to have a lot 3D and cropping to get a real advantage. For now I know that I'm not missing anything out when staying with Windows XP and Vegas 8.0 :-) The only down thing for is to spent a couple of hundereds bucks for Vista and 4GB additional RAM. Maybe I will build a new computer with that.

In regard to my rig I think I have a good setup with RAID 0, a lot of other HDs for systemb OS and render out HD and so on. Just to take this in advance.

Regards

Axel

Darg said: "I think this is a misunderstanding. 64bit is on my machine slower than on XP 32bit! So there is absolute no advantage taken."

I have two otherwise identical laptops - same make (Sony), model, CPU (Core2 Duo), RAM (2Gb), HDD - identical except one is running Vista and the other is running XP. *Every application* I run on them, the XP laptop is noticeably faster than the same application on the Vista laptop.

Well, after tweaking some stuff out of Vista I see that the big influence in regard to render times is more determined by Vegas itself. The render time for V8.0 on my 64bit and V8.0 on Xp are nearly the same, for V8.1 it's slower or the same. I think that Vista is stepping back for tasks like rendering and let the software doing it's stuff. In regard to system response, like opening/starting an application Vista is much slower, especially with switched of Superfetch. Every HD access takes longer, even when my rig is quick enough to not let you feel it that strong. I have seen that much more worse on cheap grocery shopper computer.
What I never got on XP or Vista was a steady HD LED by rendering AVC, so it's more a question of the codec. For rendering as DVD stream or HDV it's steady.

Darg:

If you look at the rendertest thread, you will see the 32 and 64 bit are extremely close in performance, with the 64 bit usually reported as a tiny bit faster.

Since 64 dosen't run 32 bit ad-ins not many reasons for the 64 bit version IMO.

There's a longer term reason for the 64-bit version and that is that the entire Windows world will probably go 64-bit over the next year. Consider that currently shipping I7 motherboards are supporting 6 dimm slots and 24GB of RAM. There's very little point in installing a 32-bit OS on this hardware.

VP 8.1 shipped for free with 8.0c. It's transitional but this will eventually be the core program with 32-bit Vegas fading into the background. Faster? Slower? Not exactly the point. They just have to start migrating, and they knew it two years ago because MS told them so.

Rob Mack

Rmack, I agree. The new MoBos are made for 64 bit and it is time use more RAM because the OS is eating up most of it.
One thing that still kills my nerve is the fact that 8.1 does not support the same codecs that I have in the parallel installed 8.0 version. I don't get it but especially AVIs are not fully supported by 8.1. I made yesterday a composition in After Effects and 8.0 could read it but 8.1 was not oeven thinking about it. I can rip of my hair but that's how it is.

Axel

I have been pulling my hair out these last few days too using Vegas 8.0c and 8.1 on two different 64 bit Vista computers. To me it seems that 8.0c is totally instable on 2 different systems, it crashes with everything I do, I tried EVERYTHING thats possible to troubleshoot.

BUT whats worse: 8.0c is the only one of the 2 versions that has a workable previewing speed!

So it comes down to this:

8.0c is instable
8.1 is dead slow in previewing speed (if anyone has a solution please HELP!!) :)

So I'm actually stuck here...

I see that everyone here is talking about rendering speed, but what about your previewing speed while working on the timeline?? I can't believe what I'm seeing, but it must be true: the 8.1 version is DEADSLOW , I cant even view a simple overlap 1280x720 video in normal WMV format on the timeline in normal quality without the framerate dropping, CPU is at 20% of its capacity, everything else in the taskmanager too...what's going on here??

I'm an IT professional but I don't get this, esp because I have 2 different computers with Vista 64 on them, they both have the same behavior.

I think I'll reinstall Vista 32 and see what happens there....too bad I have bought this high tech i7 CPU system with 6 Gigabytes of RAM I can't even use this way!

Great software this 8.1 version of Vegas.......NOT

"I cant even view a simple overlap 1280x720 video in normal WMV format on the timeline in normal quality without the framerate dropping, "

What makes you think you should be able to?
WMV is NOT a codec suitable for editing.
It's also fairly lossy which means the quality of your video is compromised as well as you having a hard time editing it.

Bob.

Thanks Bob,

I dont seem to have a format called Sony YUV in my Vegas, would that be the same as Sony MXF maybe? And there I can choose a lot of different options from HD EX to HD 422 etc...

If you have 1920x1080 MOV files coming from a Conan EOS 5D mark II and you would have to choose a format to render them to in order to work with them in Vegas in a stable way, what would you render them to?

Sony YUV is the YUV codec inside an AVI container. Select "Video for Windows (*.avi)" under "Save as Type" and then under "Template" select one of the appropriate options ending in "YUV."

Thanks John, I'll try this one today, I let my computer render all my files into Sony MXF last night, which also seemed to be a lot better speed at previewing than the WMV file, I think I'm on the right track here! But unfortunately they still crash my Vegas rendering at 73%, it's a bloody nightmare...

It puzzles me though that the guys at Vegas support don't seem t know this since I even uploaded my entire project there and they won't even bother to take a look at it.

I have my hopes up re-installing Vista 32 bits next...