Its another Vegas 8 bug -> Rendering

[Jeff Harper]

Chris, I am not familiar with the 3800, but I do believe while Magic Bullet is terrible for render times, your processor could be updated and you would see a significant increase. I know when I went from Pentium IV to duo core it was pretty dramatic. Magic Bullet is still slow, but I would render out the project you described in about 6 mins with my current processor. Without Bullet a 3 min clip would take about 90 seconds (for Mpeg2). Of course ugrading is not always feasible or affordable.

Thanks Bill, I'm going to disable 32 bit and see what happens.

[Bill Ravens]

Pay the price and toss the dice.
Vegas has always been somewhat "development software", IMHO. I've been using Vegas since version3. New releases are always glitchy because Sonic Foundry and then Sony push the envelope to stay current with camera technology. The alternative would be to be like FCP, Premiere, or Avid, where changes follow camera technology by 1-2 years.

For my money, I'll take the cutting edge capability and live with the buginess. But, that's just my choice. So, make a choice and live with it 'cuz that's how it is. After reading all the complaints with other NLE software makers, even the Hollywood favorite, Avid, I think vegas 8 is quite an accomplishment. It's really pretty amazing that the guys at Madison have kept the philosophy that Sonic Foundry started and haven't caved in to the corporate battlecry of mediocrity.

[Chris Barcellos]

Actually, I went back to project, and I found my project was not not in 32. Had it in 8 bit by default.

3800+ was AMD's first dual core. It was smoking over any Intel two years ago....

I just tried the same Magic Bullet filter in Vegas 7-- it started mounting up the count, and I shut it down after it registered it was going to take 1 hour 40minutes, and it was still climbing. My dual core monitor was showing both cores working hard. This one does not make sense, but I assume there is some issue with the processor setup for this plug and perhaps the interaction with Cineform's codec.

I do fine with Vegas filters, though still a lot longer than you indicate to render out to the Cineform intermediate I use. This particular project had about 4 video track and 5 audio, each with some filters and transitions. All video was in Cineform format. The 3 minute project, in that case, took about 20 minutes to render to a final Cineform file.

Maybe time to look at new processor....as you indicated.

[Jeff Harper]

I know, the one I upgraded from recently was pretty good almost exactly two years ago also...I'm obviously in the wrong business...this will likely go on forever, buying a new processor every couple of years.

I hear an 8 core is on the way, but I believe that is 2009, if I'm not mistaken.

[Jack Zhang]

I hope I can say this...

The reason that crashes are more evident?

Encrypted core files.

It protects against piracy, but sure is a pain in the neck on some incompatible systems.

I'm not a supporter of Trusted Computing so this is an example of Trusted Computing gone wrong.

[Robert Wheeler]

You know, I was going to say at least they have not gone for the dongle route, because any dongle introduces a huge bottleneck into any system. So I'm not suprised its a protection layer that could be throwing a spanner in the works. It would also go someway to explain all these problems that could be put down to memory corruption issues.

The only people that don't feel the impact of protection schemes are those who are using cracked software. I remember a few years ago doing a last minute favour for a friend, setting up a laptop to make a multi-track recording of a school show. The laptop would just not accept the Cubase dongle and external hard disk at the same time, so I ended up getting hold of a crack along with a dongle emulator to get around it. That was daft in itself, but at the end of the show, I checked the dongle emulator's window and it reported that it had been called over three thousand times in the hour or so it was active. A few days later I was regaling the story to a friend and he told me that over 50% of all the processor time Cubase uses is calling protection routines. Madness.

[Jack Zhang]

Wow, just wow.

Well, you gotta make it work somehow...

[Bill Ravens]

wow is right! didn't know vegas had encrypted core. yikes!! is it new with this release? I run vegas on both an intel laptop and an intel workstation, dual core processors on both machines. never has given me any probs. I used to run an AMD dual core and that, too, seemed fairly trouble free altho' not as free as the intel machines.

a couple of other areas to investigate with your install:
1- In preferences, look at the number of Rendering Threads selected. At most, you should have 1 or 2, unless you already have a quad core machine.

2-Look at the amount of dynamic RAM you've selected. Generally speaking, the less you have, the better off you are. Speaking of RAM, 2 Gb seems to be the minimum for trouble free op, at least, that has been my experience.

3-as for long render times, so much software, these days, ship with processor intensive background processes. When Vegas renders, it runs at 100% processor utilization. Every single background process, including mouse movement, takes processor cycles away from the render processing. Anti-virus and file scanners that run on cycles use a lot of resources. Still image processing is memory intensive. Have you monitored your memory useage during rendering? If you're filling RAM, the rendering will slow to a crawl when you start paging files.

It has always seemed odd, to me, that some people have so much trouble when some others don't. A lot of times, the problems are associated with outdated video cards or video card drivers.

[Cary Lee]

Originally Posted by Chris Barcellos

Actually, I went back to project, and I found my project was not not in 32. Had it in 8 bit by default.

3800+ was AMD's first dual core. It was smoking over any Intel two years ago....

I just tried the same Magic Bullet filter in Vegas 7-- it started mounting up the count, and I shut it down after it registered it was going to take 1 hour 40minutes, and it was still climbing. My dual core monitor was showing both cores working hard. This one does not make sense, but I assume there is some issue with the processor setup for this plug and perhaps the interaction with Cineform's codec.

I do fine with Vegas filters, though still a lot longer than you indicate to render out to the Cineform intermediate I use. This particular project had about 4 video track and 5 audio, each with some filters and transitions. All video was in Cineform format. The 3 minute project, in that case, took about 20 minutes to render to a final Cineform file.

Maybe time to look at new processor....as you indicated.

I updated from a 3800 X2 to a Opteron 185 b4 the 939 socket CPU run out. Now it is so much faster at stock 2.6 vs 2.0 when rendering.

[Chris Barcellos]

Thanks Cary, will consider that......

[Jack Zhang]

Originally Posted by Bill Ravens

wow is right! didn't know vegas had encrypted core. yikes!! is it new with this release?

Yes, it's new with Vegas 8.

[Robert Wheeler]

I honestly do not know what the point is of trying to protect software. It is so easy to crack most software. If you want a piece of software, you will be able to get it within a couple of days of it being released. More often than not, you will be able to get it before it is released

If I was Sony, I would concentrate on bring in money for the Vegas range by bundling OEM versions with their cameras. Professional users will usually buy the software, but casual non professional users will more often than not just get the pirate version.

[Matthew Chaboud]

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

Yes, it's new with Vegas 8.

I'm curious.. What part of Vegas 8 is encrypted?

What's the "core?"

Think carefully before you answer...




As far as Robert's problems go, those almost all sound like storage device issues. Either drive failure, controller failure, controller driver bug, or a bad cable. The way that apps talk to disks hasn't really changed between XP and Vista. Vista allows for a few more tricks (like I/O prioritization), but I don't know of Vegas using any of those.

-Matt

[Matthew Chaboud]

This isn't to say that Vegas is perfect.... Of course.

[Jason Donaldson]

Sometimes I get to 100% rendering completed, but it will still go on for another 10 minutes or so...the output file is perfect regardless if this happens or not.