Vegas and 8-core or higher cpus
 

I know that Vegas supports up to 4 cores. Does v8 now support more than 4 cores? With the coming 8 or more cores in the future, I hope we can use them to speed up rendering and other tasks.

What's the status on this, and if it's not yet implemented, when do you think will it be?

Does Vegas support up to 4 cores? It's still an x86 application if you install it in a 64 bit OS. I've noticed all 4 cores of my quad-core working while rendering, but I actually think my quad-core machine renders slower than my core2duo.

JR

That's interesting JR. Anyone else have quad core experiences to share?

There is a setting under options--->Video that specifies the maximum amount of rendering threads. I set mine to 4, and it seems to be rendering a lot faster, at least when producing HDV.

For some reason (and I think this is mentioned in another thread somewhere on DVinfo) when I render SD DV, It will do a bunch of frames very quickly, pause for a couple seconds, then another burst of frames. Not sure exactly why this is.

I'm using a 64bit OS, so perhaps I would have better results using a 32 bit OS. I might try a dual boot and experiment.

JR

See the NEW Rendertest-HDV.veg thread on the Sony Vegas forum for render times on various machines.

It was that thread that caused me to fix the "max theads" setting in Vegas. I got 1min 45 seconds on the test with my quad-core box, rendering to HD1080 60i MPEG2.

On my COre2Duo laptop, it was 4:17. That makes me feel a bit better about my new editing box. :)

JR

Jerimiah, how did fix the Max Threads? What is the best setting?

Have you run the Quad on a 32bit system yet?

Thanks

In Vegas click on "Options" then scroll down and click "Preferences" Then on the "video" tab, make sure that the maximum rendering threads setting is 4.

I don't know why/how I changed mine to 2, but apparently I did at some point.

I haven't done an install of XP Pro yet to test rendering speeds.

I installed CS3 to see if it rendered any faster and I couldn't see any differences. I hope somebody comes out with a natively 64bit editing application, I have a feeling it will make a lot of difference.

JR

Sony announced last year at NAB that they were developing one. So I'd say you're probably going to see one sometime soon here, but they're playing it close to the chest so it's hard to say.

my quad core uses each core no probs
 

just only uses between 35 and 45% on a Q6600, so it's like waisting half the processing power which is annoying.

All 4 procs are at 100% all the time here with Vegas 8b

I can render 1hr 15 Minutes of Video to MPEG2 (Widescreen for DVD 720-480) with Quality Settings at Max , 2 Pass variable, in 3 hours

Paul

Adam, are you using any 3rd party Plugs? I see this happen when I used MB Looks, but not when I am using vegas FX etc...

Dave

Dave only plugins
 

as such are SoundForge 8d and Cineform??

Adam

My performance shows at between 73% and 90%, never 100% when rendering.

Q6600 is most definitely twice as fast as my duo core. Weird thing is when it is rendering section with MB effects, the processor usage drops down to 50%, don't understand that but that is the way it is for me.

Pegging CPU cores
 

The fact that the Vegas MPEG encoder (MainConcept) is pegging the CPUs when running is not a good thing. The whole idea behind using multiple cores is to enhance multithreaded applications. Instead of one CPU core doing all the work the work is divided among the four physical cores and thus allows these cores to do other tasks.
It seems that the MainConcept encoder is not releasing to the CPU enough to allow other processes to run - that is poor programming design.

On the other hand, the CinemaCraft encoder (while faster than the MainConcept encoder) does not peg the CPU cores - each is at 50% or lower.

The first time I tried the MC encoder to encode 1.5 hours of video it said it would take 3 hours - the CC encoder took 20 minutes at 2-pass.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks
Jim