Hard Drive system needed for HD and uncompressed

[Stephen van Vuuren]

I'm currently editing short clips with 1080p 24fps, film rez and uncompressed AVI's as 1280X1920.

I currently am just using ATA drives in a highend 3.0 Ghz HT system (200 & 250 WD Special Editions).

Anyone know what Vegas needs for decent RT previews (I can only do Draft(Auto)...

[Edward Troxel]

I'm not sure you're going to get decent previews of uncompressed. Vegas is optimized for DV. Try this: create a DV version of your files. Edit using those files, and then substitute the real files once editing is finished.

[Stephen van Vuuren]

I would really prefer edit at list at 1080 HD 24p rez. I have lots of other elements (graphics, fx, titles) I use as well and generaly those are at HD rez as well.

Plus, things like color correction etc. are a pina when stuff has ben put through the DV codecs horrible color sampling.

Surely the upcoming version 5 is going to support HD editing.

[Edward Troxel]

It ALREADY supports it. There's just a LOT of information to be processed by the CPU PER FRAME. So, you're going to lose framerate and/or need to reduce the quality level of the preview as you have seen.

[Stephen van Vuuren]

No need for ALL CAPS. Obviously, I know it supports it since I'm currently editing with it.

My question was about hard drive subsytems and Vegas. According to my task manager, CPU usage is not the primary problem but hard drive throughput is.

[Stephen van Vuuren]

I just tested. Playing back a dissolve between 3 uncompressed AVI files at 1080 24p with 10 48K 16 bit audio tracks gets my CPU usage to 31%...

[Edward Troxel]

You said your bottleneck was hard disk access. Was that still the case? If yes, you'll need to find a way to increase your hard disk access throughput.

[Stephen van Vuuren]

That's the purpose of the post. To find out what hard drive subsytems will allow Vegas to run decent previews of HD and uncompressed AVI. I'm going to post over in the HDV editing section where they may have more experience with HD & Vegas.

[Rob Lohman]

A decent RAID (0 = striped) system will dramatically increase
throughput when reading. Ofcourse, if you are doing effects
etc. your processor is very important as well.

One of the "problems" is that the PCI bus is limited to 133 MB/s
throughput. So I doubt you'll be able to get anything above
100 MB/s (even with a lot of striped disks in a RAID set).

[Jim Lafferty]

Hard drive seek time and throughput is not the central problem -- it's processor speed, as Edward has said previously:

There's ... a LOT of information to be processed by the CPU PER FRAME. So, you're going to lose framerate and/or need to reduce the quality level of the preview as you have seen.

(emphasis mine)

This is why the rendering overhead is offloaded onto a hardware co-processor in true realtime HD setups. Then, once you've got HW support, you can start worrying about disk throughput.

As it stands, if you're going to work in HD and Vegas, you're going to want to invest in a fast RAID for capturing footage from your deck, but in order to edit you will need to investigate proxy files.

Incidentally, there are ways around your realtime HD "issues" given Vegas's limited HD workflow -- if you have to color correct a sequence in HD res, render out a small segment of each scene (i.e. each lighting instance) in HD, color correct a shot, and then copy the shot's color correction properties onto the HD footage on a separate Vegas timeline. For an idea of how this works, look into the "Paste Event Attributes" option in Vegas.

Or...color the entire piece with a style that is not conventional -- use the disadvantages of Vegas as strengths.

edit: What makes editing/creating titles or 3d work necessary for HD resolutions? These things should look (reasonably) just as they do in DV as HD -- most of what you're looking for would be transition timing and framing, contoling motion, etc. Or, am I missing something?

- jim

[Stephen van Vuuren]

>Hard drive seek time and throughput is not the central problem ->- it's processor speed, as Edward has said previously.

>This is why the rendering overhead is offloaded onto a >hardware co-processor in true realtime HD setups.

Not in Vegas. Did you not see my post that CPU usage was only 30% (and only 10% HT second processor) during playback? If processor was important, I would expect to see way more than that.

>Or...color the entire piece with a style that is not conventional -- >use the disadvantages of Vegas as strengths.

I want the software to be a tool not the creative factor.

>edit: What makes editing/creating titles or 3d work necessary >for HD resolutions? These things should look (reasonably) just >as they do in DV as HD -- most of what you're looking for would >be transition timing and framing, contoling motion, etc. Or, am I >missing something?

I usually create titles in AE or am doing composites in Vegas. Often, the titles are unreadable or impossible to judge timing with playback. But HD rez titles look fabulous at 1080 24p when rendered out.

[Jim Lafferty]

If processor was important, I would expect to see way more than that.

I'm going to say it once again and then I'm not returning to this thread: processor speed is central among many factors that make watching HD from the Vegas timeline at 30/24fps impossible.

If processor speed wasn't important, then there'd be no reason to post your question -- SATA and SCSI RAID would solve all your problems.

Beyond that, the entire industry of filmmakers shooting HD would be turned on its ear by your discovery that hard drives alone are the lynch-pin of realtime HD solutions.

There's a laundry list of reasons why your processor isn't showing 100% at a given moment despite your efforts otherwise to hammer it with data.

And while I'm not a Sony engineer, I didn't write Vegas code , I can assure you that hard drive throughput isn't the only -- and arguably isn't even the main -- consideration.

Either learn to work with proxy files or move onto another NLE with a hardware assist card. Your problems aren't going to be solved by repeating these questions elsewhere.

I want the software to be a tool not the creative factor

What a shame. All tools are creative factors. You wouldn't be working in a digital medium without the tools allowing you to do so...

- jim

[Stephen van Vuuren]

<<<-- Originally posted by Jim Lafferty : I'm going to say it once again and then I'm not returning to this thread: processor speed is central among many factors that make watching HD from the Vegas timeline at 30/24fps impossible.

If processor speed wasn't important, then there'd be no reason to post your question -- SATA and SCSI RAID would solve all your problems.

Beyond that, the entire industry of filmmakers shooting HD would be turned on its ear by your discovery that hard drives alone are the lynch-pin of realtime HD solutions.

There's a laundry list of reasons why your processor isn't showing 100% at a given moment despite your efforts otherwise to hammer it with data.

And while I'm not a Sony engineer, I didn't write Vegas code , I can assure you that hard drive throughput isn't the only -- and arguably isn't even the main -- consideration.

Either learn to work with proxy files or move onto another NLE with a hardware assist card. Your problems aren't going to be solved by repeating these questions elsewhere.

What a shame. All tools are creative factors. You wouldn't be working in a digital medium without the tools allowing you to do so...

- jim -->>>

Jim:

I respectfully disagree with every point you made even though you are not returning to this thread.

First - CPU speed. My machine has no problem displaying the HD frames, applying affects to them. The problem only occurs when streaming them off the drive. In fact, my cranking up my preview buffer Vegas plays full-rez just fine, for only a few frames at a time until the buffer is empty. So unless you or others can explain why this is CPU related and not hard drive related, I fail to understand your strident claims that it must be the CPU...

I have not tried a RAID solution here - I was just posting to see what others using HD in Vegas were doing.

Secondly, posting in another forum was extremely helpful. Instead of all the needless debate here, I got plenty of helpful information very different from this thread. It's in the HDV editing forum - very educational.

Finally, if I working on a project that needs a little color correct why would I want to apply a global sepia tone just because I can't preview the color correction. I'm an experimental filmmaker but that not really experimenting - that's throwing in the towel.

HD is here to stay, Vegas 5 is coming and lots of vendors seemto be improving & innovating on the HD front (e.g. Cineform which I found out about in the HDV forum).