Speed increase from Vegas 8 to 9 or even 10?

[David Delaney]

I am using Vegas 8 and I am happy with it. But I find with renders that have image sequences, it really slows everything down. Right now I am on a 2 hour video that is taking 12 hours to render because of the image sequence (png). Would I see a speed increase if I upgraded to 9 or 10 with this sort of thing? Also I am using Vista, wondering if upgrading to Win 7 would help or not with Vegas 8?

[David Wayne Groves]

Its going to boil down to your PC Specs, there will not be a dramatic increase going from 8 to10...Your Processor and RAM will make the most difference...

[Iker Riera]

i don't work much with long image sequences like you mentioned, but for AVCHD work at least the performance increase is pretty significant in version 10. I used to transcode all my footage into DNxHD to work in Vegas and now i can edit it straight out of the camera with no problems.

I Don't know how that translates into the type of work you do but i'm guessing there should be at least a slight performance increase.

[Ronan O'Conghaile]

I noticed a slight difference when upgrading from Vegas 9 to 10. What made a bigger difference though, was when I upgraded to a 64 bit system which took full advantage of the 4 GB RAM I have.

Take a look at upgrading your processer and RAM if you're looking to increase render speed. What I have at hte moment suits me fine, but I'll be looking to upgrade further in about 10 months time.

[Chris Barcellos]

I seem to remember that image sequences were awfully slow to render in earlier Vegas versions. I remember it was necessary to take your still image and render just a one second version and then stack them. I also recall that the fastest results were obtained by taking your image into Photosshop and cropping to 1920 x 1080 images size.

[Gregory Barringer]

64 bit will make a noticeable difference especially if you have multiple processors.

[Jeff Harper]

Yes I agree with what has been said. It sounds like a few things may be the issue.

You likely are running an older processor, like a Q6600 or likely even slower. In addition your images may be much larger than they need to be.

I rendered a 90 minute project last week that was mostly video, but it had about 150 wedding photos with color correction applied using vegas, as well as effects. It took about 40 minutes to process, maybe less, I don't remember exactly.

First thing, as Chris says, resize your images if needed. I rarely use images more than 2K pixels across, there just isn't much reason to have them much larger, IMO.

[David Delaney]

Thanks for the tips. I rendered out the small clips of the image sequence as an AVI but it did not drop the time more than 1 hour. Right now, 1 hour and 40 minutes is taking 11 hours to render - a mix of HD and DV footage. There are only 3 graph overlays from photoshop (psd)
Yes I am running an Q6600 - and using Vista. I haven't upgraded Vista to the next service pack because I have nothing but problems with it. I don't want to tempt fate with all of the projects in the pipeline right now. So I was thinking about upgrading Vegas to 9 or 10 in an attempt to get some more juice out of it. I heard that 10 is a no go because I don't have Win 7 or the newest version of Vista, so I might have to use Vegas 9 (off ebay or something).

[Jeff Harper]

HD footage on an Q6600 will take long time. Vegas 9 will not help, at least not much. I was using Vegas 8 and went from Q6600 to an i7 920, and that's when things changed for me. Going to Vegas 9 to increase your speed using your current processor would be a waste of time and money. You cannot get around the fact your processor is now dated. Even overclocking would be of relatively little help.

Here's what will happen if you get Vegas 9: You'll see little to no change in rendering speed, and you'll end up realizing you need a new processor, and then have that much less money to make the change.

Wish there was a simpler solution.

[David Delaney]

what processor would u suggest - I see DDR3 is at dirt cheap prices now....

[Jeff Harper]

David, when I bought my current processory, the i7 920, I had spent weeks reading everything about everything to do with processors and ram and motherboards before making my purchases, and before that I was fairly knowledgeable anyway, as I kept up on things constantly.

But more recently, I've not kept up much on things.

The problem now is I have been so happy with what I have I have not read hardly anything to do with the new crop of processors, the Sandy Bridge. At this point if I were to upgrade I would go with a Newegg.com - Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition Bloomfield 3.33GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor BX80601975 if I could afford it. It is the best value when taking overclocking ability into account.

Then next best thing they say is Micro Center - Intel Core i7-930 Processor Boxed 582759 if you can find it, as it will overclock beautifully, but it is hard to find, if you can find it at all.

For straight out of the box speed, but poor overclockiing, is the i7 970 Newegg.com - Intel Core i7-970 Gulftown 3.2GHz 6 x 256KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80613I7970

I guess at this point, I would go with the 970. Expensive but good.

I'm actually considering dropping the $$$ for a i7 970 myself, as I'm editing four lines of HD video at a time now, and I need the power. It is six cores, which translates into 12 cores for Vegas. If you bought one of these, you would freak out from the speed after your Q6600, I can guarantee you that.

[David Delaney]

Thanks for the info. I am going to have to upgrade everything I guess - RAM, GPU and MOBO as well as the CPU. I was thinking about
Buy the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 SE 1GB GDDR5 PCIe 2.0 at TigerDirect.ca

For the GPU and the sandy bridge i5 or i7 (like you suggested). Next I am going to need RAM DDR3 and the prices are so dirt cheap right now (not sure why).

What do you think for a MOBO?

[Jeff Harper]

First, I don't know much about current video cards, but I personally like EVGA, their warranty is second to none, and they have an amazing upgrade program. Good quality, but there are others who would like other brands better, I'm sure. A hinky video card is not what you want.

The card you selected seems to be an off brand or lesser known brand, and if it goes bad what do you do? EVGA has US offices and quick replacement. Anyway, get what you feel is best, I just don't recognize that brand.

Motherboard, I'm sorry I can't help. I don't have time to research it for you, and I dont know what is best now. My current board is great, but it's out of production. I have an ASUS board.

If you don't know Newegg, go there to shop, or at least to look. They have an egg rating system, and if you click to see the reviews individually, you will get LOTs of important information. That's where I go. It is important to remember there are a LOT of idiots who will post bad reviews for stupid reasons, or because they don't know what they are doing, so take in all the reviews.

DDR3 ram is cheap, I suspect because it is not all it's cracked up to be. Nothing wrong with it, but it has fallen out of favor, somehow, I forget why. Get it, use it, it's just not as much better as DDR2 as it was supposed to be, but again I don't remember what I read about that.

For your motherboard make sure you have the connectors you need, such as firewire if you download tapes.

[Michael Wisniewski]

Unfortunately the built-in h.264 transcoding features in the Sandy Bridge CPUs are not yet widely supported, but if I was buying today I'd make sure to get a motherboard with the Z68 chipset, so that I could take advantage of that feature when the software catches up.

[David Delaney]

It has been about 2 years since I upgraded, so there is a lot to digest. Thanks for the advice on the MOBO.