Vegas 8 & Windows 2K

[Jason Robinson]

I have a Dell PowerEdge 860 with a nice SAS RAID array and no Windows XP Discs to install on it. But what I do have is a copy of Win2K.

The Sony web site states that WinXp or Vista are required for Vegas 8. Is this a hard requirement? IE Vegas will not install unless it sees an OS of XP or newer? Is this a requirement due to the .Net3 installer (which might not be supported on 2K)?

And yes, I searched the forums and there were some users talkign about Vegas on 2K, but I wasn't sure if it was Vegas 8 or 7.

Has anyone installed Vegas 8 on Win2K? Thanks for the assistance.

[Edward Troxel]

I really don't believe it will work on W2k. It won't even work on XP SP1! (which is what my older laptop uses and can't upgrade to SP2 without jumping through hoops I don't want to jump through). Could very well be due to the .NET 3 requirement.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

I really don't believe it will work on W2k. It won't even work on XP SP1! (which is what my older laptop uses and can't upgrade to SP2 without jumping through hoops I don't want to jump through). Could very well be due to the .NET 3 requirement.

I was figuring that might be the case. I may reserve the poweredge to be my render NAS since it should be incredibly fast and trim running Win2K.

It was nice to see a task manager list the OS as only using ~150MB of ram with nothing else running. Try getting a XP or Vista install to be that slim!

[Jeff Harper]

Unless you're running 6 or 12GB of RAM with a 64 bit OS it doesn't matter because you have between 4-10GB of headroom.

What kind length/volume of projects do you run to use the networked rendering, Jason? As I understand it there are only a few scenarios where it is of some benefit. Truth be told, I probably wouldn't use it even if it worked great, as I dislike networking my PC...the boot times are brutal and the additional network issues kill me. I use external estata drives and I just unplug from one and plug into the other to transfer data.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Unless you're running 6 or 12GB of RAM with a 64 bit OS it doesn't matter because you have between 4-10GB of headroom.

What kind length/volume of projects do you run to use the networked rendering, Jason? As I understand it there are only a few scenarios where it is of some benefit. Truth be told, I probably wouldn't use it even if it worked great, as I dislike networking my PC...the boot times are brutal and the additional network issues kill me. I use external estata drives and I just unplug from one and plug into the other to transfer data.

Unfortunately, I don't have any killer edit system. All my systems are 3yrs or older. So no quad cores. But what I do have is a GigEthernet network and 5 PCs in the 2GHz or greater and two are dual core.

This is the main reason I even consider distributed network rendering. My projects are usually 1hr long shoots from 3 cameras, with heavy color correction, levels, color curves, and a few other filters. Usually around ~30 total layers with 1/3 video 2/3 audio. No real-time audio effects besides volume envelopes. Most are 5.1 surround.

When I render the projects with single pass, it takes 3hrs. When I render two pass (which I do for 99% of them) it can take 6hrs. These renders are always done on my 2Ghz Core 2 Duo system (my fastest system).

I would love to be able to kick of a distributed network render (as opposed to a normal dedicated network render) so I can make use of my second two-core system (an Athlon 64X2) and hopefully chop my render times in 1/2 using my P4HT@3Ghz as the network render host and stitch host.

[Jeff Harper]

Jason, even with my new system, projects that have all MB effects still take a long time.

My laptop is set up identically software wise to my desktop. Would networking a laptop for those projects cut the render times significantly?

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Jason, even with my new system, projects that have all MB effects still take a long time.
My laptop is set up identically software wise to my desktop. Would networking a laptop for those projects cut the render times significantly?

theoretically, networking the two systems with a 100Mbps / 1000Mbps (aka gigabit) switch would help but.... only if you were able to get your main system to run a second copy of the network render service and only if you were able to get it to work!

This is exactly what I have been trying to do. I have 4 PCs to make use of (7 actually but I've only installed a Windows based OS on 4 of them), two of them P4 3GHz and two with two cores @ ~2Ghz.

For two machines, if you use the network render service on machine A to tell machine B to render a project, then machine B does all the work and A hosts the files sitting with a largely inactive CPU other than lots of network / disc traffic.

If you have a hyperthreaded or multi-core system you can start a second copy of the network render service (NRS) on machine A using port 35705 instead of the standard 35704. then theoretically point your primary copy of the network render service (port 35704) to register both machine B and the second copy of the network render service on machine A.

Then when you kick off a render from machine A, it should render on Machine B as well as on machine A if you choose the "distribute" render option inside of Vegas.

But this is the part that I have never gotten to work correctly. The render always fails immediately (well after about 5 seconds). The render job shows up on B & the second copy of A, the new mini-window sized Vegas windows pop up on B & A, and the queue status is changed from "queued" to "rendering" but the host (the main copy of the NRS on A) registers the render as having "failed" and eventually the mini-window copies of vegas may bomb out.... or not.

So I decided that may be the problem was with the multiple copies of the NRS on one machine. So I brought a third system into the mix and got rid of the two copies of the NRS on machine A.

So my setup was now three systems connected by GigE, all with the same user name & password logged in, with the same directory shared as the same network share (D:\video is always shared as "<machine name>\video" and the permissions are always wide open read/write for that user name.

Theoretically that means everything should work! The NRS on A has registered the NRS on B & C and kicking off a render job and checking the "distribute" box should split up the render job every "X" frames (determined by the NRS settings under "options").

But I must say that even if the distributed render service does not work, the ability to queue up render jobs is handy..... too bad that means you have to have two machines running all night.


Sooooooo. I blame loosing many nights of sleep to staring at failed network render screens trying to figure out why the heck it isn't working. I may take Sony up on that offer of service for registered "Pro" versions because I've tried everythign I can on my end and nothign fixes the problem.


Now...... if you made it this far. Please try out the NRS on your machines and let me know if it works or does not work!

I may actually try switching to hosting all video content on my Dell PowerEdge 860 server via one of its 2 GigE ports (if I can get the Win2K network drivers to function) and then hopefully that will eliminate the potential for any hosted based file permission issues.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

I really don't believe it will work on W2k. It won't even work on XP SP1! (which is what my older laptop uses and can't upgrade to SP2 without jumping through hoops I don't want to jump through). Could very well be due to the .NET 3 requirement.

so I wonder if I can install Vegas 6 on Win2K and then upgrade to 8...... Hummmmm.

[Edward Troxel]

Originally Posted by Jason Robinson

so I wonder if I can install Vegas 6 on Win2K and then upgrade to 8...... Hummmmm.

No. Vegas Pro 8 still requires .NET 3 and is a totally separate install from Vegas 6.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

No. Vegas Pro 8 still requires .NET 3 and is a totally separate install from Vegas 6.

dang. well wait to go and spoil my mad schemes. :-)

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

No. Vegas Pro 8 still requires .NET 3 and is a totally separate install from Vegas 6.

I suppose the license restrictions also prohibit a vegas 8 install of the NRS from handing a render job off to a Vegas 6 install of the NRS...... since different serial numbers are involved.

Also since the V6 copy of vegas would not be able to open the V8 project file..... right?

But I wonder if I changed my primary edit system to V6, if the V8 NRS systems could accept V6 project jobs (setting the license problems aside).

[Edward Troxel]

Vegas 8 could not hand a render job off to Vegas 6 because Vegas 6 can't open a Vegas 8 project. Not sure if the other way around would work, though.

[Jeff Harper]

Jason, I thought you were already successfully using the network rendering feature, sorry to hear it's not working out.

I don't know, obviously, but I suspect it might not be worth the trouble, you might be spinning your wheels.

I tried it out a year ago when I had a second PC networked to my workstation. The networking's purpose was only for access to multiple hard drives on second PC.

I decided to try networked rendering since I already had Vegas on both machines.

It ended up that the rendering didn't seem that fast, and the stitching seemed to take away for any slight gain I might have obtained.

Since I have my laptop configured the same as my current desktop, I might try it out again on a project that has MB throughout just for kicks, when I have a few minutes to spare.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Jason, I thought you were already successfully using the network rendering feature, sorry to hear it's not working out

Sorry... the confusion is because I had network rendering working ... not distributed network rendering. I really love network rendering. Just Friday I kicked off a two DVD render (two MPEG files and two ac3 files) on my two network render machines, while the main machine sat and served up the files over the network all night. Still took hours to render the 1.5hrs of footage, but it was hands off once I queued up the jobs.

[Jeff Harper]

I understand now. I'm not familiar with distributed network rendering. Sounds interesting.