Vegas Render Torture! (HD)
 

If you're bored over the weekend and have a half an hour to kill, you might want to try a new rendertest for benchmarking. With the speed of new systems ripping the old benchmarks to shreds, we're curious to see what happens with the new systems, and have created a much more robust (and painful) render test.
As folks mail us with their results, we'll post them.

http://www.vasst.com/?v=render_test_2006.htm


Warning-if you have a slower, older computer, proceed at your own risk. Even on the fastest newer single proc systems, this render test will take approximately 15 minutes to render. This test is geared heavily towards the HDV user.

where are the settings?
 

DSE - I will do this and I started to but realized that my Vegas 6.0c is set on default pretty much all the way.

What RAM settings are you referring to and where do I find these?

Regarding framerate playback - is this after the render and played through something like VLC or do you have a preference - or - is this referring to the playback of the project prior to rendering? Not sure where I should pick the framerate from.

tks and I will do this....phil

Douglas,

I ran the test on my Pentium 4 D 830 3GHz and it rendered out in 2 hours 20 minutes. You say on the website that it should only take 15 minutes. What kind of system did you run the test on? Should I be concerned over my computers performance? Thank you in advnce for a response.

Mark

Mark - how did you verify your fps and the RAM setting as suggested by the weblink at VASST? My system is a 3.0ghz and I began to run the test but it looked like it was going to take about an hour so I cancelled it - thinking that maybe there is a performance setting in Vegas that I am unaware of regarding RAM and renders. Let me know if you have an idea. tks ph

Well I have now tried 4 times to run the test and each time it stops at 70% saying an error has occured and there isn't enough system resources. At this point it has taken 19.55 mins with projected time of another 10 mins( it took 14 mins for 50%). I have reset Vegas to all defaults, Vegas temp is running on a seperate drive Sata 160G, target for rendered file is another Sata 2 of 200G, nothing else is running and network interface is disabled. System is a Gigabyte Ultra 9 with Athlon64 X2 4200, 2G RAM,40G IDE boot drive, X700 256M PCIe video. Any ideas as to what needs to change to complete test? On one of the runs I had the processor performance window open and both CPU's were at 100% but I was suprised to find Page File use very high at 2G just when it stopped with the error message. I will try moving the page file to one of the fast drives and making it very large.

Ron Evans

Just did the test again with the Page File on the last of my fast SATA drives with Windows looking after the size. Still stopped at the same point just turned 70% on the rendering box ( I think its frame 601) with about the same times ( 14min to 50%, about 19 mins to 70%). However monitoring the page file use it didn't exceed 1.2G at any time during the run!!!!

Ron Evans

Vegas temp on Maxtor SATA 160G drive D, encoded file to Western Digital SATA 2 200G drive H, Page file on Seagate SATA 160G drive E.

This is what is on the VASST page about this test - "We're interested in the playback framerate average, because while some systems can play this timeline back with full frame rate most of the time, these same systems in our own tests were slow to render. Feel free to tweak your RAM settings to get the best overall render speed. Please measure this with Preview set to Preview/Auto."

I still haven't seen where the framerate average can be found. Also, I notice that if I set the Preview to Preview/Auto - for other projects - as soon as the render starts when I hit SAVE - the "Preview/Auto" changed to "Best/Auto". Where is the other setting that is overriding this?

The render times on the Vasst page look very long so my thinking is that my system is not that out of line although I would like to run the test for Vasst to compare. Help someone??

Phil
I am also confused. I would like to know what RAM settings are being talked about and where are they changed and where to find the frame rate just like you. My system is obviously exceeding some system resource but which? I can in fact render out in two pieces. Up to about 70% and then from about 70% to the end with the total time just over 34 mins. I have read somewhere that Vegas does not do a good job of managing resources( ie giving them back when task completed etc). As far as playing from the timeline I want to know how the project should be setup... as a HDV1080i? By just louding the veg file it will play out just fine from the timeline, but since I don't know where to look for the frame rate I don't know if it is playing out at the correct frame rate. Vegas 6.0 is still new to me as I mainly use Edius Pro3.
Douglas can you give us a clue?


Ron Evans

DSE - can you clarify please?
 

I reviewed the results on the VASST site that have been submitted so far - can't tell if the render times posted are in hours although my guess is they are and if that is the case - MAN does this small test take the time! I thought my system was configured improperly for it to estimate taking so long but it appears that mine would be in the ballpark. But then again don't know for sure until I get a clarification on the FPS and the RAM questions asked.

Plus based upon the responses it looks a little difficult to tell if everyone is giving apples to apples comparisons - some of the FPS answers are all over the map.

Of course the FPS responses are all over the map, no two systems would likely EVER show the same framerate of an unrendered timeline. Do you guys not look at the lower right of your preview window during playback to know what your framerate is? I can't imagine folks not, but apparently there are some who don't.
The results you see are displayed in hours, minutes, seconds. This is a torture test that a lot of systems can't even render. It's a VERY tough hit on any weak system, and a true test of pain on a newer system. Looks simple, but it's not.
As the test requires, look at your framerate in Preview/Auto mode. You sorta need to read the parameters of the test before trying it, otherwise you'll be lost.
It's pretty clear we need to make this easier, but I don't know how. Other than reading the parameters, and opening the file, and rendering to the parameters specified, touching nothing....I'm open to any suggestions as to how to make this easier. If we could force Vegas to only render to one template, and if we could force Vegas to prevent folks from messing with the Preview window quality/size...then we could have less hassle, I'm sure. But...this test does require folks to actually read the parameters and follow the instructions; otherwise it's not a benchmark, it's just a buncha guys playing with it.

Douglas, You said in your first post that this test only takes fifteen minutes to render. The fastest time on the VASST site that was posted was 2h 16min. What setup were you using when you got the 15min render time?
Thank you in advance for the response.

I didn't modify the post in this forum as I'd done in others. When I posted that, the test was at 89% and 11 mins into the test. It's that last hundred frames or so that kill the render time. In other words, I'd made a post prior to the test completing itself, which was obviously an error. Needless to say, both myself and the Sony engineers are trying to figure out what the issue is for most systems, as most folks experience what I've experienced; roughly 10-20 mins on the front end, but those last frames really zap it, badly. Many systems can't even complete the render. We don't know why yet. We'll have a new test up shortly.

I am running the test now to see what it will do. I am on Vegas 6.0c and I do not see anything with the word FPS or framerate next to it but I have now figured it out. It's the number next to "Display" that is changing. So my FPS is avg at about 10.0fps. Now I see. ph

Amazes me how majority of the results listed on the web page goes for 2, 3, even 10 hours!! How long is the clip?? Might re-think this HDV hobbie rendering appears too taxing on even the best processors.

30 seconds.