What can 7.0 do with HDV that 6.0 can't?
 

I was just curious about what Vegas 7.0 can do with HDV that Vegas 6.0 can't. Can anybody fill me in? Thanks.

Faster processing, faster renders, zippier with FX piled on...If you're HDV anything, or HD anything, you want to run, not walk to the upgrade.

Allow much better handling of M2t files on the timeline....meaning no intermediate renders necessary if your computer is up to snuff. That was what made me upgrade.....

And what Douglas mentioned is nice to boot...

There's also a significantly larger per-source-file memory cost with 6. We've had projects with well over 1000 m2t files on the timeline in 7. I think 6 will die on you at around 80, tops.

Will I need an intermediary codec to edit HDV in Vegas 7.0? Or will Vegas 7.0 handle everything perfectly fine by itself?

You can edit either way. Editing native HDV may make a lot more sense though.

Has anyone noticed that 7.0e is slower than 7.0d? I just replaced my C2D E6300 with a C2Q Q6600 and it renders the rendertest.veg file slower than I benched with the C2D, even with overclocking. I also noted that 7 was slower than 6 when I upgraded.

Depends
 

That is all up to our hardware. Awesome software can't make up for trying to edit on a Centrino system with a Celeron processor (just to use an example)

I agree with Guy. Vegas 7.e is slower in my computer than Vegas 7.d and I don`t know why.
Ron

Well, it's not expected to be slower, but, in Guy's case C2D vs. C2Q is not a fair bit of benchmarking for certain tests. Things that previously benefited from the shared L2 cache of the two cores in the C2D (for instance, two threads that worked on the same frame data in succession) may not move as quickly on the split-cache system of the C2Q, dependent on the scheduler.

The expectation is that it is a bit faster on identical systems for most work. I'd like to know about numbers from real projects, rather than the rendertest project. It, being a low-bandwidth downloadable benchmark project, isn't representative of actual HD editing work for most.

Matthew,
You may be right about the construction differences. However, the C2D OC'd to 3.15 GHz benchmarked the rendertest in 28 seconds using Vegas 7.0b and that is the same speed as 7.0e on the C2Q OC'd to 3 GHz (exactly everything else is the same). JohnnyRoy's QX6700 did it in 14 seconds. Now, I don't expect to hit 14 seconds, but I was expecting some speedup from 4 vs. 2 cores. To see absolutely none was a real surprise.

The only reason to use rendertest is that it has been widely used and there are plenty of references for benchmarking.

I ran the rendertest.veg file today on my QX6700 Quad machine to see if there was any difference between Vegas v7.0d and v7.0e. I had been getting 14 second renders in 7.0d, but I am now getting consistent 12 second renders in v7.0e.

Since the render times were getting close to the 10-second range and Vegas only reports render times in 1-second increments, I thought that perhaps it was appropriate to increase the "time resolution" of the test by making it a bit more "intense," so I modified the original rendertest.veg file for HDV. I increased the resolution of all the generated media and set the project properties for "HDV 1080-60i" and rendered it out as HDV using the default "HDV 1080-60i" template. My machine rendered it in exactly 120 seconds.

If anyone else wants to try the new, modified test file and report their results back to this thread, I have uploaded the VEG file to my web site:

www.johncline.com/rendertest-hdv.veg

John

Ok. I'll have to look into my hard disk setup. IIRC, you guys are running RAID0. That's the only thing I can think of right now. I should be getting 20 sec or lower renders with the Q6600.

I have a QX6700 (whatever the extreme 2.66GHz marketing name is) without any RAID right now. I can get a rough sense of what the numbers are on the rendertest project to spot any possible configuration problems with your machine.

Thanks, Matthew. I'd appreciate that. The render test is on the VASST site.