My tests show that having the dynamic ram set to 0 reduces rendering to single core. Seems that Vegas uses the dynamic ram for multi core rendering.

I wouldn't drop it to zero. I do leave mine at a very low number, though. Mine is currently set to the default 128Meg.

Elsewhere it was posted that the preview dynamic ram is just a setting, to enable it you have to press Control B...?

Well in VMSP 9b that doesn't work for me, anyone tried it in Vegas 8?

Cheers.

Actually it's SHIFT-B which will do a RAM render. If you have an effect/transition that is not playing at full rate and you want to preview it at full rates, highlight it and then press SHIFT-B and it will render to RAM. The higher the RAM setting is, the longer segment on the timeline you can render.

Edward,

Is this a virtual ram render or is it your ddr2?? I found in Vegas if I set the virtual up I could not operate properly, DSE rrecomended I set it low and I did and it solved my issues. so, how do you do a ram render off the ddr2 if shift B is acting off the virtual memory??

Perhaps I do not get exactly what you mean here.

The RAM setting in the preferences controls how big/long the RAM render can be. It's also used during rendering and really needs to be set to a smaller number for rendering.

Some people increase the number while editing and then decrease the number when it's time to render. I don't use the RAM render very often so I just leave it low all the time.

...so, how do you do a ram render off the ddr2 if shift B is acting off the virtual memory??...
Vegas' RAM render function renders to the RAM as managed by windows. Eg. if you have the preview dynamic ram set to 500MB, your RAM render will never exceed that. However, with those same settings if you only have 256MB of unused system ram available, and your ram render request is for 500MB, the remainder will be made up with virtual memory (hard disk page file) as managed by windows.

The ram render request goes to system ram (ddr2 memory sticks) first, then virtual memory if needed. Of course the system ram is much faster than virtual memory.

Clear as mud?

I have mine set at the maximum 1GB on a Vista64 system with 8GB ram. I assume the remaining 7GB RAM is more than adequate, as I never seem to exceed 2.5-3.0GB ram usage during renders using Pro 8.0c. I have yet to check if Pro 8.1 will utilize more of the RAM at render time. And speaking of 8.1, is 1GB the maximum setting on that platform as well?

I should add my projects are of the smaller home user size (5-10) tracks in general.

I have Vegas Pro 8.1 on a 4Gig machine, the default is 350MB, the max value is 2814MB.

I have mine set at the maximum 1GB on a Vista64 system with 8GB ram. I assume the remaining 7GB RAM is more than adequate, as I never seem to exceed 2.5-3.0GB ram usage during renders using Pro 8.0c. I have yet to check if Pro 8.1 will utilize more of the RAM at render time. And speaking of 8.1, is 1GB the maximum setting on that platform as well?

I should add my projects are of the smaller home user size (5-10) tracks in general.

No, on my machine I can set the max RAM to 5GB. The RAM setting is a little bit different in 8.1 than in 8.0.
In 8.0 it has only an effect on the "shiftB" function but not on actual "render as" function. If you take a look at the memory usage of 8.0 in the task manager you will not see a difference between 28KB and max RAM on your system.
In 8.1 the RAM setting seems to be used also for "render as" functions. It was set on my machine after installation to 526MB and I came out with RAM usage of around 1.8GB to 2.3GB memory usage. When I brought it up to 2GB or 4GB the usage jumps up by this number. I figured out that I can go on my 6GB RAM sytem up to 3.9GB and than Vegas 8.1 is crashing with some error when a higher number is chosen.

I hope that helps.

Axel