My woes with Veg11 have been all due to instability and just plain not working of the GPU acceleration.
Well now Im previewing Best Full 6 tracks of 1080p AVCHD, M2TS, MXF HDV etc on my aging i7 920 and GTX 560TI.
The 560ti at stock clock must have been causing issues, because now after overclocking it, everything appears very stable for the first time. I followed this guide-
[Tested] ASUS GTX 560 Ti DirectCU II GPU Overclocking Session - 3D Tech News and Pixel Hacking - Geeks3D.com (http://www.geeks3d.com/20110207/asus-gtx-560-ti-dc2-gpu-overclocking-vddc-voltage-clock/2/)
Will report back if anything changes ( or I burn down the house )
:)

Thanks for posting Gerald. In my case I've found my PSU is likely about 200-300 watts under what it should be. I run 10 hard drives, 3 of them 15.7K rpms, and am overclocked over 30%.

I'm finding that 4 lines of 1080 24p are playing back with audio lagging behind when preview screen is largest size (nearly fills screen) on my 30". When I resize to one size smaller it's perfect, but I want to use full size to see details and be sure shots are in focus.

If new PSU has no effect, and I'm not sure that it will, my next step will be to either overclock my card as you recommend, if I can, or replace it. I have ton of $$$ invested in fast hard drives, controller, and processor, and now that I'm editing 1080 I'm not going to go cheap now. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

I'm hoping my underpowered PSU is affecting my GPU performance, but I'm not an expert enough to know if that is the case. A new GPU at this point will only need more power, so first step for me is the PSU.

I'm guess I'm on the right track, Gerald. I happen to be buying the same power supply used in the article you link to, the AX1200. I love this place!

Now Im worried about my PSU Jeff LOL
I think mines only a 750 running 5 drives, Capture card and my GTX 560ti room heater.
But still, just edited in Veg11 for a cpl of hrs and rendered out a job for the first time without one crash.
Im stoked :)

ps It even had Magic Bullet lens distortion and rendered like a stream copy.

curiosity - when you say you're running 5 drives, is this an internal raid or something?

if so, what format are you working with, uncompressed?

Hi

Thanks for posting Gerald. In my case I've found my PSU is likely about 200-300 watts under what it should be. I run 10 hard drives, 3 of them 15.7K rpms, and am overclocked over 30%.

I'm finding that 4 lines of 1080 24p are playing back with audio lagging behind when preview screen is largest size (nearly fills screen) on my 30". When I resize to one size smaller it's perfect, but I want to use full size to see details and be sure shots are in focus.

If new PSU has no effect, and I'm not sure that it will, my next step will be to either overclock my card as you recommend, if I can, or replace it. I have ton of $$$ invested in fast hard drives, controller, and processor, and now that I'm editing 1080 I'm not going to go cheap now. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

I'm hoping my underpowered PSU is affecting my GPU performance, but I'm not an expert enough to know if that is the case. A new GPU at this point will only need more power, so first step for me is the PSU.

A power supply wouldn't effect performance. If it was struggling causing voltage drops or injecting dirty power into your system you computer would crash with blue screen errors, plane reboot with no warning or just die completely. It wouldn't effect performance in the way you describe.

There is also no way your power-supply could supply an extra 200 or 300 watts over it's rated capacity, a lot don't even manage their rated maximums for more than a few seconds as it is. So whatever you have used to make the total power calculation is way over-specifying the power supply you need, which isn't uncommon.

Regards

Phil

Thanks Phil. Generally speaking I feel you're correct Phil. Conversely, a marginal PSU can and will cause a host of relatively subtle issues short of causing a crash, which I've experienced, so I took a look at my present PSU for that reason and based on a past episode.

For several years I ran two PSUs, and I lost about 6 hard drives over the course of about 2 years, three Velocirpators and two WD Caviar Blacks. I always had indications something was wrong in enough time I lost no data. Anyway, my PC ran pretty well and was overclocked, but the hard drive thing was baffling.

I read somewhere how a marginal PSU can cause HD issues, so I ditched the cheaper, weaker PSU and my system ran like a different PC, it was more responsive. It had always ran pretty good, but with the PSU removed the whole feel of my system changed. As as aside, I also ditched my software raid controller shortly thereafter and then it was off to the races and thing got even better.

Obviously, it wasn't lack of power that caused the issues I had, but a hinky PSU, so that doesn't apply here, I suppose, or does it? I don't know. I've read my PSU isn't as great as I had thought it was when I bought it (Zalman 850W) and it's pretty inconsistent, some say.

PSU calculators are recommending between 865 and 1100 watts, depending on the site (I've tried 5 or so different calculators) and my PSU is 850. The Asus PSU calculator actually came in the highest at 1100W recommended, and to my knowledge they don't market PSUs, so I paid extra attention to that number. But as you say they are said to overestimate.

In the end, after staying up for hours last night looking at PSUs and other stuff, and researching, I changed my mind about the PSU, for now. $300 is a chunk, and I'm not convinced it needs replaced after all. However when I have $ to throw around, I'm sure I'm going to replace it with the Corsair AX1200 anyway.

I just overclocked my GPU (THANKS GERALD!) and actually see a slight improvement when doing mulitcam with Ultimate S, though playback is the same.

Re: PSU, I run a Raid controller that when not cooled properly (mine is fine) gets very hot, almost hot enough to burn your finger, and while I haven't found out what it's pulling, it's clearly significant. Coupled with an OC of 30%, the overclocked GPU, and the large number of HDs including the 15K drives, it's given me something to look at.

I'm not running multiple video cards, and it's very possible I'm set for power, but I'm going to continue to poke around, but I'm not going to buy the new PSU just before Christmas, not sensible. As you say, Phil, I'm not crashing, and I have a stable OC at 4.2, so likely everything is fine.

curiosity - when you say you're running 5 drives, is this an internal raid or something?

if so, what format are you working with, uncompressed?

No uncompressed Leslie, Im not man enough for that :)
I just divide things up a bit,
128GB SSD for Windows
2TB Cavier Black Partitioned in 2- Fast half for scratch, slow end as a Home folder (Desktop, Documents etc)
2 x 1TB 7200 scratch drives,
1 x 2TB Eco Green drive for Videos, Pictures and everything else that gets archived. This drive is synced to another external drive about once a week.
And forgot, Ive also got 2 x 150GB Raptors raided which run OSX which I can boot into for when I have to deliver Prores files (which I'm discovering seems to be the norm rather than exception).
So 7 drives, not 5.
Feeling better after Phil's "Dont worry about the PSU" reply :)
Thanks guys.

Hi


Obviously, it wasn't lack of power that caused the issues I had, but a hinky PSU, so that doesn't apply here, I suppose, or does it? I don't know. I've read my PSU isn't as great as I had thought it was when I bought it (Zalman 850W) and it's pretty inconsistent, some say.

It is highly unlikely your power draw is anywhere near 850 Watt. Most power-supplies soon fail if used at their full rating. Also taking into account efficiency is not 100%, if your PC were using 850 watts your power draw would be around 1000 watts from the mains. As the majority of that 1000 watts gets converted to heat you'd know about it :-)

If you have or buy a plug in power meter that shows the power you are drawing it will give you an accurate figure of electricity used, and your PC total power draw will be about 70 or 80% of that.

I used the Asus calculator and it recommends 450 watt for my system, but the most I've managed to get it to draw is around 160 watts with the CPU max'd out. I'd be okay with a decent 250 watt power supply, which would probably be more efficient than a 450 watt power supply supplying 170 watts but mostly it would be providing me with around 80 watts which is what my system is using now, and that includes a monitor! A high rated power supply is less efficient at providing a low output.

Regards

Phil

I agree with Phil. My system, has two 6 core x5650 xeon 130watt each cpus, 560GTI, 10 hdds, 8 port raid controller, 12gb ram, blueray burner, firewire card reader, a Quadro 2000 card, and two monitors. ( intel chasis, 1000watt supply, it came with it )

Under max load, my system draws 475 watts from the mains. This includes both monitors too. My 1500watt UPS will run for about 5-8 min under that load.

Jeff I would look for a seasonic 600watt powersupply. I have been selling them for so many years now, and have never had one come back yet. I know it would run your system fine. Seasonic usually make many of the high end PSs you see online that other makers put their names on, and double the price.

Hope this helps.


P.S. I run all my hdds in a mirrored configuration, someone asked about configs...

sigh* i can preview just fine, but i cant render :(

gtx 570 1284mb ram
core i7 2600 4.2 ghz
16gb ram @1600mhz
4x1tb samsung hdd

What are you trying to render Tom, 1080?

Nice overclock Tom!

Thanks Phil and Joe. Joe, your system and mine likely use similar amounts of power, so I am reassured that my power supply is likely adequate. I'm so glad I did not impulsively buy a new PSU last night!

I might be asking too much for perfect playback of Vegas with 4 cameras of 108024p footage to fill the screen on a 30" monitor. As I mentioned previously, playback of video is good, the audio lags a bit, which is distracting.

NVIDIA DRIVERS 285.79 BETA (http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-285.79-beta-driver.html)

i was reading last night that the above beta driver sorts our a few 'problem' with cuda and other processing in vegas. unfortunately i have no recollection of where i actually read it...

anyone shine a light on the matter please?

Well thats interesting.
I installed that new version a few days, maybe a week ago, (I have my Nvidia update settings for beta releases as well).
Im now wondering if my new found stability with Vegas 11 is due to that rather than my new OC'd GPU
Either way :))))

What are you trying to render Tom, 1080?

480p 720p 1080p

all h.264 with the main concept codec, just keep getting the system out of memory error ,cpu encoding still works fine

Oh, so it's just the GPU thing not working. Still that stinks.

Update, Just spent a few awful hours trying to edit Cineform files in Vegas 11. Must have crashed 50 times. Ended up replacing the files with the original AVCHD versions on the top track, but still got crashes. It was only when I muted the Cineform tracks below that the crashing stopped. It would crash always on a crossfade of the avchd files, Im guessing with the Cineform tracks below it was enough to crash as soon as they came into play at the crossfade ( make sense?)
Anyway, all avchd and mxf was fine, stable again.
Whats going on with Cineform and Vegas?
Is there anything I can do short of a clean install?

Gerald, sounds pretty awful what you're going through. I'm editing with Cineform, having no real problems.

As much as I love the transcoding ability of Cineform, I'm looking forward to not using it after my current crop of weddings. I am tired of 700GB worth of files for a single project. This isn't Cineform's fault, of course, it is the nature of transcoded files, but still... I'm shooting in 24p, and since 24p is compatible with DVDs and Blurays, I'm hoping Vegas will resize 1080 to 480 without issues.

As for your problems, yes, I would probably do a clean install. I assume you turned off the GPU feature?

If you do a clean install, I'd suggest doing a long format of your drive, not the quick format that Win 7 performs. Found I had to do that to get rid of all the quirks I had with Windows 7. I use a raid controller, so I am fortunate I can do a full format using the bios of the card.

Otherwise, you much use a floppy with a formatting utility (I don't have a floppy drive any more) or take the drive out and put it into another computer to format it. You may already know all of this, but thought I'd throw it out there for you just to be sure.

Another benefit of a full format is I believe disc errors are cleared up with a full format, but I might be mistaken about that.

after my first few crash sessions with cineform years ago i decided it just wasn't worth the effort - moved over to mxf and never looked back.

afaic unless you're trying to get a feature out for up-rezzing to silver screen the hype of using cineform is simply that, hype.

i've worked some sequences in mxf pretty hard and couldn't see visually, or on the scopes any problems at all... ymmv

I've never had an issue with Cineform causing crashes, from day one. I've had other issues, but not acceptance into Vegas.

Hype? It's a conversion tool you either need or you do not. I've taken four different cameras, shot in four different modes and converted for editing and the results are amazing.

Taken 1080i, 1440, 480, and 720p all converted to the same dimensions, deinterlaced the interlaced footage, and after color correction it looked like it was all shot on the same camera. It converts relatively quickly, depending on what you're converting.

It removed pulldown from 4 hours of footage in minutes last week, so now I have four matching cameras, rather than have one line of 24p in a 60i wrapper. HD Link is an very useful tool, but only if you need it. Cineform folks are the first one to tell you everyone doesn't need it.

On the other hand it is a step I'd love to eliminate.

sorry jeff, let me rephrase the 'hype' bit - cineform is a great codec, IF you need one. by 'hype' i wasn't referring to it not doing anything useful, but rather users insisting that they HAD to use it to maintain quality no matter what.

fortunately i don't have too many clients shooting esoteric codecs, mostly i've seen a move away from hdv to avchd, and my system will happily handle most avchd directly on the tl. when the material is going to need 'something' extra, then, and only then do i transcode to mxf.

No prob Leslie. Yes, it depends on what your working with and what you need to do with it. I've not used Vegas for resizing much yet, except for going from 720 to 480 which works very well for DVDs.

Regarding GPU thing, I started experiencing crashing of Windows yesterday while running Vegas, and I downloaded the beta drivers for my card, and problem seems to be solved.

Does anyone know if there are advantages to workstations cards over the desktop/gaming cards for Vegas?

Earlier in this thread, I discussed the idea that my 850W power supply might not have been powerful enough. I went ahead and replaced it with a 1000watt OCZ Gold Certified PSU. The difference is astounding.

The most obvious differences that I can see off hand (just installed it minutes ago) is thumbnails of photos etc now appear instantly. My browser is lightning quick. It's as if I bought a new computer. Everything opens faster now, like it should.

I've been having so many weird side issues, the only thing I could think of that might help was the PSU, and it seems it was the right thing to do.

I almost regret not going with a 1250 watt unit, but hopefully this will be sufficient.