RAM upgrade produces incredible results
 

I couldn't believe this. I am running a Quad Core Q6600. I had 2 1gb sticks of DDR2 533 RAM. I used vegas to capture, edit and render a video file from my Sony HVR-A1U in HDV format. Rendering of the finished product including transitions and color correction etc took 13 hours and 14 minutes. This was on Tuesday. I recently changed my RAM to a 2GB (1 stick) of DDR2 667. I re-rendered the exact same project, and this time it only took 8 hours 43 minutes. The RAM was the only thing that was changed on my PC. I used the same HD to render to and I didn't defrag or anything else between the two renderings.

Is it normal to have such a difference in performance between the two RAM configurations? I am definately not complaing at all.

8 hours 43 mins !!
How long was the project ?
What format did you render to ?
My quad core q6600 with 4gb ram renders my HD footage into SD for dvd in about 2.5 times.

Paul.

Do you mean 2.5 times longer than 8 hours and 43 minutes?
Anyway, my project is 85 minutes in length, and I rendered out to WMV "8Mbps HD 1080-30p Video" with the render quality set to "best".

RAM includes some metadata that tells the motherboard how fast to run it. It's likely that the new RAM allowed access with fewer wait states, speeding up all access to the memory. And yeah, that will speed up renders and anything else that exceeds the cache (on chip RAM) and uses the RAM in the motherboard slots.

The funny thing is that the previous RAM might have been *capable* of running as fast as the new RAM, but to find that out would take testing and optimization. Overclockers adjust things, test, adjust, test and so on to optimize not just CPU speed, but RAM access times, ignoring the metadata.

On the other side of the coin, if you ever build a machine that crashes, try slowing the memory access. That can turn a crash dummy PC into a rock solid performer.

Jason, i mean 2.5 times the length of the project, a 1 hour project will be rendered to mpeg-2 in 2.5 hours.

So you had an 85 mins of hdv project and it took 8hrs and 43 mins to render to WMV !! That's very slow.
I wouldn't even wait that long.

Paul.

Yes, WMV HD. You're rendering to SD, not HD. There is a ton of transitions and color corection within the project, and 2 nested .veg files as well as 5.1 sound (6 tracks audio). I don't think your PC could do any better considering the contents of the project file.

Hey Jason, this is off topic, but I notice you are using the extremely slow "best" setting.

Unless I'm mistaken, (wouldn't be the first time) rendering using the "best" setting is only needed for using lots of photos, as I understand it.

Someone correct me if I'm mistaken. I do know it slows rendering to a crawl, and from having tried it a few times I truly saw no difference in output quality, except for photos, where I have see a slight improvment.

Anyone else?

Incidentally, if you rendered with Best setting the first time and then good the second (not knowing you were doing so) that would account for a drastic speed increase as well.

Render time is not all about time length of your film...

If you use 3d track motion, FX (filters, color corrections and so on), transitions and more the rendering time will be affected... These stuff is heavy things for Sony Vegas...

I recently made a 80 seconds long film, which took 4 hours to render (M2T, 1280x720, 50fps).
Its all about the content in your project.

"BEST" should be used when resizing is done. This is almost always when using images. But it can apply even when using video. For example, HD sources to an SD render could benefit from "BEST". Otherwise, "GOOD" typically gives results that are just as good as "BEST". I would recommend doing a small test both ways and see whether or not it will benefit your situation.

Wanna see your render times go crazy, try rendering a 32-bit floating point project. I had one that was about 2.5 hours in length with lots of color correction, transitions and some inserted picture in picture type portions. On a Q6600 based machine with 4 GB of ram it took 8 days to render!

Yes Garrett, it is amazingly slow. I have done it, and admit color was a bit better, but not better enough to justify it's use for general video use.

Thanks for the info Edward. I just assumed that if good was good, then best was best so to speak.

I have saved a preset using the same settings so best was used for both...good thinking though

Well, I'm impressed. I had no idea memory speed could have such a drastic impact...thanks for letting us know...

See this post for an explanation as to why floating point is s-o-o slow:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost....1&postcount=37

Hey John,

Yeah after sitting for days waiting for my project to render I searched out all the info I could. It just amazed me. I saw that the render would take about 14 hours, so after waking up I saw it it said 18 hours. After about 3 days of this I thought what the $*ck is going on. Then I realized that Vegas can't display beyond 23hours 59 minutes. My dang machine really meant 8 days 14 hours. After seeing that the results of using 32-bit were only marginally better, I said forget it. I need to be able to get my projects done a in a reasonable amount of time so I'm sticking with 8-bit.

One thing about memory speeds. It's not just about the clock speed. Don't forget to pay attention to the latency also.

Just to share my recent experience.... I have an HP Quad-core machine with 3gb ram stock. I purchased 4gb of high performance ram with the intent of maximizing my performance. I saw absolutely no increase in render times of the test file from the sony forum so I jumped on Anandtech.com and found out the bios is locked on HP's and I can't use the faster capability of my new ram. Stinks. Lesson learned? Ask an expert next time.

I recently ditched my Dell Precision 390, kept the processor (Q6600) got a new MOBO and overclocked to 3.0. Then I switched the 8GB of ram out to (DDR2 1066) performance ram. What a difference.

I now render everything 32 bit...an hour project takes an hour to render...not too shabby for 32 bit. Before I couldn't, took too long.

It's not an i7 system, but I'm relatively happy.

The ram alone sped up my system tons...I couldn't believe it.

I did a photomontage today and rendered it out best in 32 bit and it really did look great.

Now try to imagine how quick your render would be when you would have the right motherboard which can run 1066 FSB and the right memory to that :-)
533 and even 667 memory is realy crappy slow. The Q6600 has the 1066 support, did you checked your motherboard?

Axel

I have an overclocking MOBO and my ram is running at 1066, its great.

It not memory speed that made the biggest difference, it's the amount of RAM. Dealing with HDV files requires a lot more RAM than standard-def DV. 1 gig of RAM is simply not enough under any circumstances. When Windows runs out of physical RAM, it uses a dedicated portion of the hard drive as RAM, unfortunately hard drives are magnitudes slower than real RAM. This dedicated portion of the hard drive is called the "paging file", it's also used to temporarily swap unused portions of programs to the hard drive in order to maximize available physical RAM. The dramatic increase in render speed that Jason experienced is due to the fact that Windows was able to do most (or all) of the render in physical RAM instead of having to resort to using the hard drive as RAM.

Also, on most modern motherboards, you should install RAM in pairs to take advantage of the Dual-channel capabilities. Dual-channel architecture is a technology that can double data throughput from the memory to the memory controller. Dual-channel-enabled memory controllers utilize two 64-bit data channels, resulting in a 128-bit data path.

Vegas really needs two things for renders; a fast CPU and lots of RAM. You can right-click on the taskbar and go to the performance tab in "Task Manager" to see how much RAM you're using during a render.

He went from 2GB ram (1GB stick x 2) to 2GB ram (2GB stick x 1) so his total ram count didnt' change.

Yeah, I just noticed that! I initially read it as that he went from 1 gig to 2 gig. Nevermind...