The pressure for capacity is great, but does anyone need a HUGE drive for the system drive? It should store OS and applications and very be fast. This is the drive that is hit the most during operation, and failure shouldn't result in losing projects or files.

Other important factors are access times, for which the Raptors have no match. For rendering one or more video streams, sequential read/write performance will be served well by any drive unless you are reading and writing to the same drive. If you hear your disk churning, you will benefit from the faster access times.

I take it this was a render to MPEG2 DVDA preset? Is that a single or two pass?

What about the same project to the 3MB SD WMV? I found that WMV renders are horribly horribly slow. MPEG2 is speedy by comparison.

no kidding. I get 11min render times for projects that are several minutes long.... not over an hour long!

The number of partitions has no effect on performance (well, actually it has a negative affect, not a positive affect!). Having an OS drive and a media drive is the way to go.

Yes Jason it was a single pass mpeg 2 render of course, wmv would have taken somewhat longer.

Same project on my old Q6600 would have taken 30 minutes, as it usually rendered 1/2 real time (without MB, etc.)

I did a benchmark test on a i7 320 vs Q6600. I created a digitally generated file in Sony Vegas Pro and rendered it out in MPEG2 HDV 50i. Both systems had a RAID0 setup. The Q6600 took 27 minutes to complete render the i7 320 took 20 minutes. This makes the i7 30% faster than the Q6600 which would reduce render times on a 5hour render to 3.5hours, not bad if you ask me.

Not bad Nick, but pretty slow compared to overclocked. Your i7 is running at stock speed I'm sure. I bought the i7 with overclocking in mind, as it's overclocking features are designed to be exploited.

I noticed that you and Jason mention RAID 0 a lot. I personally have never noticed raid to be a factor in rendering times. I suppose if you compare render times from a slow drive to the times from a RAID array there could be a difference. Difference for me in render times doesn't occur with any of my drives.

Jeff not sure if RAID0 makes any impact on rendering myself, I was merely trying to keep system configurations constant. RAID0 is very effective for playback when editing multi-tracked projects. Was running stock speed.

Interesting stuff
 

Good evening,

I am , as I write, rendering a blu ray of 20.7 gigs of hdv video. I threw up the task manager to see whatis happening.

it is going at lightening speed, all 8 cpus are operating at 7o to 80% capacity.

rendering audio is requiring 3% of the cpu using only 2 cpus and 1.92 gigs of Ram.

Of course I relaize vista takes a fair amount of ram just to operate too!!

to my real surprise it is only using 2.1 g of RAM!! Here i was considering of upping the annie to 12 gigs and I am only using 35% of what I already have!!!

Sense I did a little morre tweaking to my system the cpu useage went up from about 60%, it is at 76 at this moment (I am on a different computer by the way).



An interesting note for this I7 on vista. I loaded up Front Page to work on my web page and then found that the computer would not capture!!!!!!! I thought this was the same problems I had sometime back and I was ready to pitch this dell at a Dell rep. I went back and restored my computer to before Iput front page in and all is well again!!!!

so, it seems some form of microsoft dealing with graphics is the primary issue that caused me so much trouble in the past (I had installed all my software).


I would highly recommend installing one at a time, testing all systems , and then moving onward with the next.

In hind sight I reckon it was the microsoft software that casued the problem back in january!!!!

Gee Dale, no one would have EVER imagine Front Page could cause those issue...great that youknow what it is!

Jeff,

I never would have thought Front Page could cause a problem!!! I had pulled all my video applications off and all that, you know the drill!! Left front page on until I reinstalled vista. Just had not got around to front page as I have been to busy with jobs.

It also makes me suspecious of all software now. My editing computer is only going to have necessary support programs!!




By the way, my adobe after affects 6.5 pro, when I load it the os states i should not load it because it will slow down computer start up. but then cS2 doesn,t go figure

Now i am really wondering about that.

the I7 is great!! but vista is taking some getting used to!!

I only mention RAID because when I am multi-caming a 3 cam shoot, I get slow frame rates. Now that could be the CPU trying to play 3 DV streams and not a HDD issue. I'm not sure.

Jason, I also find for multicam playback can be smoothed with faster drive setup for multicam. Rendering on the other hand seems to be the same.

Building a new system: Full tower, 4 500gb sata drives, 12mb ram, Vista 64 ultimate, Intel i7 920. In the past I would put my OS on the C drive and load Vegas and associated files on a seperate drive. Is this the optimal setup?

No it isn't.
Optimal setup is OS and all programs on drive C, captures and all other project media (music, images, logos, grahics, etc.) on drive D and finished renders on drive E.