Increasing RAM didn't speed up rendering in Vegas?
 

I have 2 X 2 gigs of ddr2 667 ram in my computer. Over the weekend, a friend gave me his ram (exact same ram) to test on my computer. Rendering times with 4 gig of RAM were only 5 seconds in difference - and barely noticeable - I thought Vegas used RAM for rendering?

The CPU speed it the primary determinate for rendering in Vegas. Multi-core processing is the fastest, if you cannot afford a system like that (me), or your system cannot handle that kind of upgrade, you can upgrade your processor. If you are using an effect such as magic bullet, you can upgrade your video card to one that takes advantage of GPU and this will help you, but only for plugins that utilize GPU. Hope this helps. J

David, this has been a frustration/topic/discussion or whatever. I actually posted, (I think) somewhere the response from Sony to this question. It was one of those really foggy responses that big tech supports give.

You would think that there would be some software modification they could do, but I'm not a programmer. And since I'm not done with my coffee this morning, this is all I can think of.

RAM doesn't make things go faster. A lack of enough RAM makes things go dramatically slower. Once you have enough RAM, you will see practically no speed increase. Video editing is done in pieces and written out to disk. If you have a Gig free for rendering on a 2Gig/RAM system, that is several seconds of video that can fit in memory but often just a few frames at a time are processed. I'm guessing that as long as you can have enough space for Vegas to uncompress two full GOPs per track of video, you have enough RAM. Uncompressed HDV is only about 60MB/second, so 600Meg free is ten seconds of video that can be processed in one chunk. I know the hard drive writes a lot more than once every ten seconds during a render, so the actual pieces of video being processed at one time is probably no more than a second or two.

Right, RAM doesn't make anything faster. A LACK of RAM makes things much, much slower.

Think of RAM as a workdesk ...... and paging to hard disk (what happens when you run out of ram) as a storage cupboard .... everything being *currently* processed needs to be able to fit on your desk (in your RAM) at the same time, in order to work at optimal speed. If you run out of ram, you're constantly having to wait for things to be loaded from hard disk, while your processor twiddles it's thumbs and waits.

(If you've done complex compositing or 3d work you'll be very familiar with what happens when your renders burn through more RAM than you have and your computer practically freezes up, goes almost entirely unresponsive, and thrashes the hard disk ;)

Once you have enough RAM (your work desk is big enough to fit everything needed at a given point in time) then having a bigger and bigger desk really accomplishes nothing.

There are other benefits though.. if you're rendering a project on a 4GB machine, and it's taking up ~1.3 gigs of ram, then you can lower the thread priority of the render and happily work away in photoshop (or whatever) .. so long as you don't hit 4gb usage then your render should hardly slow down at all. If you were on a 2GB system then running the render and photoshop would hit 2gb fairly easily, at which point your machine would be paging to hard disk and the render could slow down *significantly*.