Sony Vegas 10 - Terribly slow rendering!

[Reventon]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forums and new to video editing, so please bare with me!
I'm trying to edit 1920x1080@60i footage shot with a Canon HF100 (.m2ts files) using Sony Vegas Studio HD Platinum 10.0.
My output is AVCHD 1920x1080@60i with the goal of burning it to a DVD for playing on the PS3.

When it's time for rendering however, I can render a 15 minutes video in 9 hours, which seems crazy for me, especially considering it was much faster when I used Power Director.

My specs are Q9550@stock, 8GB DDR2, HD4870 1GB.

I know rendering is CPU-dependant but I doubt my CPU is outdated? I get better performance with other software! Is there anything I should know? Can i use my GPU for faster rendering too?

Thanks in advance and sorry for what could be a silly question!

[aedipuss]

could be you're using the wrong settings. the cam shoots 30i in vegas terms. in marketing terms 60i is 60 fields/second which in normally called 30i or 30 interlaced frames/second. output should be 30i also.

[Reventon]

Thanks for the quick reply! I will try it.
I saw lowering the rendering threads from 4 to 1 and the Dynamic RAM from 350 to 100 could help. Any ideas?

[aedipuss]

no. using all 4 cores of your cpu should be faster than only one. and i'd pass on the ram thing also. adding more hard dirve is one sure way to decrease rendering time. having different source and destination drives can cut times significantly.

[Reventon]

OK thanks. Should I try rendering to an external hard drive or will the USB limit my transfer speed? I don't want to damage my external hard drive and lose the data!
Also the default ram is 350. Should I increase it? Max is 1024MB.

[Reventon]

Edit : Unfortunately rendering to my external HD didn't improve things.
Any other suggestions? I doubt my rig is too weak!

[aedipuss]

you can try the higher ram, it won't hurt anything. but, there is definitely something wrong with your install. there aren't many formats i can't render at better then realtime with vegas pro9, i would think studio should be about the same.

[edDV]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forums and new to video editing, so please bare with me!
I'm trying to edit 1920x1080@60i footage shot with a Canon HF100 (.m2ts files) using Sony Vegas Studio HD Platinum 10.0.
My output is AVCHD 1920x1080@60i with the goal of burning it to a DVD for playing on the PS3.

When it's time for rendering however, I can render a 15 minutes video in 9 hours, which seems crazy for me, especially considering it was much faster when I used Power Director.

My specs are Q9550@stock, 8GB DDR2, HD4870 1GB.

I know rendering is CPU-dependant but I doubt my CPU is outdated? I get better performance with other software! Is there anything I should know? Can i use my GPU for faster rendering too?

Thanks in advance and sorry for what could be a silly question!

First I know nothing about Vegas Home Studio 10. I use Pro 9e.

Second Cyberlink uses an intermediate (MPeg2 suspected). Vegas Pro assumes a native i/o.

Is quality a concern? What changes (filter, transitions, etc.) do you perform during the edit?

If you filter or effect, incoming h.264 is decoded to semi-raw RGB temp files.

H.264 is non asymetric. That means a recode will require more processing time (encoding from scratch) than playback.

Give us more detail about how you are changing the file on the timeline.

If you are just cutting, things will move fast (e.g. GOP in = GOP out).

[Reventon]

I only trim the videos and use fade in-out transitions. I tried using a special effect on one scene (smoothing out the graininess), but I didn't add it to all the project. Other than that, nothing.. not even music.

[poisondeathray]

Run a virus scan to check if you have a virus or trojan stealing cpu cycles . Something is not right. It shouldn't take 9 hours for a 15 min piece.

Maybe try re-installing ? (Save your project first)

[vcd4ever]

I know rendering is CPU-dependant but I doubt my CPU is outdated? I get better performance with other software!

I'm also having the same problem with vegas pro 9.

Importing a 67 seconds long avi into vegas and rendering it to AVCHD 1920x1080i29.97 takes about 3 hours and 49 minutes.

Importing the same avi into premiere pro 2 and frameserving it to an external encoder and encoding it to AVCHD 1920x1080i29.97 only takes about 49 minutes.

The same project settings was used in both vegas and premiere, the same encoder settings was also used in both vegas and the external encoder.

The avi was also 1920x1080i29.97 and no transitions, effects or anything else was used.

I don't know why vegas is so slow when it comes to render to AVCHD, but at least I know, thank's to your post, that is has nothing to do with using an old P4 with 512 MB of RAM.

Vcd4ever.

[aedipuss]

i didn't have any hf100 test video, but i did have a 1:01 minute canon hf10 .m2ts vid. i ran it through vegas pro 9 using the sony avchd blu-ray 1920x1080 60i template and it completed in 5:28 on a quad q6600 @2.8ghz (as close as i could get it to yours) using win7 32 bit.

revention - studio shouldn't be 7 times slower with the same speed cpu. something isn't working correctly.

vcd4ever - over 200 times slower? i could see maybe 10-20 times longer renders with your cpu but not 200. vegas isn't working properly on your system either.

[Reventon]

Thanks eaedipuss. My daily scheduled scan is always clear, my Win7 is a 2 month old installation on a desktop PC i barely use, and Vegas is a 1 week old install. I check my running processes very frequently just to make sure I don't have anything weird in the background, and at idle my CPU usage is very low. So I doubt it has something to do with my OS...

I'm ready to give up now.. it's just a shame I spent 3 hours on that project!

Thanks again for your help guys.. anything else is very welcome before I switch to another software!

[edDV]

What software? And what are your priorities?

Are you trying to do a native edit with low loss or a multi-recode and then except what you get?

I'm curious to compare results.


BTW: Vegas Pro9 now uses the 60i terminology as follows

Project
"HD 1080-60i (1920x1080, 29.970fps)

Render As,
"Sony AVC(*.mp4, *.m2ts,*.avc) then use template
"AVCHD 1920x1080-60i"

[vcd4ever]

It seems now, after doing some more encoding test's while monitoring system resources, that vegas uses alot of RAM when rendering to AVCHD.

Resources used when using vegas:




Resources used when using premiere:




I have managed to increase the rendering speed for both vegas and premiere by doing some memory tweak's, so encoding a 1 minute AVI (1920x1080i29.97) now takes about 2 hours and 25 minutes with vegas, and about 27 minutes with premiere.

The only way to further increase the rendering speed is probably done by adding more RAM.

Vcd4ever.