Hello all,

I recently upgraded my PC and while rendering a project (DV to CBR MGEG-2), I've noticed that my CPU seems to be under utilized as task manager reports only 20%-40% of my CPU being used.

I am running Sony Vegas 7.0e and have a quad core Q6600 processor with 2 GB of RAM (also running Vista).

Any insight into this problem, or is this normal?
Thanks.

Render a small piece to AVI first. See if that assists.

I render ALL my work to AVI first and thence to MPG for DVDs. I almost always get near to or 100%. I don't know from Vista. Dunno?

Try what I suggest and get back here - yeah?

Waiting ..

Grazie

Grazie, just curious to know about how long it takes you to render an hour avi to mpeg 2, it takes me 1 1/2 -2 hours per 1 hour file.

__________________
Wil Chapman Jr.
Oly, Washington
DP, Producer, Editor

Feel free to visit ( UPDATED!!! )
http://www.myspace.com/chapmanphotography
http://www.myspace.com/sport_specific (personal and training site)

Why?

OK, something LESS than real time. I just did a test, using V8Pro now so I wanted to reaffirm or confirm, so, on an 1.5 hour avi. I ran a 2:22 min (equiv here of frame 4000) test it actually got to 2:40 on the timeline! That's like 18 seconds less, so it is rendering in LESS than real time.

I'm bumping along at around 97>100%.

This is the VIDEO only pass for DVDA. 5mb average bit rate. I do a separate AC-3 encode, which is blisteringly fast.

I've stripped down my Task manager to vapours! I'm going from one internal to another. Er .. I've taken out Everything I don't need in Vegas that would work the CPU .. er . .that's about it?

My new guess-timate would be around 1:15mins for the 1:30 mins - kinda what I as getting before V8.

So, this is why I always do a completed OR chained AVI first. PLUS I got a finished AVI to fall back on!! Nothing worse than having a straight to MPG fall over .. yuck.

Grazie

Ok so I did a number of tests monitoring the CPU resources used in each. I tried rendering a smaller piece of the DV footage (from my camcorder) and there was no difference (only 15%-30% used).
Then I tried rendering a different DV file (DV file captured from TV by Canopus recorder) and resources jumped up to about 75%-85%!!!

So does anyone know why rendering two different sources of DV to MPEG-2 uses two very different amounts of CPU resources (30% compared to 80%)?

Thanks.

Hello all,

Well I managed to solve my problem and thought I would share my solution.

Turns out the main issue involved my paging file. I had placed the paging file on my RAID-0 drive (same drive that I use for all media used in the project) because I figured the paging file could benefit from the added speed of the RAID setup. However, what was happening was that as Sony was rendering, my PC started storing more to the paging file which overwhelmed the drive slowing rendering times significantly.
Now that the the paging file has been switched to another drive, my CPU usage is back up to 80%!

Hope this helps someone!

Thanks for posting that. A useful tip. Still doesn't explain why you see a difference between different DV files, though.

__________________
Tim

the two different DV clips were on different drives, so that was the difference.