I'm writing this post to help inform others on what I've come across while editing with Sony Vegas Pro 11, which hasn't been a fun experience.
First, a little background. I started out with a new Dell XPS desktop. 3.4 i7 with 8 gb of ram Amd 6750 video card.
I got Sony vegas 11 after trying out their studio 11 version. I knew I needed the added features of the pro verison and it wasn't much to upgrade to pro 11. When I first started to edit, I was shooting on Canon DSLR's and everything seemed ok. There were the occasional crashes and the auto save would not work but nothing too bad. Playback was smooth and rendering was very close to real time while grading within Vegas. It seemed like after every new update the problems got worse and worse. Crashes would happen more often and there would be a huge shift in color after rendering, mainly in skin tones. This forced me to start grading differently, by not going for how I would like to see the final image but just enough to get good skin tones. Earlier this year I got the GH2 and soon after I was using the high MBPS all I frame patches and Vegas 11 didn't like these one bit. On play back, it will skip up to 10 or more frames at a time. Far from what any editor wants when trying to piece together a edit. Rendering stayed pretty good with the high bit patches only adding a few minutes to the over all time to render.
Things only got worst from there. Vegas seemed to crash every couple of minutes. For some reason while rendering, it would only use the computer's processor instead of also using the graphics card's processor. Even my i7 had trouble with bigger files and if the render ever did complete, it would take up to 2 hours. Frustratingly, it would crash with only a small percent left and an error screen will pop up saying unknown error has occurred.
At this point, I decided to start to upgrade the parts in my workstation to see if anything would help with better performance.
First, I got a new set of ram cards 16GB of 1600mhz ram, clocked the i7 at 3.8.
Then I did some some research on graphics cards. I knew I wanted to get a cuda based card since most softwares actually use these instead of open cards to speed up rendering and smooth playback. When looking at the different gtx series cards I found the gtx 570 and gtx 580 were very popular among editing workstations. The gtx 570 has 480 cudas cores and the 580 512 cores. Both the 570 and 580 need a larger power supply a minimum of 600 watts. But then, I found the newest gtx cards. The gtx 600 series. These cards use Nvidia kepler gpu architecture. "They have been designed all new for maximum performance and opitimal performance per watt. The smx streaming multiprocessor is twice as efficient as prior generation resulting in world class performace and the highest image quality."
After doing lots of research, I decided to go with a gtx 670 card after reading it outperforms both the gtx 570 and gtx 580 cards, and it does so using less power and runs quiet and cool. Base clock 1006 mhz, boost clock 1084mhz, memory clock 6208 mhz, 1344 cores and only needs a 500 watt power supply.
Reading a few forums, I found out people using Dell computers with sandybridge were having trouble getting the gtx 670 to recognize the drivers. Dell won't update the bios because they now have the xps 8500 using sandybridge. But Nvida found a walk around to updating the bios of the gtx 670s to boot the drives. So I ordered the gtx 670 from a online source and installed a 600 watt power supply.
After installing the new card, I got everything put in place and I was ready to get started with my amazing fast graphics card. I turned on the computer and after a few seconds, the screen remained black and no boot up. I unplugged everything and opened back up the computer case to make sure the card was sitting in the slot right and I didn't miss any connections. I tried booting it up again and still got just a black screen.
I contacted Evga to see what could be going on with the card. I explained what was happening and mentioned I had a Dell running a Sandy Bridge board. Evga explained it could be a bad card or maybe I didn't have the latest drivers installed. They set a pre labeled mailing slip within a few minutes.I sent it off for a replacement card with the newest drivers and bios software.
The replacement card came pretty quick and once I installed it, the computer booted up just fine. I started on a edit I had been working on. I checked Vegas if it recognized the Gtx 670 and at least it showed it did. I went to the start of the edit and pressed play. I wanted to see how big of an improvement the new card had on playback. Unfortunately, playback was worst then ever - skipping up to 20 frames at a time and sound would cut in and out. This wasn't good. I needed to send off a rough cut to get approve before I started to grade and this was definitely holding up my progress. I checked all the settings and looked at the properties again to see if Vegas recognized the card and, again it said it did.
I double checked all the settings since Vegas will sometimes change the render settings from the project settings. Everything seemed good, so I selected the render to only use the card and a few seconds in, Vegas crashed. I restarted the program and tried again and the same unknown error message came up. I changed the setting to use the processor and card and still got the unknown error. So the last option was to use the processor only. The timeline was around 10 minutes with added sound effects and it took 45 minutes to render. The longest render vs actual timeline I've ever dealt with.
When I got the go ahead to start grading the edit from my client. I use Magic Bullet Looks 2, which is a great grading tool, but is also giving me problems now. When going into Looks 2 it gives a washed out image, different from what is being showed in Vegas. Grading takes longer then it should. I have to keep going back and forth between Looks and Vegas to see what is actually being done to the image.
After working on the grade I needed a mov file to send off for scoring. I selected the highest setting for both video and sound for the mov file. Once again, I was forced to use the processor only to render. After watching the render time go up and up Vegas crashed. I got fed up and installed the Amd card and tried the render again. Still forced to use just the processor. The render started and once again the time kept going up and after 2 hours, the render was finally finished. Heavy grading with Looks adds a little time to the overall render, but I've never seen it add more than just a few minutes. Before Vegas updated, I could edit and grade a short in a few hours. But this ten minute short I easily have over 20 hours because of all of the crashing and render problems.
I started to search the web and found that no software supports the newer Gtx cards except Cs6 but not officially through Adobe, but using a walk around and adding the card to the list of supported cards for Cs6.
I contacted Sony asking if there will be any updates to add support for the Gtx 670 card. Got an reply back saying to try the newest update but they saw nothing in the notes saying that it would support the newer cards and if the update didn't work it was just the card I was using that was the problem. Tried the lastest update soon after reading the email. Same thing constant crashing, playback skips and can not finish a render with the card installed.
So basically I now have one of the highest benchmarking cards out but one of the worst for editing since its not supported by the software I'm using. Vegas 12 just came out and Sony offers a 30 day trial. I'm going to be trying it out to see if the Gtx 670 is supported. With all the problems I've had with Vegas 11 even if 12 does support the card, not sure if the 140 dollars would be worth it to upgrade. Vegas 11 has been out over a year and it's still so buggy with all the crashing, poor playback and forced to use only the computer's processor. It's hard to say how a new version could be any better if 11 has had numerous updates and still so bad. I will write a new post telling my findings with the trial offer of 12 and if it does indeed support the newer Gtx cards.
If it doesn't I will have to spend more to get Cs6 just to run the card. But hopefully it will make editing smoother, faster and keep me from cussing so much. Haha!
