Processor not stressed during rendering

[pascalbrown]

Whilst rendering some video in vegas, I've been monitoring how much processor and ram is being used. I kind of expected it to use a fair bit, but it turns out that it uses between 5% and 30% of either core. In Task manager it shows that vegas never uses more than 30 CPU.

Is this too low? Is there something I'm missing? Does this mean that it could do it faster if it used more processor, or does it mean that it doesn't take much processor power to render video? I thought the whole point of people upgrading to dual core or quad core is to improve rendering times, but my CPU isn't being stressed!

Any help/advice/answers are most welcome!:hv20-smilie03:

[SenorKaffee]

Rendering a video should mean full load for at least one core, unless you have a pretty slow HDD. What would be the point of saving CPU load?

[pascalbrown]

I have no idea, which is why I was asking. I have 3 hard drives, all SATA2, 7200rpm, atleast 8mb cache (one is 16mb). I can't imagine those are the weak link? Is there an option in vegas I might be missing?

[pascalbrown]

Interestingly, I just tried resizing/converting something with virtualdubmod and set priority to highest and both cores were approaching 100%. Is there something in vegas where you can set the priority?

[SenorKaffee]

While rendering you could modify the priority of the task in the task manager. But this is really strange behaviour unless you are playing games while rendering. o_O

[white_2kgt]

Interesting, I had a dual core and when rendering Vegas uses both cores, 100%. Same HD specs as you, raw files on one hd, output to another HD. Vegas is suppose to support quad cores as well.

[24Peter]

Check the SONY Vegas forum. Lot's of discussion there. Short answer is you should be at 100% CPU utilization for most renders.

[cbodom]

im having the same problems here, what is a better sony vegas forum?

when i render as mpeg2 it will use ~99% of all 4 cores
when i render most anything else (wmv9, huffy) it will use ~25% prolly 1 core?

is this normal because the other codecs arent multithreaded?


q6600, 4 gig ram, 3hd raid0

[mik]

it depends if the codec is multithreaded or not. it's not a vegas issue how many cores are in use when rendering.

[pascalbrown]

After reading around this issue I found this helpful thread on the sony forums;

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=537069

It has tips as to why vegas might not be stressing your CPU 100%. It also provides a test file so you can see how fast your computer is rendering compared to the others. I think this is a worthwhile test and people should post up their results.

I rendered the file in 3m dead. This is with an E6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz.

On the basis of this, I'm sure that if a Q6600 fell out of the sky onto my lap I could get the time to 1m30s!

[mik]

well i've got over 100fps rendering with my video card instead of the cpu. if speed is what you want, you'll get over 95% (my eye test, not a scientific one) of cpu rendered quality 5x faster or more. i'll try this test too.

[pascalbrown]

interesting. How do you go about rendering with your video card instead of the CPU? Why not both? If you've got a link to an explanation it would be great, or you can just explain in details what you mean. :)

[jmorton]

"...rendering with my video card instead of the cpu."

Could you explain in a new thread, please. It would get more notice as it should.

Thanks.

JM

[mik]

well let's see if people are interested

i was talking about ati avivo encoder. this is not new stuff but i didn't see it used here. you can either use their own app (found in ati basic control panel but it'll downscale video to pal size) or build your own graphedit which won't perform scaling. in either way i see 100% usage on my dual core so you actually use both cpu and gpu. that's why you get very high speed.

there are some limits, mpeg2 has a maximum of 20mbps and divx, wmv9 and h264 at 8mbps. i don't know why ati didn't allow more but anyway...

there are additional options like adaptive deinterlacing (beautiful) and inverse telecine (maybe an ntsc user could test this feature), closed GOP, noise reduction. it also encodes audio.

http://img172.imagevenue.com/loc38/th_54232_untitledddd_122_38lo.jpg (http://img172.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=54232_untitledddd_122_38lo.jpg)

[pascalbrown]

ah, this is an ATI tool. From what I can find, it is the equivalent software to nvidia purevideo. I need to read around a bit but I'll post back if I find something interesting, now that I know what I'm looking for.

Thanks

[mik]

not exactly, purevideo is a decoder.
avivo also encodes.

[pascalbrown]

"Ever since that past generation of graphics cards (Series 6), NVIDIA did something really smart. They made the GPU (the graphics chip) an important factor in en/decoding video streams. With a special software suite called PureVideo you can offload the video encoding/decoding process from the CPU towards the GPU, and the best thing yet it can greatly enhance image quality."

taken from; http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:BW1vKUK4XjwJ:www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/428/5/+encoding+with+purevideo&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=11&client=firefox-a

EDIT; I thought it was worth installing and trying this out. I can't find any video encoding settings yet, but perhaps I'm not looking hard enough. The quest continues!!!

[mik]

i don't know man... i have purevideo installed (works just fine with my radeon x1950pro and it allows you to use the additional hardware deinterlacing methods of ati) but it only decodes. i've searched all directshow filters and i can't find an encoder. anyway you can't use avivo unless you have an x1000 series card.