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Editing Machine Question


Thomas Hill
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I have a Lenovo K450e with an i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz with 28GB, 2TB internal and a 2TB 7200rpm external HD. The graphics card is a GTX960. 

My most recent 7.5 minute short took about an hour and 15 minutes to render using proxies with Vegas Pro 15. And I'm going to be editing a feature pretty soon. 

Would upgrading the graphics card or switching to Resolve help with render times? OR is that length of time about what I should expect without a full upgrade to a much more expensive system?

Thanks in advance!

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Sounds to me you have enough Horsepower in your  desktop, but no doubt a better, faster video card in the 10.. series will help. It seems in this day and age a GPU really matters for video playing and editing. I know Resolve is sort of a heavy GPU user. I personally think Resolve is the NLE of the future and the cost is very hard to beat, not counting all they have now in it.

Even the free version of Resolve now is not missing too much other than built in Noise Reduction engine, Collaborative Workflow, and a lot of 3D modeling stuff most will never use. At 299 bucks for the premium version, which you seem to be able to upgrade for years down the road in the past, is to me a pretty big bargain.

But yeah with proxies, unless you have a lot of VFX stuff in it does seem well, pretty slow going. Hmm. Are you using a Sony camera with Vegas Pro 15?

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Yeah, I've been pretty tempted to check out Resolve.

The one short that I edited with 15 was shot with an A6300. And I mistyped, it was an hour 50 not 15. I edited two shorts of similar lengths on Vegas 14 that were shot with an X-T2 and I don't recall thinking that the render times were excessive.

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1 hour ago, Thomas Hill said:

Yeah, I've been pretty tempted to check out Resolve.

The one short that I edited with 15 was shot with an A6300. And I mistyped, it was an hour 50 not 15. I edited two shorts of similar lengths on Vegas 14 that were shot with an X-T2 and I don't recall thinking that the render times were excessive.

Interesting is that Vegas is pretty much geared toward Sony cameras. You would think it would go like heck. But hasn't Vegas been bought out by some other company from Sony?? Maybe 15 isn't tweeked like 14 was? Maybe they made it worse LoL. It happens at times.

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As a Resolve user who uses it for my complete post workflow I have a couple of comments:

  • Resolve is a very very mature colour engine, but has much less mature editing features.  I believe it's the all-in-one platform of the future too, but the summary of feedback from the professional editors that I've read was that it's promising, but isn't there yet.  I'd recommend researching it a bit more to make sure it does what you want it to do.
  • Resolve isn't the fastest NLE on the planet.  Maybe do some research about benchmarks comparing it to other competing platforms.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Resolve, and I love it for what I use it for (very small amateur projects with simple edits but lots of colour work) but it's not the best platform for everyone.  Not yet at least!

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18 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

I would have to win the Lotto to buy the newest 1080 Ti Video card LoL.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16814487338

B&H has a few variations of the 1080 that are cheaper slightly less crazy expensive than that one: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1260361-REG/msi_geforce_gtx_1080_armor.html

The 1070 is in the $400s so it'll either be 1060 or jump all the way.

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Thanks for the info @kye I'll definitely explore the free version first. I found one article that compared render speeds between several NLEs and Vegas won. I do like using Vegas, just a couple annoyances that have me thinking about trying something new. And from what I've read on here and other places, they all have their annoyances. 

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1 hour ago, Thomas Hill said:

Thanks for the info @kye I'll definitely explore the free version first. I found one article that compared render speeds between several NLEs and Vegas won. I do like using Vegas, just a couple annoyances that have me thinking about trying something new. And from what I've read on here and other places, they all have their annoyances. 

Great idea.  The free version is hugely powerful and isn't crippled that much so you can get by with it for most things.

I bought a studio license (just before they reduced the price - doh!) because I wanted temporal NR and a few other specific things.  It really is an amazing tool.

Just a thought, but one of the things that I don't think people have tested that much is doing huge edits - lots of people using it for music videos and smaller projects.  It might be a good idea to pull in a few hundred random clips from your back catalog and then copy/paste your way to a huge timeline and see if it bogs down or does anything else strangely.  It would suck if you got half-way through a project and discovered something at that point!

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41 minutes ago, kye said:

It might be a good idea to pull in a few hundred random clips from your back catalog and then copy/paste your way to a huge timeline and see if it bogs down or does anything else strangely.  It would suck if you got half-way through a project and discovered something at that point! 

Good idea! I will definitely do that as a test. I just downloaded the free version and a single clip plays back more smoothly than in Vegas. Now to see how I like editing with it.

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54 minutes ago, Thomas Hill said:

Good idea! I will definitely do that as a test. I just downloaded the free version and a single clip plays back more smoothly than in Vegas. Now to see how I like editing with it.

Resolve has a pretty good customisable shortcut key system, with preset configurations for some editing platforms, so if you've got muscle memory from another package that might be a good place to investigate first.

Also, the manual is absolutely excellent, so your first point of reference for any questions should be that and not google.

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On ‎7‎/‎5‎/‎2018 at 8:53 AM, interceptor121 said:

Make sure you GPU has at least 4GB RAM as resolve requires it in the new version. Also an SSD Drive makes they difference when the memory pages to the drive 

I haven't edited anything of this size before. Which files or tasks should the SSD get?

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14 hours ago, Thomas Hill said:

I haven't edited anything of this size before. Which files or tasks should the SSD get?

Cache, proxies etc  -anything that needs fast read and write but isn't too big. Still no idea what res and codec you are going to be working on so any advice here on what hardware you need is pretty useless without that info.....

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18 hours ago, Thomas Hill said:

I haven't edited anything of this size before. Which files or tasks should the SSD get?

In theory the GPU does the rendering while the RAM holds the rest. When you run out it writes on disk ao at that point it will slow down. Read the requirement section of davinci it is pretty detailed 

on Mac OSX davinci is resource hungry. Version 15 refuses to start working if VRAM is less than 4GB while final cut runs with 1GB. Maybe it is isx but it doesn’t look like the code is particularly optimised 

 

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15 hours ago, Ivko Pivko said:

Regarding Davinci Resolve and a new PC, anybody knows if it would it be better to have two cheap graphic cards (without sli or anything like that) like the 560 4gb or one more expensive one like a 1060 6gb

Do you already have a Motherboard that can handle dual PCI cards and a Power supply that has enough juice to do it? That is a lot of the equation. If you have to buy a new motherboard, and with that goes new memory because of the new board and a better, newer power supply, well you might as well just buy a 1080 Ti and be done with it. I know easy to spend your money! ? Resolve Loves expensive, fast GPU's. If you are gong for the new 4K BMPCC and going to use Raw, well it is going to take some serious Horsepower to do that.

There are so many variables in upgrading video cards it is, well it can be a damn expensive way to go. I have found sometimes it is easier to buy a rig like that used from some gamer guy that is selling it for half what he had in it when new. There is no end to video card upgrades.

To me not using SLI or bridging them is like really only using one card at a time as the other one will be somewhat idle. I know there is the Micro Studder thing, but I never experienced to amount to anything  that I am going to stop bridging them.

But to answer your question, yeah I think the Two 560 4gb will probably be better than the lone 1060, remember neither of these were top end cards, the 560 being the older of the two, but I am not sure how Resolve will handle them un linked. I don't like it that way at all to be honest. But easy to try it both ways. But you know how computer builds are, sometimes stuff just comes together and it is a Rocket, or it can be a Dog. You never know until you do it.

The big problem is there is really no good way to benchmak Resolve like there is Games. So you are into, it will work or it won't. Nobody ever said video was easy!

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7 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

But to answer your question, yeah I think the Two 560 4gb will probably be better than the lone 1060, remember neither of these were top end cards, the 560 being the older of the two, but I am not sure how Resolve will handle them un linked. I don't like it that way at all to be honest. But easy to try it both ways. But you know how computer builds are, sometimes stuff just comes together and it is a Rocket, or it can be a Dog. You never know until you do it.

If I understood correctly, Resolve likes to have similar cards and send frames to each for processing. Use Display GPU for Compute option in the studio version, I think. I'm used to work with FCPX but my second hand macbook pro retina 2012 died 2 months ago and the more I wait, the more I'm thinking about building a PC with more RGB Lights than a Christmas tree, modular by nature and cheaper than the most basic 27" i5 imac.

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