Allocation of hard drives/swap files

wikksmith wrote on 10/6/2009, 11:05 AM
I have Vegas Pro 9.0b (32-bit) on the C drive, all media files (AVCHD clips and 2kx3k .PNG stills) on the E drive, and .veg files on the F drive.
Questions:
Which drive should the virtual memory be on?
Which drive should I render to?
Would a 4th drive help?

Obviously, I'm having a "low memory" problem with rendering or I wouldn't be asking these questions.

Thanks, wikksmith

XP MCE 2005, Quad (2.8GHz), 4 GB RAM (PC6400), nvidia 9800GT (1 GB), SATA-II drives.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 10/6/2009, 11:35 AM
As long as you have virtual memory that is about 2x your actual RAM you should be fine. (Actually, I have forgotten the rule of thumb -- perhaps someone else has a more accurate recommendation on the actual size.)

Many forums periodically go through this exercise of determining whether it is better to put the swap files on a drive other than C:. I have read hundreds of such posts and have experimented a lot myself.

I have found no performance advantage whatsoever to putting swap files on different drives, although if you have a super fast drive, it would probably be best to put the main swap file there.

If you do put the main swap file on a drive other than C:, then you should still put a small swap file (16MB) on the C: drive.

But, what you really need to do is figure out why Vegas is causing you to run out of memory. That indicates that something is going wrong. It is a Vegas, not a Windows problem I suspect.

The usual culprit used to be large still photos. This was supposed to be totally fixed in Vegas 9.x so perhaps the problem lies elsewhere. The solution to large still photos on previous versions of Vegas is to use the batch facility in your photo editor to downsize them to 20% above the project size, multiplied by the zoom factor. However, since you are doing 1920x1080 AVCHD and your stills are 3000x2000, you can't downres by much, so it may not help. However, it wouldn't hurt to try. If all your stills are in the same folder, it is easy to try. Close Vegas. Rename the folder with the stills. Copy (don't move) all the stills to a new folder. Batch down-res them to 75% of their current size. Then, open the VEG file in Vegas. Vegas should complain that it can't find the photos (because you renamed the folder that contains the originals. Tell it you want to specify the location of the first missing file. Navigate to the new folder with the down-res'd photos and select the photo that Vegas is asking for. Vegas should then tell you that it has found other photos in this same location and should it use them? You answer yes. When the project has finished opening, use Save As to save this VEG under a new name. Then, try your render.
wikksmith wrote on 10/6/2009, 12:51 PM
John:
Thanks - I like your suggestions. I'll try downsizing the png files and see what happans. Still, it would seem to make sense to render to the drive that is "less busy", I just not sure which that is.
wikksmith
johnmeyer wrote on 10/6/2009, 1:04 PM
Still, it would seem to make sense to render to the drive that is "less busy", I just not sure which that is.Under normal circumstances, Windows should not be reading or writing from the page disk file at all, or at least not enough that you would notice. Thus, for most operations, the whole question shouldn't really matter. Once you get into a situation where big-time swapping is required, whatever operation you are doing is going to crawl, so it really doesn't matter what drive you are on. It is a little like asking, "when your BMW breaks down on the Autobahn, would you rather continue your travel on a skateboard or on roller skates?" There might be a slight advantage to roller skates, but both are going to be slow as snail stuff compared to the 160 km/h you were travelling before the breakdown.