Memory, memory...

FuTz wrote on 5/25/2002, 5:28 AM
Considering the price of memory is dropping right now and probably for another month or so,what significative changes would I see passing from 2 x 128Mb to 3 x 256Mb ?
I mean, would my preview monitor be improved? Would I get faster rendering times?
Is there sometthing I'd actually *really notice* or is it just that the system would perform with less strain?
I ask because there is a maximum of 255 available for the video memory in VV3. Is it related?
As you might know right now, I have a little difficulty figuring out how exactly the "internal circuits" of the machine do their respective job inside the case...
Thanks in advance; there's ALWAYS somebody who KNOWS here in this forum, which is one of the best things in my "computer-related-life"...!!!

\Ü/ yééééé!

Comments

SonyDennis wrote on 5/25/2002, 6:30 PM
I wouldn't expect rendering to get faster, unless your system is currently using virtual memory due to use of large images or something.

The improvement you can expect to see is an increase in the amount of frames that fit in the Dynamic RAM cache (i.e., the largest time selection that Shift+B will make). The maximum setting allowed in Preferences will grow when you add more RAM.

///d@
FuTz wrote on 5/26/2002, 12:46 PM
Great, so I'm gonna buy some. Prices are expected to drop even more since everybody's going with DDR memory right now (I still got pc133 mem...).
Thanks!
DougHamm wrote on 5/27/2002, 1:31 PM
I've got 1GB of memory and last night, for kicks, I started four simultaneous MPEG-1 renders in four separate instances of Vegas. All the RAM was used up within seconds, and my pagefile approached 800MB, but the end result was four perfect .mpg files in the morning. Until Vegas introduces a better way to batch render from the timeline, the extra memory comes in handy for this reason alone!

-Doug
FuTz wrote on 5/27/2002, 5:35 PM
woah... what kind of memory do you have? 133 or DDR ? What brand? I'm asking cause I could go up to that number on my board. But I've always heard that 512Mb mem. units have problems... (?!?)
riredale wrote on 5/27/2002, 7:25 PM
Do a search for a great little freeware program called RAMpage. It installs in your system tray and keeps track of just how much RAM is in use by all your programs at the moment.

As for my PC, I run W98SE with a bunch of processes running in the background (about 54, according to another cool freeware utility called "Taskinfo2000.") Rampage indicates that, after bootup, I am using about 130MB out of 256MB installed. Running VV sucks up about 10MB more. Doing a simple render to an avi file takes about 12MB additional. It could be that complex renders eat up more memory; I haven't tried them yet.

The only program in my arsenal that just eats up Ram is "SteadyHand," a great program that takes shaky video and smoothes it out so much that it looks as though you shot it with a really good fluid-head tripod. You feed it an avi clip, hit the go button, and Rampage just drops to near zero, indicating some pretty serious number-crunching.

I have my virtual memory set up with 128MB as the minimum, and 512MB maximum. In this way, the 128MB section is always present, and thus defragged. As indicated earlier, my system almost never has to go to virtual memory in the first place.


Addendum: I apologize, I had not yet tried most of the bells and whistles of VV3 for the above post. Doing a "Dynamic RAM Preview" will indeed suck up every last bit of RAM memory you offer, so in this instance if you want to do a preview longer than a few tens of seconds, you'll want to throw in all the memory your motherboard can handle. Again, I don't think this extra memory will be tapped during an actual rendering, but it would definitely be used in preview mode, as SonicDennis posted.