Video Render taking 30GB, is this normal?

[kodokuj]

Earlier I was exporting a video, that's 20 minutes long. My CPU or GPU weren't at 100% (GPU was around 5%, CPU was around 75-85%), but my Ram was at 30/32GB (which is all I allowed Sony Vegas to use.
Is this normal for a render? And does this mean I should plan for 64GB when I make a new build relatively soon?

[Electronics Wizardy]

A lot of programs will use as much ram you give them, so they will just use more ram if you give them more. It will likely help if your seeing performance issues editing, but I doublt export times will be much faster.

[Mark Kaine]

yes its normal especially for video rendering. 

 

31 minutes ago, kodokuj said:

does this mean I should plan for 64GB 

if video editing is a priority for you, yes. probably more than 64 couldn't hurt either (if your system is up to it, meaning needs likely an extremely expensive motherboard to pull that off)

[BiotechBen]

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

A lot of programs will use as much ram you give them, so they will just use more ram if you give them more. It will likely help if your seeing performance issues editing, but I doublt export times will be much faster.

Refer to the "some of our editors *cough* *Taran*, are using nearly 120gb of RAM during editing"

[mariushm]

The CPU is doing the compression and in order to preserve as much quality in a fixed amount of bytes per second, the encoder needs to keep in memory multiple (consecutive) frames of the video to analyze what changes between them .... along with a lot of extra data ... so the encoder could keep up to a few hundred frames in memory.

 

At the same time, Vegas will use memory buffers to decode the videos and audio tracks you have in the timeline and will prepare frames in advance (mix video and audio tracks together, overlay text over video, apply effects, color correction, whatever else you do etc etc) so that the frames would be ready for when encoder is ready to compress them.