Tuesday 19 April 2011

What is the difference between Sony Vegas pro 32 bit and Sony Vegas pro 64 bit ?

Dheeraj Gautam asked this question on the Sony Vegas user group on Linked-In. I thought the answer might be useful to others so I am posting it here too.

32 more bits? Sorry couldn't resist :-)

Vegas pro 64 bit is a fully 64 bit application. What this means is that on a 64 bit operating system like Windows 7 64bit Vegas can use far more RAM.

On a 32 bit system the maximum amount of RAM available is 4Gb. With HD footage and larger and larger files to deal with this is often not enough and so the computer has to keep swapping data from memory to the hard disk. Causing slow performance and sometimes crashes.

On a 64 bit system you can address up to 192Gb which provides far more room for data to be kept in RAM. (Theoretically up to 16Tb but Windows limits this to 192Gb :-)

The down side is that your plug-ins also need to be written for 64 bit in order to use them in 64bit Vegas. There are new 64bit plug-ins coming out every day and the OFX architecture that Sony have adopted means we will get access to many more plug-ins.

I personally run Vegas on a 64bit system (with 8Gb of RAM), but I have both the 32 and 64 bit versions installed. I can work on a project in the 64bit version with all the performance benefits that brings and then if I need to use a 32bit plug-in I can open the same project in the 32bit version of Vegas. Best of both worlds and one of the reasons I love Vegas.

Any comments or questions gratefully received. Neil

14 comments:

  1. I have the 32 bit version of SVPro 11 and I have a pc running on Windows 7 at 64 bit. What's the downside. I do short films in HD from 5-20 minutes long. Pls respond to ed.robles26@yahoo.com. Thanks. great article

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Eddie,

    As I said in the article it's possible to run Vegas in 32 bit and 64 bit versions on a 64 bit version of Windows.
    Provided your PC has more than 4Gb of RAM you should see some performance improvements in the 64 bit version.
    The only downside is that plugins written for 32 bit will not run in the 64 bit version.

    Hope this helps.

    Neil

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi,

    I'm having some trouble here. I just bought a new 64 bit machine, and 64 bit Vegas. Very nice except that QuickTime causes Vegas to crash at the "Creating File I/O manager" stage of the splash screen. QuickTime is only 32bit. So I uninstall QuickTime and Vegas works fine. However I use a lot of QuickTime movies and also export from After Effect in QuickTime Movie format, so this is a huge inconvenience. I do not want to downgrade to 32 bit, since the whole reason I spent extra money for a 64 bit machine was so that I could use 64 bit Vegas. I know that 64 bit programs can only use 64 bit plugins. Do you know of a workaround for this? Is there some kind of an alternative to QuickTime which Vegas can use? Really appreciate your help.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Dom,
    There doesn't seem to be a 64bit version of Quicktime as yet :-(
    I would suggest using image sequences to get from After Effects to Vegas and vice versa.
    By using 32 bit images such as Targa with Alpha you can import and export complex animations with Alpha channels for use in Vegas.
    It also gives a benefit that rendering from After Effects to image sequences can easily be networked and you can re-render just small parts or single frames if necessary.
    What other Quicktime sources are you using?
    Best regards
    Neil

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  5. Thank you for this... :)
    i really didn't understand but now i do !

    ReplyDelete
  6. hi :)
    from what i read i understood that 64 bit is better right ?
    well, i have a 32 bit operating system can i download the 64 bit vegas sony ??

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi there,
      No I'm sorry, Vegas is now 64 bit only.
      You should consider upgrading your computer to 64 bit, there are numerous advantages.
      Cheers,
      Neil

      Delete
  7. what is the difference in vegas pro 11 to vegas 12?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi there,

    Here are the release notes for Vegas Pro 12:
    http://dspcdn.sonycreativesoftware.com/releasenotes/vegaspro12.0.563_readme_enu.htm

    The main differences are that Vegas 12 is now 64bit only and takes advantage of GPU acceleration. It also now supports Panasonic P2 format natively and Sony XAVC.

    Vegas 12 also has the ability to import and export projects from other Non-linear editing systems such as FCP and Premiere.

    Hope this helps,

    Neil

    ReplyDelete
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