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To fix the WIndows upgrade problem, I think I might just slip my boot drive into a another machine, let it update (hopefully), and then switch it back
It should be a winner if Windows 10 doesn't rebel and blow its Activation during the alternating PC drive swap, you may have to reactivate again, maybe not.
If using a spinning drive and not an SSD, I would suggest a Scandisk and full defrag after the last update restart,
many sludge performance issues and mystery quirks can be sorted with that,
without wasting time and money on third party optimization
prayware
EDIT:
I would clone the drive to another drive and put the clone in the other machine to complete/resolve the winupdate merry go round fiasco 
If anything goes bung, you're safely back to first base with the original drive, and can keep cloning to try stuff out without too much fear
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Here's a thought...
Buy a big SSD or set up a RAID 0 using a couple of hard drives.
Disable preview and render using uncompressed YV12 (Sony YUV codec 4:2:0 or Helix YUV codecs ) ... it takes 12 bit per pixel so for 1080p 50 fps you're looking at 1920x1080x50x 1.5 bytes per pixel = 155520000 bytes or 151875 KB or 149 MB/s or 9 GB per minute.
Speed would probably be limited by the read and write speed of the drive.
Then depending on what video card you have, use NVENC or AMF (AMD Advanced Media Framework) to create a high bitrate Youtube version of the clip (let's say 40-60 mbps) , even a cheap GTX 1050 / Radeon RX 550 can do 1080p hardware encoding at around 100-150 fps as long as the hard drives can keep up
For hardware encoding using AMF (AMD RX series and up) , VCEEnc works great: https://onedrive.live.com/?id=6BDD4375AC8933C6%21516&cid=6BDD4375AC8933C6
Then use software x264 over night to create an archival 1080p version let's say 20-25mbps vbr (with highest quality settings, variable bitrate etc) and a "720p" and/or 960x540 versions for download (instead of using the ones from Youtube) -
He's better off time and sanity wise trying a CLONED drive swap first on another PC, taking notes on any special BIOS settings,
and reset Bios to default or optimum on the test PC to accept the cloned drive without drama on first boot,
so hopefully a few drivers will kick in and finish the stubborn update
rather than troubleshooting some obscure code and or hardware hiccup that may be 'just one of those things' that can't be fixed,
or breaks other stuff if it can
KISS
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I did see that for NVENC rendering, the Pascal Quadro's can do 9 streams of H.264 1080P high quality frames simultaneously or 21 streams of the Highest quantity of frames. For consumer GPU's, NVENC limits it to just 2 streams. Sounds like nVidia has crippled the non-Quadro Pascal based cards like the GTX 10X0 series.
High quality of course being relative for hardware encoding, if you can spare a few minutes x264 gives you more bang for your MB.
I hadn't realised you could use third party codecs in Vegas, but you can - using Video for Windows, pick any option, and then change the Video Format to x265vfw or whatever you have loaded. I did a quick test in Vegas 14 and the open source x264 codecs seem a little slower using the CPU rendering then say the Sony AVC codec.
If there is a stand-alone Windows codec that can use NVENC, that would be great. So far, I have only seen NVENC codecs embedded in packages. -
It may be a background process clash, and one of them either doesn't want to play ball or doesn't start up/shut down properly,
or some program has replaced a driver or file or whatever,
or an anti-malware or security thing has jacked or quarantined a file or driver thingie
Perhaps some trial betrayware or software install or uninstall went south a while back and everything has been half snafu till now
An MS file in the update process may be an MS security threat...
etc etc etc or it may be a combination of the above at random causing the update fail
Either way, the update loop isn't going away on its own, so it's time to get medieval and either remove and add hardware (PITA)
or lower the risk of paper cuts, lost screws, badly reseated cards, ram, processors and lab rage 
by simply cloning the drive and trying it elsewhere
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Putting the drive into another machine worked! (i5 dumpster PC)
When the drive was put back into the dual Xeon it did the "Getting devices Ready" thing but froze at 70% on that.
A hard power down and it's now booted and running the latest version of Win 10
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See if the Xeon will now do MS Update with no drama, and if there is, just do the drive swap thing again
Once that's all sorted and the machine is purring properly, consider a refresh install of the latest version Vegas,
and see if the render biz has improved
Locale: United States
Time Zone: AUS Eastern Daylight Time
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Once that's all sorted and the machine is purring properly, consider a refresh install of the latest version Vegas,
and see if the render biz has improved
Still 1:35, no idea why. But considering Vegas 14 was like 4-5 times that, I'm happy. -
It still does the lock up on first boot thing, same as before.
But now at least Win 10 is updated.
It did say it failed to install some update just now, but which one(s).
These are what they were:
UPDATE: Seems like all of them failed as it's trying to do them again. -
Run a Scandisk on the drive and try to update again in the Xeon
and or toss it back to the i5 and let it do more of the updating dirty work, and run a Scandisk on that too.
Sooner or later whatever/wherever the issue is, 'should' get sorted out, and all available updates completed.
Then disable all that stuff, till you are sure you need it, unlikely after this fill up .
Don't be shy about restarts either, they can help a LOT !
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Or you could just fuck it and go back to Windows 7, which will work just fine.
It's not like that old machine needs Windows 10 to run, and all the software will run on Windows 7 as well.
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Putting the drive into another machine worked! (i5 dumpster PC)
I'm honestly a bit surprised that worked without much trouble, but I guess I learnt something today.
When the drive was put back into the dual Xeon it did the "Getting devices Ready" thing but froze at 70% on that.
A hard power down and it's now booted and running the latest version of Win 10 -
Xeons you use are meant to run server workloads (where reliability is more important) not really suitable for video rendering which is a compute oriented workload. Server machines are designed for reliability not speed. It is like MARATHON vs 100m SPRINT. It is no wonder your renders must be a MARATHON race
. I'd suggest you can wait for Ryzen refresh (Ryzen+) getting released some time in april this year. Or otherwise you can invest in Threadripper (expensive but worth if you want to get rid of all the hardware bulk)
Ideally to keep it compact, I'd rather go for a small MATX Threadripper setup ()
All SSD/m2 storage for desktop and large NAS for archival, uploading to youtube and storage of clips. -
Xeons you use are meant to run server workloads (where reliability is more important) not really suitable for video rendering which is a compute oriented workload. Server machines are designed for reliability not speed. It is like MARATHON vs 100m SPRINT. It is no wonder your renders must be a MARATHON race
A Xeon isn't very different from a Core i5 or i7. In many cases it's literally the same silicon. The only difference is that they're binned differently. Xeons are generally chips that run the coolest or with the lowest voltage in the wafer. In practical terms, they should be the most stable. They are often indeed clocked slower too, but that's often a function of the amount of cores. You can't have that many cores going at full blast without creating huge thermal issues.. I'd suggest you can wait for Ryzen refresh (Ryzen+) getting released some time in april this year. Or otherwise you can invest in Threadripper (expensive but worth if you want to get rid of all the hardware bulk)
Ideally to keep it compact, I'd rather go for a small MATX Threadripper setup ()
All SSD/m2 storage for desktop and large NAS for archival, uploading to youtube and storage of clips.
Of course, there is the matter of single threaded speed versus many cores. In that regard you are correct. However, a video workload is one that should scale excellently with more cores. It's not the kind of computation that's very dependent on previous results. Properly written video renderers shouldn't benefit from faster core speeds on less cores, but should simply consume all the horsepower that's thrown at them in whatever form that comes. -
for matching per-core performance of commodity desktop cpus (Ex: Intel 8700K) one would need to invest in serious Xenon CPU which costs in the $5 to $8K range (just the CPU alone). In that price one can easily purchase 8 x of 1950x best Threadripper CPUs.
For a casual video rendering (Not 24x7 rendering thats needed for a movie production house) like Daves requirement Xeons are simply not suitable from price performance comparison. What is needed - a reasonably priced machine which simply renders fast enough and uploads to youtube. -
Putting the drive into another machine worked! (i5 dumpster PC)
When the drive was put back into the dual Xeon it did the "Getting devices Ready" thing but froze at 70% on that.
A hard power down and it's now booted and running the latest version of Win 10
FWIW I found I massively improved the generla reliability and boot speed of my dual Xeon by switching to UEFI, it looks like you’re running legacy BIOS. You can do this in place, it takes about 15 minutes or so, but make sure you have a system drive image backup and copy of your BIOS settings before you do! -
for matching per-core performance of commodity desktop cpus (Ex: Intel 8700K) one would need to invest in serious Xenon CPU which costs in the $5 to $8K range (just the CPU alone). In that price one can easily purchase 8 x of 1950x best Threadripper CPUs.
Why not? Video rendering generally does not depend on clock speed, but on raw horsepower. If that's many slower cores, so be it. Price/performance is also moot if you already have the chips.
For a casual video rendering (Not 24x7 rendering thats needed for a movie production house) like Daves requirement Xeons are simply not suitable from price performance comparison. What is needed - a reasonably priced machine which simply renders fast enough and uploads to youtube.
If it were a gaming PC you might have an argument, but video rendering is one of the handful of occasions where you should be able to throw all your cores at your problem. -
for matching per-core performance of commodity desktop cpus
Some loads - like say, video encoding, if you're not using GPU acceleration, thread.Quoteone would need to invest in serious Xenon CPU which costs in the $5 to $8K range (just the CPU alone). In that price one can easily purchase 8 x of 1950x best Threadripper CPUs.
... at $840 a pop before adding 8 motherboards, 8 sets of RAM, 8 power supplies, 8 SSDs, 8 cases, and 8 heatsinks.. you can't buy 8 1950Xs for the price of one '5k to 8k' Xeon (one n, not two).
Oh, by the way - a Xeon with similar single-thread performance to an 8700K is priced.. similarly to an 8700K.
This is your regularly scheduled reality check.
All that said - if you're going to do GPU acceleration I really don't see any point persisting with a giant dual Xeon machine.. -
All that said - if you're going to do GPU acceleration I really don't see any point persisting with a giant dual Xeon machine..
It doesn't cost me anything to keep using what I'm using. -
All that said - if you're going to do GPU acceleration I really don't see any point persisting with a giant dual Xeon machine..
It doesn't cost me anything to keep using what I'm using.
Well...
There's time and frustration of Windows 10 not working properly, for whatever reason. There's power cost, which will be quite measurably higher even if it is kept relatively idle. -
FWIW I found I massively improved the generla reliability and boot speed of my dual Xeon by switching to UEFI, it looks like you’re running legacy BIOS. You can do this in place, it takes about 15 minutes or so, but make sure you have a system drive image backup and copy of your BIOS settings before you do!
Thanks, I thought you had to re-install to change that.
Just converted to UEFI and it worked fine, seems to be booting ok now.
So maybe all problems fixed now, we'll see... -
I just ran GPU-Z during NVENC and it's showing only a 25% GPU load which cycles down the 5% or so periodically.
I think the reason for that is the NVENC is actually not part of the GPU itself, it's en entirely different part of the silicon and it's own core. NVENC using the NVENC encoding hardware and not the CUDA cores. -
Yes, the encoding is at least partially dedicated hardware - the idea being to be able to encode and decode videos simultaneously with GPU load with little to no impact on performance. They've made a few chips which simply don't have it.
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Did a few more tests with the x264vfw codec in Vegas and it does seem to produce good results at a much lower bitrate then the Sony and Mainconcepts codecs. Also the lower the bitrate, the faster the x264 codec encodes the video. This is using CPU rendering.High quality of course being relative for hardware encoding, if you can spare a few minutes x264 gives you more bang for your MB.
I hadn't realised you could use third party codecs in Vegas, but you can - using Video for Windows, pick any option, and then change the Video Format to x265vfw or whatever you have loaded. I did a quick test in Vegas 14 and the open source x264 codecs seem a little slower using the CPU rendering then say the Sony AVC codec.
If there is a stand-alone Windows codec that can use NVENC, that would be great. So far, I have only seen NVENC codecs embedded in packages.
Now in theory, the x264vfw codec should be able to also do NVENC encoding since it uses the libav library from ffmpeg that is compilable with cuda and NVENC support. However, I gather the nVida licensing doesn't allow for NVENC to be freely distributed in open source software like the x264vfw project. You would have to download the nVidia NVENC SDK and compile x264vfw yourself I guess with the libav CUDA and NVENC compile flags enabled.
If anybody wants to try x264 in Vegas, I have attached a screen shot of the settings in Vegas 14. The 4000 kbits/s bitrate was just an experiment with low bitrates. It gives a 83MByte file for the two minutes 1080P 50P render.
The different VFW FourCC settings do nothing but change a FourCC string in the AVI. The renders are absolutely identical.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/
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And on the subject of using CPU rendering - my 2010 era Xeons are capable of pushing over 100fps with x264. As above it's setting dependent - ultrafast preset and a bitrate of 18Mbps racks up 94fps for the sample clip.
I don't recall which Xeons you're using, but surely they can whip my X5650s handily.
None of this tested using Vegas and VFW, and with that no access to comparable settings - sorry, don't run Windows on that. If you or someone else can describe the settings I can perform a better comparison.
E: Oops, hangon, 720p preset. Two moments.
E2: Right, now it's not wasting cycles scaling: Try 135fps at 20Mbps.