Anyone having problems with USB drivers?

larry-peter wrote on 5/8/2013, 11:59 AM
Vegas' performance has taken a nasty hit again for reasons I'm still trying to sort out. This is on my system #1. The only change I have made to my system recently is installing a Rosewill USB3 card about a month ago. I didn't notice any differences at all until now, but my project were all pretty small and simple. Now, when working on a project with a 2 hour timeline - AVCHD footage (like usual) if I move the cursor to a new position on the timeline Vegas is non-responsive for up to 15 seconds. Playing the timeline in Preview/Auto is jerky and audio will drop out for several seconds at a time.

No USB drives are connected and I have disabled the new USB card with no change. Could just having the USB card driver installed be a problem? I need to get footage from USB drives into this project, but just to pull them onto my RAID. Not loading any footage to the timeline from USB drives directly.

Windows system logs don't give any clue to where the problem could be originating. Footage is stored on eSATA G-speed RAID, as usual, and the size of the project timeline seems to be the issue, not footage itself. I can take any clips from this project and they play fine in a clean timeline until a certain number of clips are added and then performance goes to ****. Checked clips individually and no particular clip is the problem. And have worked on projects 4 times this size in the last few months with no issues.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Comments

videoITguy wrote on 5/8/2013, 12:16 PM
Installation of the USB card could have made a huge difference on your system - mostly depending on what slot it gets set in to vis-a-vis the way your PCI bus is setup (note - read that motheboard/chipset design)- Likely your installation has caused the board to reset some values - which merely uninstalling the driver might not affect.

Do you have a clean system restore available before your install of any hardware on the PCI bus?
JasonATL wrote on 5/8/2013, 1:03 PM
I had hangs in Vegas that I eventually diagnosed to a USB CF/SD card reader. The card reader's "drives" (the letters) were always visible regardless of whether there was a card inserted. This seemed to really confuse Vegas, which would seem to query those "drives" and wait for their responses. Removing them finally fixed the problem.

This might or might not be related to your problem, but I thought I'd offer in case.
larry-peter wrote on 5/8/2013, 8:44 PM
Thanks for the suggestions. I do have a ghost system drive. I'll try that.
videoITguy wrote on 5/8/2013, 9:39 PM
Atom12- I reread your op in this thread and while I had jumped to the conclusion that your system resources went totally downhill, I can't help but think you need to troubleshoot your time line a bit more.

You do not indicate how the codec and source of clips maybe different from your past projects if at all- but I wonder about they typical isolation technique - where you condense the timeline lenght in halves. Try running the project at half-size, quarter-size, etc - what I mean is half the length of runtime.....
larry-peter wrote on 5/9/2013, 9:29 AM
videoITguy, the clips are from the same source as always, AVCHD from a Panny AF100. There are a couple of .png stills that were generated from the timeline, and Color correction, curves, and levels. No third party FX.

I can't do too much testing until I get this project out, but last night I removed all extraneous footage and condensed the timeline down to the actual run length, 15 min. The clues I have now aren't logical at all - some portions of the timeline still have this terrible performance, other parts play fine (and nothing obviously different between the sections). Performance monitor shows a lot more activity than usual from my eSATA raid during the poor performance, so I started thinking maybe it is the clips, or a failing sector on the raid. But if I copy just that section to a clean timeline it plays fine again. And AJA speed test and chkdsk both show the raid is ok.

As soon as this project is delivered, I'm going to remove the USB card and see if I can get the system configuration back to where it was. The ASUS P6 bios seems able to reset the PCI bus configuration manually. That card is the only piece of the mystery that hasn't been eliminated totally.
larry-peter wrote on 5/9/2013, 11:34 AM
Here's some new info, still trying to sort out what it means. I downloaded BM's speed test to run on the RAID and I'm getting 140mB/sec read and only 12mB/sec write! I just added some footage and it's taking forever to build peak files. I'm not sure if the RAID drives or controller may be failing, or if the USB card has screwed up the systems' i/o.
videoITguy wrote on 5/9/2013, 12:05 PM
Okay I think you did an excellent isolation test of the timeline and you did well to check the raid with BMD values.

While, I can't tell you the details, it is possible that USB3 connected to Sata drives might have interfered with the SCSI like hardware for your raid card. Check the device config to see if SCSI values are reporting any question marks. This is back to what I first suspected with your bios getting diverted in different directions with the PCI bus.

Or, as you suggest, could be looking at an imminent Raid card failure. You may have to take it down and isolate the individual drives first to be sure they independently test well and they probably will.