AVCHD VMS 10 Awful playback rate!

plasmavideo wrote on 3/15/2011, 2:36 PM
I have the full version of Vegas at home, Vegas 8, and we bought VMS 10 for a simple project workstation at work.

The workstation at work is a 3.0G Dual XEON machine, XP, with a Quadro FX4000 video card. Granted, it's a few years old, but should still be pretty potent.

The machine at home is less powered, with a middle of the road everything. It plays back AVCHD files from a Panasonic camera in preview very smoothly in Vegas.

On the machine at work in VMS 10, even with the lowest draft resolution selected, and with the optimize for preview ticked, I barely get a few frames per second of very blocky video playback from the same files. I've tried matching project settings to media, and all of the normal things I would do in Vegas Pro to optimize the situation, but nothing seems to work.

Any ideas on improved performance, or is the VMS engine that much different from Pro? Is there something that you guys have generally found in machine configurations that can cause this?

I am blown away by the value per dollar of the software, but this problem has me stumped.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 3/15/2011, 4:09 PM
This is NOT normal. VMS10 is way faster for AVCHD than VMS8, especially on such a machine. I'm sure there's something else to blame here. Open the Task Manager, without Vegas open, and check what process eats out the CPU. If none in particular, open Vegas and check that again. Also, right click on an AVCHD file, and check which DLL decoder is used to decode it, it should be compoundplug.dll.
plasmavideo wrote on 3/15/2011, 5:46 PM
I'll check the decoder tomorrow when I get back to work, but I can tell you that without Vegas MS open, there is only about a 1% CPU usage, when it's open, but idle, there is only minor CPU activity. The minute I hit play, the CPU usage rockets to 98% on all 4 cores (hyperthreading). This is with a bare-bones file - no filters, etc, in a virgin project with no envelopes active that I'm aware of.

Let me also re-iterate, I'm comparing it to Vegas Pro 8, not MS8.

I'm wondering if there is something in the corporate security lockdown that is interfering, but I remember when I tried the trial on my regular desktop with identical antispyware, antivirus, etc, the files played smoothly on that single 3G P4. (I know, I know, but corporate IT insists on AV and ASW junk on that segment of the network).

I'm not using a RAID on that computer, but I do have a single 7200RPM SATA media drive, so it should not be a drive throughput issue.
Eugenia wrote on 3/15/2011, 10:24 PM
Pro and Platinum use the same engine. It's just that Platinum 10 is 8 months older than Pro 10's, but with the h.264 optimizations in place, so Platinum is only about 20% slower than Pro, but still up to 200% or 300% faster than previous Vegas versions. So what you're seeing is obviously not right.
plasmavideo wrote on 3/16/2011, 9:16 AM
Thanks for your replies.

I checked, and compoundplug.dll shows up in Vegas as the decoder.

I've disabled all antivirus and related software, as well as checked for anything oddball running in the background, so I'm stumped. I'm going to try a re-install of the software, but I doubt that will help. I did install the latest Nvidia drivers just in case.

This computer also has Premiere Elements on it, which I don't and won't use, so I'm going to remove that in case there is a conflict of some nature.

If I ever find the answer, I'll post it here.

Again, thanks.
Markk655 wrote on 3/16/2011, 10:22 AM
One other idea brute force solution is to try uninstalling VMS10 and then reinstalling.