No PIP, compositing, fancy 3D or anything like that, just simple fades, dissolves and text overlays... All in DV25 captured from DVCAM.
The playback rate drops below 25 everytime there's a fade/dissolve/text present in the timeline on any of systems I have available.

Kim.

Are you sure your media properties fits the project properties and it's all set properly to DV settings?

Marco

How much below 25 does it drop?

With your set up it shouldn't drop much - certainly should be plenty enough to make editing decisions.

Even with my 1.6Ghz superimposed titles maintain full 25 fps , Dissolves may drop to around 17 but that's no problem for editing.

What sort of numbers are you getting with dual 3.4 s?

What are your preview settings (best, good, preview)?

I find that realtime performance is dependent not only on preview quality, but also preview size.

In Vegas 5, making the preview size larger than 320x240 causes frame rate to diminish.

This didn't happen in V4. Preliminary results in V6 also do not show the problem.

Your mileage may vary,

XOG

From my experiance, going from V4 to V6, I have found a noticable performance hit. I do most of my editing on a laptop (2ghz P4M with a gig of ram). I noticed yesterday that just playing the timeline with no FX or anythying, just the straight captured video on one track, the video was jerky, whereas with V4 it was completely smooth. I have disabled the media manager, and that seemed to help, but it's still nowhere as smooth as V4 was.

MIchael

I echo this concern. If there was one single thing on my wish list, it would be to improve the real time preview. I use a P4 2.4ghz with 1.5 gb of ram. I use a 27" external NTSC monitor and set the screen size to 640 x 480. This helps, but I long for the good ole days of linear editing preview quality. Many clients are not real comfortable with the delay of pre-rendering or dynamic ram previews.

JAB

"How much below 25 does it drop?" "With your set up it shouldn't drop much"

Well, in my opinion it shouldn't drop at all.
But judging from the way you frase it, it is to be expected vith Vegas, just as I feared.
It's way too distracting, I simply can't edit that way :(

I'm always using "Preview Full", except when working with deinterlacing, bluring etc., then I switch to "Good Full". Smaller preview sizes and "draft" are not usefull for anything, right?

Kim.

I guess it comes down to opinion, but I can edit extremely effectively even if preview temporarily drops down to 10 fps or less. Remember this is not output - it's preview to allow you to decide timing, position of graphics, colour correction etc. As I said, if something complex needs full frame rate to decide, RAM render is pretty painless.

Saying it shouldn't drop at all is doing Vegas an injustice. Remember it's software only, so it will depend on many things including the PC specification, project and preview settings and as I mentioned, number of tracks, effects etc. Even hardware assisted systems have limits on how much they can preview without rendering.

I too have been wondering about this... If as Kim says in the original posting that all these other editors offer smoother previewing (and I wouldn't know first hand) - why can't Vegas do it.

Peter and I must be old farts, because I consider the preview, even when 12fps and 360x240 preview to be plenty to edit. On the lineir systems of my youth you did your edit based on knowing the outcome of the setup. You could kind of preview it, but you really didn't know until you committed it to tape and reviewed the edit. You certianly didn't apply all of the effects and transistions at once. You did the transistion to tape and then effects or color were done in another suite. Masking and layering were done on seperate passes. AND yes I walk 4 miles to school in the snow!

You can get similar performance by rendering after the slice, then again after layering, and again after color correction and so on.

This is not saying that realtime output would not be great. It would be and Matrox has just that for a price. It comes down to what you need the most. I need the portability, ease of use and power that Vegas has. If the GPU preview is more important to you, then you need to work with the tool that best suits your needs and workflow. I do not personally believe that there is a BEST product. I do believe that there is a best fit product for each style and job. Don't feel like you are married to one product if it does not suit your needs. No product will fit everything. There are trade offs. Choose what works best for you and use it. You do not need to appologise or complain.

"Preview (Full)"? If you want good frame-rates, it's "Preview (Auto)," then if you've got some need of Full (color correcting, inspecting frame details, etc.) then kick it up to Full and expect the framerate drop. For inspecting a small region, render it out to a new track or just let it cycle through on loop and the frame-rate climbs back up. Generally speaking, though -- watch your previews in a 360x240 window, or out to an NTSC source if it needs to be bigger for your workflow. I'm on a dual MP2000+ machine with a gig of RAM and my RT previews are consistently 20fps and up (unless I'm doing compositing, which is rare.)

"All these other NLE's" that do better RT preview are... Edius and then the HW dependent NLE's. I can't speak about Edius' preview quality, but as for Vegas, you're getting a solid preview with (e.g.) scopes that are completely, full-frame accurate.

Food for thought: let the Vegas 6 bugs get shaken out, or work with Vegas 5 and you're going to have a rock-solid editing environment. I don't understand why you need realtime DV preview at full res (I'm not trying to be confrontational -- I'd really like to know), but think about speed in terms of stability -- while yes, other NLE's might give you a greater sense of responsiveness, wait and see if they crash during a long project or render. This, IMO, is the true factor in the "speed" of an NLE, and computers moreover. All the speed in the world means nothing if your machine goes BSOD halfway through a 15 hour render.

- jim

This is all very helpful for me to put things in perspective - I just don't have lots of video editing experience - and I wasn't sure what to expect - though, come on now - wouldn't you really rather edit at full framerate and resolution ?

One thing I've noticed on my older slower systems is that straight DV footage actually played better on my NTSC monitor if the preview was set to full.

There's a little performance hit in scaling it down in auto mode and then scaling that back up when you output over 1394 to a passthrough converter.

However, fx and transitions process faster at a smaller playback size so you make it up at small sizes.

Rob Mack

wouldn't you really rather edit at full framerate and resolution ?

Of course. And I'd rather be making millions making movies the way I want to as well, but... :D

- jim

> " ..... walk 4 miles to school in the snow!"

You were lucky! We had to hop!

"I don't understand why you need realtime DV preview at full res (I'm not trying to be confrontational -- I'd really like to know)"

I guess it's a psychological thing.
Everytime the framerate drops I'm "distracted", or "annoyed", and that makes it hard to maintain concentration/focus and a sense of flow in the editing process.
A lot of the editing I do relates to music and rythm, so to me it's much the same as when working with audio while there's clicks, pops, dropouts or distortion in the sound/output.

Admittedly I'm a "spoiled kid", coming from an background in audio/music where everything incl. effects is reatime, all the time.
But I don't think I have unrealistic expectations when it comes to video. I know the differences in the nature of video and audio streams, and the number of calculations required for video processing. I'm not trying to do color correction, compositing and fx's all at once on a software-only NLE.

Like I wrote earlier all those other NLE's can maintain full framerate preview on my setup's, but Vegas can't.
Maybe it has something to do with Sony's "superior" DV codec being to heavy on the CPU? But I can't even get a decent framerate on a dual 3.6 Xeon?

Kim.

I think your setings are simply wrong. You should get fluid playback with a dual Xeon.

I tried Premiere Pro lastly and it was slightly better in term of FX preview frame rate, but there was no dramatic differences.

Do you preview in "preview" quality mode or good or best?

I agree that there must be something interfering. With DV, I just set up a three track senerio. Top track title. Next track vid at 70% transperent. Third track Video. I used crossfades for transitions on the vids. At preview Auto with a 360x240 I never fell below 25fps. That is with a single 2.8 P4 with 1gb RAM.

When I didn't use transperency, just fades and titles, it stayed 28fps and above. It slowed down when I added the transperency and third video track.

Kim,

I think you raise some interesting points. If you're gettng better preview in other apps, the question is are their previews as accurate as Vegas's? Or, are they simply more efficient in their processing routines.

Edius, I'm told, is an almost all RT, full res NLE, but I've also been told the output suffers. I know the Vegas codec is among the top five on the first render, and rises to the top on successive renders -- so perhaps you hit it on the nose when asking if this makes the difference.

I also know it's a long-held belief that software scopes are not to be trusted, but the Vegas crew and DSE (for one) have proven time and again that the Vegas scopes are accurate and reliable. Perhaps it's a common belief because other NLE's routinely take shortcuts, where Vegas does not -- and this might explain the RT difference.

Otherwise, I think you're putting across some mixed signals, as well. You say you're in need of consistent rhythm about things to make editing unobtrusive, and at the same time say you're not going for intense FX. So your previews should be pretty close to RT if this is true, but if not it begs the question -- if having things smooth is your highest priority, why the need of full screen preview? It's not like you're inspecting the frames for visual integrity...

Even if you were, there are changes I'd suggest with your workflow and your expectations of Vegas -- for instance, color correction with scopes KILLS Vegas's framerates. This being a well known thing, most of us wait to do CC as a last step after all our edits are in place.

The bottom line is, it seems you can't have your cake and eat it too at the moment. Perhaps a re-write of the Vegas preview code is under way for a later version, but until (and if) then it's not likely anyone will be getting full res, realtime preview internally all the time. So you have to split tasks along the line of maintaining consistent FPS (shrink the preview window, lower the quality settings) in order to establish your rhythm, and then, once it's in place, render out a file and do your CC or other intense FX on the final edit.

As an aside, I too put rhythm of shots higher on my priority list than most other things. I spend a lot of time watching films for this sort of thing, and even if I'm doing a small project -- like a 1min, 20sec artist profile video that I did recently -- I cut for rhythm and timing over any other method. A lot of my work uses a musical backdrop, and even simple things like fades are measured for how they "feel" -- in other words, I never set fades to a static, consistent length of time but try to let other elements dictate how they flow.

- jim

This is one area where Vegas is different than most other NLE's. It doesn't matter how many tracks you have within reason, you still get "real time" preview of applying changes, regardless. NOBODY else does that that I'm aware of. So while other NLE's may get closer to the project frame rate if that's what you define as "real time" but only Vegas gives you "real time" preview of everything you do as you do it. Something has to give, and that's frame rate. Again, not really the fault of Vegas, your CPU even dual at this point in the game can only do so much. Add me to the old fart list that has no problem editing or previewing at framerates of 12-15. Its more getting used to it. If its a little bumpy, so what, big deal. Remember what we're talking about: P R E V I E W not rendered finished product.

There's always Shift+B for that area that you must see in (PAL here) 25fps Preview .. or better Good. I'm getting some real big muslces on my little finger and fore finger.

Grazie