Choppy playback in Workspace

Velcro Face wrote on 5/11/2007, 5:44 PM

I've added a subtitle track to a 35-minute video. The task of placing each subtitle has gone smoothly enough, but in reviewing the project I've run into a problem: The playback in the workspace window is so choppy it's impossible to tell whether the subtitles fall in the right place. The video runs at about 2 frames per second at full resolution. There also seems to be a lag between the picture and the subtitles.

My system is an AMD 64 3200+ with 1 GB of RAM running Windows XP, which should be more than sufficient, according to the minimum specs published by Sony. I experience no such choppiness when editing in Vegas. Are there any settings or options I can try (aside from buying a new, dual-core system) to make it run more smoothly?

--
Michael

Comments

MPM wrote on 5/14/2007, 1:04 PM

Personal opinion etc...

Don't think you lack for horsepower. In my experience audio & subs might lag the video very slightly in preview, but that's 'bout it. I think that the biggest strain on DVDA is the audio -- it handles the video end of things in-house so-to-speak -- so I'd suggest checking your audio & related drivers to start with. I think that there was another thread on this not too long ago, but don't recall much more than that.

Velcro Face wrote on 5/19/2007, 5:42 PM

All my drivers are up to date. In order to reclaim as much horsepower as possible, I decided to set up a dual-boot system. I devoted one partition exclusively to video applications, and stripped out everything else. I uninstalled several programs that were loading with Windows. Now when I preview with subtitles, the playback is much smoother.

The biggest culprit seemed to be Windows Desktop Search. You can suspend indexing, but you can't unload WDS without opening the Task Manager and closing four separate services (which I found tends to make the whole system unstable). These services together ate up more than 60 MB of memory.

--
Michael

MPM wrote on 5/20/2007, 9:08 AM

Yeah, I think many developers figure you're only going to run their software, so why not load something when windows fires up. =-{

If you want an eye-opener along with a useful tool, try the free System Internals' Autoruns program available from the Microsoft site... It'll show you quite a list of everything loaded with Windows, & give you the option to have them run automatically or not.

In my experience stopping most services does as much harm as good, but you can usually get away with stopping Task Scheduler, Computer Browser, & Auto Update, which can make a small difference when they kick in periodically. Many services that are set to start automatically can be set to manual without any apparent loss of function -- software just starts them up when needed & if it takes literally a couple of seconds more to start an app, it's a price I'll gladly pay.

I've got an MS mouse & keyboard, and the Intelitype & Intelipoint software generate an enormous amount of traffic to the registry -- I've seen a difference rendering etc. turning those off in Task Mgr.

I often disable the network adapter so I can turn off Virus & Spam monitoring, & that helps -- simply blocking everything at the firewall caused problems, so I found it works much better right clicking on the Network Connections\adapter in Windows Explorer.

And there's always the old standby of defragging discs as needed. While I'm sure that there's better software out there, I've used: http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag finding it tons better than the built-in XP molasses.

Velcro Face wrote on 5/24/2007, 4:29 PM

Thanks for the suggestion about System Internals' Autoruns. I'll download it and give it a try. I also use MS Intellipoint software, and hadn't thought of turning it off. While the playback in DVDA is still quite choppy when compared to Vegas, it's much better than it was.

As for defragging, I've read comparisons that show the built-in MS defragger to be more effective at speeding up start times than either Diskeeper or Perfect Disk. I've never heard of the Auslogics product, though.

--
Michael