For h.264 Mpeg4/avchd footage, is best to upgrade to VMS11. You could have bought a cheaper PC and save that $65 required to upgrade. You can install the trial version in parallel to test it.

You can be in preview/auto (no need for preview/half), and as long as:
1. Your project properties are set correctly to mirror your footage's properties.
2. You have no plugins on your events in the timeline loaded
then preview will be real time.

For plugins you must do them at the very end, when the editing has finished. At that point it doesn't matter if it's real time or not. Plugins and most transitions are never real time anyway, no matter what spec PC you got.

"yet can't even do 1fps on the preview when 2 or more layers need previewing and it's making my attempts at Transitions very difficult as I'm having to VRAM buffer every transition just so I can watch the transition effect in realtime.. "

You see, your layers and transitions and effects don't exist as video files, but are merely a set of instructions that must be rendered in real time in order to preview, unless you pre-render them by one means or another.

So the preview fps is entirely dependent on your system's ability to crunch all those numbers in real time. The things that help, as have been detailed many times before, are to Match Project to Media Settings, turn off preview enhancements, and use an intermediate render to take the load off your CPU.


You left out one critical piece of information, that being your source footage, but In the case of AVCHD or DSLR, with GOPs 200-400 frames in length and various flavors of b-frames sprinkled throughout, it's a wonder they preview at all, even without effects and transitions.

Right now, I understand VMS 11 is doing better with this than Vegas Pro 10, which costs several hundred dollars more.

Boy do I feel like a dumbass now - Found the issue after checking my source footage for you guys/gals. Now, I'm doing a some Rally car for a mates Team so I've got multiple sources of video (for Pic in Pic, in-car, outside etc), PNG's of Racetrack maps and normal JPG Pictures all combined so there's alot of source files to check.

Anyway, as a test I rendered one of the track layouts in 25mbps 1080p to see how it looked (final product is 1080p 8mbps for the Internet but I hit the wrong 1080p) and then I've made a big mistake. Somehow I've deleted the original PNG image of the track and re-added the 1080p movie version instead of the PNG (I haven't a clue how/why etc, must have been tired) which is slowing eveything down, the 25mbps file won't play smoothly even on it's own.

Now I've figured that out I've a play and I've found I can have a maximum of 10 video lines all doing 1080p 8mbps with no slow down in the preview window.

Again, I haven't a clue how/why I've added a 1080p movie of a tiny PNG but at least I've found the issue!

Hi Ian,

When I was using VMS10P, I was also having major problems with the preview (about 3-4 SECONDS per FRAME <-Yes, I said that right) though I never had a problem with VMS9P. I work with 640x480 AVI files from a Canon Powershot S5IS.

A test with the Vegas Pro 10.0d trial showed no problem and the VMS11P trial also showed no problem.

I went through the tech support process and showed them the extent of the problem and Sony, much to their credit Thank You Very Much, upgraded me to VMS11P.

Try the trial version of VMS11 and see if you still have preview problems. Make sure you document everything by shooting video of your screen, so you can show Sony what's going on. If you open a tech support ticket, be patient. It will probably take them upwards of a week to respond initially, but after that their replies should come back within a day.

Good Luck,

Jon