Choppy video preview, Upgrades?

spidermonkey wrote on 3/10/2003, 11:33 AM
Hello All,

I wanted to know what hardware upgrade would be most effective towards eliminating my choppy video preview. Even in "Draft Quality" the playback is choppy when there are a couple of plugins happening. Even simply video cross fades slow the framerate down. My system is currently as follows:

Seagate 10K SCSI drive for my video playback
Matrox G450 (32MB) dual monitor vid. card. (use second computer monitor for preview at slightly lower resolution than main monitor)
528MB RAM
P4 1.5GHz
Win 2000 Pro
Vegas Video 3

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Tyler

Comments

PDB wrote on 3/10/2003, 11:50 AM
As far as I know, adding any effects (even crossfades..) slow down the framerate during preview: depends a lot on the speed of your proc. For these parts, the pros recommend using the dynamic RAM preview (which is very slick...I use this quite often) or prerendering the short segment (which will be slower depending on the effect...)

But there again someone may be able to give you more pro advice...

Regards
Paul
AlexB wrote on 3/10/2003, 12:00 PM
Hi!
Remember: this is not a real time system, just a near-realtime preview. You can choose paramaters/ tradeoffs: picture size, quality,framerate.
Most important is processor speed, you could upgrade to a P4 3.06 GHz. This would however most likely require you to change motherboard and RAM too.
You can evaluate short sequences in RAM Preview, this would improve with more RAM.
A.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 3/10/2003, 12:17 PM
You could also pre-render. I have a p3-667 with 512DDR 2100, and my preview is choppy (as expected) but if I pre-render, i have 30fps playback. Very nice! only bad part is my slow render time due to slow processor (4.5 hours for 23 minutes of NTSC 640x480 with some sfx). :)
PAW wrote on 3/10/2003, 12:30 PM

You say that you use the second montitor on the Matrox at a lower resolution for the video preview window.

I would have thought the best option would be to use a TV via scart to 3 phono connected to your cam/converter and preview via firewire. I think this will give better previews than a large preview window.

You could then use the second display for a bigger workspace for Vegas.

In my experience large preview windows are not the best option.
spidermonkey wrote on 3/10/2003, 3:54 PM
Thanks everyone,

I do have the Canopus ADVC100. Maybe I should somehow use it to send video out to a regular TV or monitor. What is scart? How should I set this up in Vegas, I think I tried to get a regular TV to work for preview in the past to no avail.

Cheers,

Tyler