What DV charge for the external monitor you used? (Model a Stamp)

If you're hoping a super fast PC will give you true real time previews at optimal preview settings I think you'll be disappointed. AFAIK you can't get true real time on a external monitor for the same reason you can't get real time software rendering. There isn't enough horsepower (yet) even with the system you propose. I'm guessing right now you're using a "slower" system which would explain studder. The more tracks you have, the more complex filters you apply all slow previews down.

Have you tried a dynamic RAM preview? The more RAM you have the more you can preview. You can change the default settings from Options under the Preference menu. This of course is a limted area on the timeline.

Or you can prerender some or all of your project. A file(s) is created, a green bar of the portion selected gets added above the timeline. Slow process yes, but then you'll see real time or close to it.

Drop down the preview quality. Try draft quality. This will get your closer to real time but the quality will suffer somewhat in the preview, don't effect the outcome when you make your final render.

Just for a rought yardstick on my AMD XP 1900+ I get the following preview rates (averaged for a 30 second span including a cross fade transition) when using an external monitor:

best 6.4 frames per second
good 7.3 frames per second
preview 7.9 frames per second
draft 15.4 frames per second

When just using the preview window

best 8.3 frames per second
good 11.4 frames per second
preview 12.8 frames per second
draft 28.7 frames per second

Your milage will varry. I had some other processes running at the time.

Thanks !
Forgot to say that my DV material is DV PAL - 25 fps. The external monitor is connected to a Panasonic MiniDV camera for previewing.
So, it seems that even a 2 GHz with 512 Rimm Ram isn't yet "strong" enough to handle real time playback of transitions and FX ...
Anyway, it'll be much better than the PIII 500 MHz I'm using now ;-)

I have just moved from a 400mhz P3 system with 128mb Ram to a new system that I am still tweeking. It is

P4 2ghz
ASUS P4B266 MB 400mhz FS Bus Intel 845D Chipset
1gb DDR RAM
40gb system drive
80gb Media Drive
GForce 4 64mb AGI video card (PNY)

With the source coming off the network from a firewire drive hung off of my old P3 system I am getting the following FPS:

320x240 Preview window with Preview Quality
Compositing
1 layer Audio
1 layer Text
3 layers Stills cropped for pic in pic
1 layer motion video

24-28 FPS
with square pixels turned on I get 18-24 fps.
This is including fades.

When I turn on the drop shadows for the three still channels, the fps drops to 4.5.

Over all I can't complain about the performance of the system and VV3. Rendering to DV takes about an hour per 1.5 minutes with everything turned on. After Effects cannot keep up with that speed of compositing.

BTW, without the drop shadow and only one channel of Audio, one channel of Text, one pic in pic still channel and one channel of Video (with Crossfades) I still get 27-28 FPS. With Drop shadow - 9fps. One other note, with HSL Filter on the motion track and no drop shadow I still get 15 fps.

The bottom line of this post is to tell you that the frame rate performance of your system should be quite pleasing even though not real time. I do not know many NLE's that can composite what VV does and even come close to real time. If you want to pay $50,000 USD or more you can get real close, but I don't have that kind of investmant at the moment. My new system with O/S, modem, network card 6 channel audio card. etc was still only $1400 USD.

K

I have a P4 2GHz 256 DDRRam

The preview frame rate is 25fps (I'm working in PAL) with no effects or transitions in all the preview methods with 360x288 and also in project size 720x576)

With effects the frame rate is about 17 in the transitions and it descends to 8 with some hard effects like HSL. in best quality preview

With multitrack (3-4) it is about 8-9 fps

Excuse my bad english, please. :-)

Josaver

Thanks again !
I'm wondering what the results will be with a Rimm motherboard and Rimm RAM although I'm not so sure if that has any influence on the preview of a project.
Should something like "Ramdisk" help for faster previews ? (instead of using hard disk space, the system uses a part of the RAM to write temporary files)
I supose I'll just have to try it ;-)

Just a note, the new system has clocked in with MPEG-2 encoding times of 2.8 to 1. For a non-hardware, quality encode, I am pleased! What a differnce. No more overnight encodes for me!

K

With the Boxx turnkey I am seeing just under 2:1 for straight cut DV>Mpeg-2, DVD NTSC template.

I am jealous but my machine only cost $1400. I guess there is a trade off, but I can not complain. I wanted to spend the extra $2K but I didn't have it right now. Starting a new business often means running a little short for a while :) Maybe next round.

K

kkolbo, you obviously have a smokin' machine and got a great deal on it. I just threw this Boxx figure out there because many people have asked how fast it is.

During development and testing of Vegas 3 I was running a PII400 the entire time (our minimum system) with Win2k/scsi drives and it wasn't all that bad, but throw a fast machine at Vegas and you can cut way down on render time. People who have used SF stuff for a few years remember when audio wasn't completely realtime like it is now, and at some point in the not too distant future DV compositing will be the same way- faster than realtime.

Any chance I could get you guys to shoot me the numbers you get with my "Preview Framerate Test" post ? Quick little deal using generated media. The smaller window OHCI speed trick up only seems to affect generated media. With DV clips it doesn't improve the framerate.

Craig H.