Query - why are people reporting this is not a problem they experienced in Vegas 3.0? (I've seen others post this as well.)

I am having the same problem. I found this post yesterday and it seems like its happening to others. Any ideas SF help? http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=145591&Replies=1&Page=5

Wasn't someone going to send their external firewire drives to Sonic to see if they can reproduce the problem---and it is a problem.

Well, I may have a solution to this problem. I called SF tech support and they made the following suggestion. Go to Start--Control Panel--Display, once in the Display Properties box..click Settings then click Advanced, in the box select Troubleshoot, there it displays a bar for Hardware acceleration, move the Hardware Acceleration to None or away from Full...then apply the new setting.

My first test worked great with no hangups. I'll keep trying to see if this is the answer.

You're going down a well trodden path.

It MAY be that you'll get some relief by turning down or off graphics acceleration. Lots of people have tried it to no effect but I'm sure some have had some luck.

This problem seems to have varied with the Vegas versions and builds. I found that it got noticeably worse with Vegas 4.0b.

To my mind it seems that the cause is 1394 hardware that only just barely cuts it with Vegas. Many of the fixes seem to take some system load away and then a drive on the wrong side of the problem might just squeek over to the right side of it.

Vegas evidently puts more demand on 1394 playback than, say, windows media player does. Vegas cannot always play back a file reliably from a drive that almost cuts it unless you turn off the waveform display or the audioplayback itself. Media player seems to have no trouble with the same files.

The odd thing is that Vegas will play back several tracks of media from the 1394 drive just as well as playing just one track. And yet it still stalls.

Is it a SoFo problem if the drive isn't quite up to snuff? Well, no and yes. The problem reflects badly on them and they need to be able to, at least, certify some 1394 enclosures as being reliable. (Or they could fix their playback problem).

Solution? really, the best I've found so far is to replace your drive enclosure or to abandon 1394 altogether. Neither is whaat you want to hear.

Rob Mack

>>>they need to be able to, at least, certify some 1394 enclosures as being reliable<<<

I agree with this but I am not sure we will see that. SoFo seems to have a long standing 'silence' about recomending anything to use with VV. I remember when it first came out and I was very interested and I asked what 1394 card they would recomend and their reply was along the lines of "we can not recomend one brand of 1394 card over another. The card must be OCHI compliant to work with Vegas Video." I treid to get any brand name out of them so I replied asking if, say, a generic $40 card would be worse than a $150 'brand name' card and again all they said was "Price does not matter. Any card will work as long as it meets the OCHI requirements." However they will say what will not work with VV (You can work with HD but you can't output HD) but they seem to stay away from naming names overall and they seem to stay away from saying what will work in the future. (No reply about the BlueFish cards or plans for better EDL import/export as an example) At times is makes a hard decision harder IMHO.

On the other hand you do have a support team that will go out of their way to help solve an issue, such as this whole external firewire drive issue, even if it is not the software causing the problem. Somehow I see this as a weird trade off because they could, like other companies, recomend something very specific and if it didn't work just say "Well it works here and no one else has the problem with the same set up" but instead they sort of say "Anything will work" (I.E - minimum requirements) and if it doesn't, bend over backwards to help you get it working. (Did that make sense?)

But yes, 'certify' items for use with VV would be awesome. I mean why not? Drivers now seem to have to be "certified for use with windows" or else you get a warning when you try to install - so why not hardware for VV? Sort of a window pops up and says "We are sorry the firewire drive you are using is not certified for use with Vegas Video. Use of this drive may cause problems. Do you wish to continue?"

Or maybe not. :)

rmack...I didn't make one point clear. My situation is similar but different from Jessariah. I'm not using a 1394 drive, he is. However, I was having the hangups. I'm not 100% convinced I got the best solution from SF, but it will work for now.

The point is that no one over at Sonic Foundry has experienced this issue and thus they are helpless to do anything--That is why they offered to test it on a drive that was having the problem---I was wondering if anyone had sent one in..

Rxt,

Yes, a drive and enclosure was sent in and what they found was that it really truely did not work on their system. They then swapped the disk from a none working enclosure into it and it still didn't work. Oh, and the disk from the non-working enclosure was just fine in the known working one.

The conclusion was that the enclosure was the problem and that's fair enough. However, we know that these bad enclosures will work for just about any other task. For instance they can play the same media files just fine as long as you don't use vegas to play them. And these enclosures don't balk more when you stack media files on the timeline. The number of media files being accessed doesn't seem to be the problem.

I just bought an ADS Dual link enclosure and put the disk from a bad drive into it. Works fine. Better than any enclosure I've owned yet. I was very reluctant to spend money on another 1394 enclosure since NONE of the previous ones had worked well. I'm pleased with this box and will buy another.

My only criticism of the ADS case is that the external power supply has a multipin connector that comes out of the drive's socket and would be impossible to replace while travelling. The cases with an internal power supply just use an appliance cord that you can buy at radio shack in a pinch.

Finally, you might want to check inside your enclosure to make sure it was built with the right ribbon cable. My Acom disk came from the factory with an ATA33 cable. I replaced it and it now works much better. Not perfect but it cut out about 90% of the stalls.

Rob Mack

Well it's beyond me what causes the problem but it's pretty disturbing to hear that you have it with an internal disk.

It doesn't seem as if system speed is an issue but it does seem to relate to how fast the disk can stream data and maybe something to do with the way Vegas accesses the data.

It does seem to relate to audio. Or maybe the act of getting the audio. Or maybe keeping it in sync with the video or with the waveform display or with the audio peak file...

Generally, you can get good playback when you do any of the following
-mute the audio
-turn off the display of waveforms
-rerender the audio to a separate file

None of which works in the trimmer, unfortunately.

One thing the trimmer does have in common with the timeline is that it uses peak files. If you hit F5 you can rebuild the file. That might give you some relief. I just now tried it with a file that stalls in the trimmer (from a bad drive) and was able to play it all the way through.

Sometimes it seems that the stalls crop up after changing your zoom level.

Aside from the above work-arounds you could start hunting around for drive performance tweaks. I've heard some claims that you'd do better if your media drive were all alone on it's own channel rather than being a slave drive.

There is no hard an fast solution that I know of-just a lot of wishful tweaks.

Rob Mack

I was hoping someone would make that point. It's not a good idea for SoFo to start recommending enclosures. On the other hand, they've got a problem with some enclosures on the market and they probably need to acknowledge it or fix Vegas to be more forgiving. In fact, they tried to fix it from VV3 to V4. It seems like they've also addressed it in the updates but those seem to be making things worse.

There is work they can do on the interface that would start to address this. For instance, maybe if you could turn off the waveform on just audio tracks it might help (Until you start to work on audio-then you're screwed). Maybe always loading peak files into ram would help. Maybe allowing them to be put onto a different drive would help. Maybe there's a calculation problem with the peak files when you zoom the timeline. Maybe the peak file timing is rounded more than it ought, maybe there's a "denormalization" problem and it just happens to be worse with a marginal 1394 enclosure.

Obviously I don't know. Yes it's a hardware problem. Vegas makes marginal hardware fail.

Rob Mack

I am not sure if this will help..but I had the problem some time ago. I noticed that I had Real, Quick Time, Media Player, Win DVD, Power Player all on my system. I made QT basically hybernate unless I assigned a clip to it, did the same for Real, through Power Player in the trash and made Win DVD for mpeg 2 only...then upgraded to Media Player 9. The problem seemed resolved- and I was not using firewire drives. I had an internal raid when I was having the problem. But, this could have been some conflicts on my system only and not yours! Take a look at your players and see if there are any conflicts between them???

VERY sound good idea. Real is an especially intrusive program and I've notice that QT has a system tray widget going now. I've not been able to root that one out yet but it seems like a registry edit. You surely don't need QT to have hooks running at all times.

When in doubt, start eliminating things.

I'll try the acceleration fix. This hasn't happened to me on my internal media drive. All of my drives are 7200rpm and the firewire card is a powered one by ADS -- about a month old, so I doubt that's the problem.

This has to be a glitch in the software, because there is no regularity to it -- it may not happen for an hour, then suddenly it happens 3 times in the same clip. Also, it NEVER HAPPENS (at least for me) in the timeline...yet the media is being played from the same drive/source file.

Real is a disease! I have it on the "family" PC, just in case I need to watch something that requires it, but would never put it on any of my personal PCs. Startup Cop is a freeware program that is still floating around on the web. It is the easiest way to prevent programs like Quicktime from loading at startup.