Frustration w/ VMS Platinum 7

tonytone wrote on 5/24/2007, 1:21 PM
I bought and installed VMS Platinum 7 on my Windows PC (P4 3.2 GHz HT, 2 GB RAM) based in part on the positive reviews it got; I have no issues w/ the video capture aspect of it (it can capture HDV footage from my Canon HV20 camcorder just fine). The "problems" begin when I attempt to open the saved footage (12 GB m2t file--I captured the entire tape to disk) in VMS--as soon as I single-click on the file in the VMS File Explorer, VMS seems to hang for around 5 minutes or so before it eventually responds to my actions...maybe because it attempts to read the entire 12 GB file in order to obtain its file properties? Then after all this--when I double-click said file so that I can open it, VMS hangs again for another 5 minutes or so before it eventually loads the entire file for me to edit/whatnot. Given all this, my question is...is all this normal? If not, then what would cause VMS to take forever (figuratively speaking) to open such a huge m2t file? I mean, it's one thing if it has to take time to open such a large file...but for VMS to take a long time to respond when all I did was select (i.e., single-click) the file? I don't know of any other program that I've personally used that exhibited similar issues just from my having selected a file...

FWIW--I don't have any other programs of significance running concurrently on my PC, all anti-spyware/virus utilities were disabled prior to running VMS, and AFAICT VMS is running at 95+% CPU utiliization.

And on top of all that, when I playback the as-yet unedited footage in the preview window, it plays back at a mere 9-10 fps...even with preview window sized at 320x240 and set to draft picture quality. In comparison, when I load it in Nero 7 using the Nero Vision utility (which BTW on my computer doesn't take nearly as long as VMS does to open said file, nor does it have the single-click issue I described earlier)--and yes, I know that Nero Vision isn't in the same league as VMS...but that is besides the issue I'm about to point out--Nero doesn't drop nearly as many frames during preview window playback (I would even go as far as to say that it's playing back at near 25 fps). Heck, even Windows Media Player 10 can play back the raw m2t clip more smoothly (in a larger window, I might add) than Vegas does on my PC!

So...do I just need to capture smaller-sized raw (i.e., unedited) m2t clips so that VMS doesn't choke when loading much larger clips? I would find it hard to believe that VMS struggles w/ loading very large (12 GB) captured m2t files...especially when I've read elsewhere that some others claim that they've had no issues loading similarly-sized files in VMS. And before someone suggests that I just need a faster computer (not that I wouldn't consider building one)--I've also read anecdotes from others who've had success running VMS on similar non-Core2Duo CPU setups...and even then, how would one explain why my "slow" PC can play back raw m2t clips at near 25 fps in Nero or Windows Media Player (in all fairness I don't know for a fact that it's doing 25 fps but I can tell that it's definitely NOT doing 9 fps), but yet can only do 9 fps in VMS?

I really want to be able to continue using VMS Platinum, but unless I can get the above issues resolved...there's no way I can put in a good word for it.

Comments

stevec5375 wrote on 5/24/2007, 2:41 PM
Don't feel alone, I have the same problem with 1.05GB VOB files I ripped from a DVD.

dsieber wrote on 5/27/2007, 6:46 PM
I just purchased and installed it 30 minutes ago, and I'm already here looking for a solution to the same problem. You are more patient than me -- there is no way I will wait five minutes for an app to select a file, that's completely unacceptable. In my case, the file is a 2.2GB MPEG2 file.

Also, DVD Architect will not install on my Vista system (everything has problems on Vista :-), and the online registration crashes. Three serious problems in under 30 minutes. Very unimpressed so far...

I guess I will try to split my giganimous 2.2GB file into something smaller that VMS can handle.
4eyes wrote on 5/30/2007, 8:50 PM
My system is a P4 2.8Ghz HT 800FSB computer, 1 gig.

Using VMS 7.0a I load a .m2t HighDefintion 4 gig file in about 3 seconds. Building preview graphs can take over a minute on large files (you can disable this under 'Options | Preferences'

A 4 gig standard defintion file is about the same.

Your 12gig HighDef file may have some corruption in it. Sometimes a glitch in the tape can cause a bad spot in the recording and VMS is having trouble reading it but I don't think so. I have corrupt .m2t files recorded from a bad tape and they still load pretty fast. The corruption will show up when editing them. It's possilbe you have corruption at the beginning of the tape maybe?
I usually don't capture all the way to the end of the tape into the blank section (usually).
I try to time my captures to 20 minutes or less so I can fit the file onto a single layer 4gig dvd.

The jumpy previewing for the Highdef mpeg video is normal for this version of VMS. This may be corrected in the next release (version 8), I don't know. You can get full previewing by converting the video to the cineformhd intermediate codec, this is better for frame accurate editing.
It does help to watch the tutorial dvd and view the "Read Me" & documentation.

This doesn't help your problem except to know that others do not have this problem.

I would suggest to mark in & out sections of about 20 minutes to render a new 1080i .m2t file of about 4gigs. Then load that file into VMS and see if you have the same problem. If VMS has trouble rendering a new file then there is corruption in the original file. You can isolate the corruption by splitting around the corruption. This is a limitation of mpeg2 recording & editing, corruption in mpeg2 files.

Taking for granted you system is performing properly and the harddisks are running in DMA mode, or course sometimes shouldn't take things for granted.
mickbadal wrote on 6/7/2007, 9:30 AM
I'm using VMS 6.0b on a PC with 1/2 GB RAM. I've loaded a single file containing an hours' worth of video (DV AVI file about 13GB in size), and it comes up in about 10-20 seconds. Takes a while longer to build the audio peaks, but then it operates fine.