Sorry to hear about the problems.

I installed Windows 7 x64 some days ago (as dual boot with XP x32 with Bootcamp plus Windows 7 x64 without Bootcamp on my 2 x quad Xeon Mac Pro) - and after installing the Win updates I downloaded and installed Vegas 8.0c, Vegas 9.0 x32 and Vegas 9.0 x64.
All 3 Vegas's run astonishing well. Preview at 29.70 Fps and my render times cut by 4 compared to XP x32 on the same machine.
An hour ago I rendered an 11:10 minutes AVCHD video in 4:30 minutes.

So: at least here Vegas plus Win 7 works without any problems.
BTW: everything here works without any non-Win 7 and non-Vegas codecs. The only codecs on the machine are the ones that came with Win 7 and Vegas.
Under Windows XP I had issues coming from 3rd part codecs that could make even Windows Explorer crash.

V8c does work in Vista 64 and so does V9.0 32 bit. If Windows 7 has Defender (I think that's what you call it) try excepting V8.0c. Some systems had to do this in Vista 64 bit.
JJK

Yes, Windows Defender could be the problem.

In my experience Windows Defender slows everything down significantly. I disable it on every machine and put on AVG Free. I just did it on two (non-Vegas) machines that I configured Windows 7 RC (32 bit) on and things seemed to speed up. I had Windows Defender on an XP box for a while and it really slowed everything down.

I don't know about Defender, but I don't recommend AVG Free, plus they are different types of products. I used AVG Free for a couple of years, but eventually I started seeing the icon in the tray black, which means it couldn't update the database, and it was because a file got corrupted. I uninstalled and re-installed several times but that problem kept on showing up, so I switched to Avast and I haven't had any problems with it in a year.

I have Windows 7 on an older AMD athlon system with just 1.5gig ram and I am running Vegas Studio 8 Platinum it works fine so far and win 7 on the old athlon seems to run faster than XP did.

I have Vista 64 on my edit machine 4gig ram and Quad core runs Vegas 8c pro 32 bit without trouble also I am running the trial of Vegas 9 on same machine without problem so far.

Windows defender can cause problems at times check the exeption section to see if vegas is there.

I realize that I wasn't too specific in my first post as to my frustrations. What I am trying to do is edit AVCHD video from two canon cameras, a HF100 and a HV30. My previous 8c workflow was to import transcode with Neoscene or AVCHDupshift (I prefer the former), bring them into vegas and output generally to either DVDA or MP4 for web based delivery. The latter being the most common.

Here's my setup and the way I typically run vegas.

Asus P6T deluxe
i7920 2.66ghz quad with HT enabled (not overclocked).
12 GB of OCZ PC3 12800 triple channel ram
ATI 4870 1gig video card (like it matters).
Dell 30" monitor
System HDD is WD blue 500gig sata
Media drives are WD black 1TB sata for projects and SG 1.5 TB sata which is mostly storage. I also have a couple WD mybooks USB that I use to move projects around and store renders.
My only apps are:
V8c, V9 64
Cneform Neoscene,
AVCHD upshift
Sonar 8 64bit.

The rest is stuff installed by the installation of windows7 and basic mobo driver software. I also performed all the windows updates right after completing the install.

Vegas is setup at the default settings. Preview window is docked and set to Preview (Auto)

A 1 minute cineform clip about takes 2:13 seconds with 50% cpu usage.
A minute of the AVCHD source clip takes 1:34 seconds with 80% cpu.
Same AVCHD in V9 is 1:29 with 90% CPU.
No plugins.

Not so bad.

Doing these independent tests kind of opened my eyes. It is working better when I start from scratch. I've been opening projects that are works in progress and I'm having problems with those. Low frame rates and bad audio sync are the recurring issues.

I'm currently rebuilding a project that I started on my other machine and so far the performance is less frustrating. I'm not sure what the difference is.

What I'm curious about now is why the cpu usage is so different from one codec to another. It seems like they should all use about the same amount when rendering. I have know idea what the bottle neck would be.

I also installed the virtual machine and xp mode so now I can run sound forge. It's not as integrated as it is when both apps share the same OS but at least I can do basic editing with a couple extra steps. A new work flow is in order.

I guess I will ride this out for a few more weeks to see if it works better once I figure out the best way to do things.

At the top of my list is media organization. I've got tons of video and I need to get some kind of system.

One more thing, what preview level are you guys using?

Thanks for all the suggestions. William

this probably isn't relevant to your situation, but just FWIW:

I had a project with a corrupted HDV clip. This was from tape; might have been a tape dropout or capture error. Anyway, V8c played the whole clip ok smoothly, with the corrupt part showing a ragged bottom portion of the image as a flat green, but sound was still ok. V9 had the playback freeze at the corrupt part, and then played it jerkily with bad audio sync.

Have you tried the same project in V9?

wm_b,

Your system is very similar to mine, and I've had no end of problems editing AVCHD video with Windows 7 x64 and Vegas 9.0 x32 and Vegas 9.0 x64.

At first, things seemed great. I was dropping MP4 clips into the timeline and editing and previewing smoothly.... Then a few crashes started happening.... After about an hour, I couldn't even load the same MP4 clips into the trimmer without complete blackout during playback.... Then it would show completely red for all the clips in the timeline.

I uninstalled the 32 bit verison of Vegas and when I reinstalled, Vegas couldn't even recognize the same MP4 clips. It's like they are an unsupported format now!

I then installed the 64 bit version of Vegas and went through nearly an identical process.... good at first and slowly worse and worse.

It's a brand new system so there might be other forces causing problems, but I had to share after reading about your problems.

It's definitely an issue with VP9, probably related to memory management, as that's precisely the progression of devolvement that I've experienced.

I'm pretty upset about it myself as I was really excited about VP9, and up until now, it's worked nearly flawlessly for me. I really don't know what I should do.

Steve

I've isolated the problem to Vegas 9.0's mcmp4plug.dll file. If I rename this file (preventing Vegas from loading and using it), Vegas complains about a missing Quicktime plugin when I click on an MP4 clip in the Vegas explorer....

So I installed Quicktime 7.x.x and viola, Vegas 9.0 can now load and edit my MP4 clips without crashing and blackouts during playback!

The only downside is that Quicktime's implementation seems much slower than Sony's partially working mcmp4plug.dll. Previews are very choppy on my Intel i7 computer.

More questions:
1) Why is Vegas using mcmp4plug.dll? Isn't this a mainconcept codec? My MP4s were generated by my Sanyo HD2000.
2) Why doesn't it use mp4plug.dll to decode my mp4 files? Which MP4 clips use this internal plugin?
3) If no internal plugins for the mp4 format are found, why does Vegas resort to using Quicktime? I have CoreAVC installed, which is a fast decoder for MP4 videos.

Could anyone with more codec knowledge please answer some of these questions?

"2) Why doesn't it use mp4plug.dll to decode my mp4 files? Which MP4 clips use this internal plugin?"

I've seen some other threads talking about preview slowness. It's been said that this has something to do with a "new" mpg plugin vs the old one. I wonder if mp4plug is the old and hte mcm one is the new.

Anyone know of a way to force vegas to use mp4plug to see if that helps the preview speed?