Agree with Forum Admin as the Dynamic Preview RAM is the culprit somewhere in the chain of Vegas<-->memory<-->swap file.

You might try rebuilding your page file. If you only have one on your C: drive:
-set it to a low setting, like 128MB - 256MB (don't turn off completely)
-reboot
-Defrag the drive where your page file will be
-Increase page file size to 2 GB or so (guideline 1.5x physical RAM max)
-reboot

I get similar problems when I (rarely) work with HDV native mpg with effects and my Dynamic RAM is set low, then reviewing loops of regions in different sections of the timeline take time to swap. Never had problems with DV, though.

Edited:
Did you check your XP power management settings? Turn it all off and see what happens.

Should I be able to get somewhat realtime with 1 clip over another with about 50% opacity. That is it, just 2 clips and opacity?

In preview (auto) I crawl to 2fps. Then jump to 28 or so, then back down....

I did everyhing mentioned in this forum that I have not done before....

If I change to Preview (full) I get 29 for a second or 2 then it drops again...

I watched my System Resources and the CPU maxed at 19%. Page files, 900 megs.

Opacity at even 99% is a render performance killer.

For having 2GB of physical ram, plus 900MB of your page file in use, what's happening is you are swapping memory to and from your hard drive. Thus the delays. When you select another section without the effect, the system is swapping the previous memory out to the hard drive, in case you come back to it soon (caching).

You are using 2GB to 2.9GB of RAM. No offense, but what on earth do you have running besides Vegas? RAM Drive, huge Dynamic RAM preview (within Vegas), SETI?

Bottom line, it sounds to me like you are using one of the most grueling performance effect (opacity) with a system bottlenecked with page swapping.

No offense taken :) Yell at me, call me an idiot, I just want this to work.

I actually had the preview ram set to 512 at that moment as I was chaning it randomly to see if anything works.

As for other items running, almost nothing... My windows pagefile is set to my SATA Raid with a 1024 minimum and 3000 maximum... No good????

Hah!

I did some similar complaining about a performance problem with a particular web authoring program. This year they actually sent 8 or 9 engineers to our office to look at what I was doing (and to talk about features they want to put into the next version)

So they were all looking over my shoulder when I did one of the handful of everyday things that made it grind to a halt. They got the idea really quick! And I got the attention of a very nice engineer who fixed 8 or 10 major problems that had existed for the last 3 revs of the application.

So, yes, letting people watch over your shoulder is helpful.

Rob Mack

We don't need to look over your shoulder - we just need the veg file. I didn't see what effects you were using.

Something that I picked up on in an earlier post - did you say that the opacity is momentarily not 100% somewhere in the timeline?

If so, be aware that ANY opacity less than 100% anywhere in the timeline, no matter how short, will impact the render time for the whole project a lot, and maybe even the preview rate.

Steve

You could try moving it off of your media drive. If Vegas is trying to read media files from it while writing the page file then maybe that's a problem. Maybe.

You know, I used to have problems with firewire drives and playback, but they would go away when I turned the timelie thumbnails off. It seemed that Vegas didn't play well with that drive while trying to get media and sfk files at the same time. It was a hardware issue, a shoddy bridge board I think, and not directly related to your problem. But it might be similar.

The fact that your CPU is hardly working suggests to me that it's mostly waiting for data from the disc drive.

Rob Mack

Okay. As a comparison I tried this on a 2 GHz P4 with a gig of DDR1 ram. The media was coming from a firewire attached disc. 2 DV25 clips. I put one on the track above the other and set the top one's opacity at 50%.

I got playback at 12 fps. preview was good/full. Preview ram set to 16 MB, threads set to 4.

When I set the RAM preview to 300 MB I get the same playback performance.

I have a LOT of programs running right now because I'm busily working:
Photoshop 6, flash 8, RealVNC, Vegas, Outlook, Activesync, xplorer2, Word, AVG, Zonealarm, MS Spyware Doohickey, IIS web server.

Nobody thinks your an idiot but there's something going on that shouldn't be and since it's happened across 2 systems it makes me think that it's something you consistently do. Could be a conflicting program, could be a hardware setup, could be a Vegas configuration.

Rob Mack

That's truly one of the great things about going to a Vegas training session, even the beginners ones. I've probably learnt more about Windoz conventions than anything else at them but boy if I look at my overall productivity across everything I do, even excluding Vegas, the costs have been recouped many times over.
Bob.

Sony Support?

Just click at the top of this screen (where it says Support)! Then click on Technical Support.

I noticed a similar issue a while back where the preview would start off fine and then after a few seconds it would start to stutter and then get better again. for a few and then stutter, etc. I could stop the play, or close and re-open the project and then restart it and it would be good for a few seconds and then stutter for a few, etc...

What I found to be my issue was the timeline updating behind the preview window (full screen). When the position bar would get to the end, the timeline would scroll left and the frame rate would drop until the timeline (screen) was updated. I found to zoom out on the timeline until I can see the entire (or most) of the project and the problem went away.

Of course this is on a p1.8. I'm not sure how much affect this would have on a faster system. Just a thought...

I suppose that if you can't get someone to come look over your shoulder you could at least let someone into it via remote desktop sharing, netmeeting, or realvnc. A remote user can't see the video play but they could look through your system to see if they can see anything.

I'm sitting here at home playing a loop of two tracks of video, one set to 50% opacity, on an Athlon64 3200+. My playback is about 27 fps and the CPU is at 90%. Your system should be able to do this or better.

What city are you in? maybe there's someone close by who'd be interested in helping?

Rob Mack

There is a lot of golden information in this thread.
Stuff I've never heard before as regards settings to optimize CPU performance as it applies to video.
These things may be obvious to those who came to video through an interest in 'puters.
But for others, like myself, computer problems were handled by the "IT Guy" (or gal).
Is there a concise listing of software/hardware settings and other information to lower the learning curve a bit and the frustration level a tad.
Big favour to ask, as many have learned these things the hard way by trial and error over time.
I think a lot of forum users would even pay for such info.
Though I speak for myself there.
Such knowledge would be time saved and money made!

Unless you can afford to hire an IT tech you're going to have to learn it yourself. At my office we have two people who handle basics. That's the boss and myself. It's a 6 person company now but for the first 10 or 15 years it was just him and a writing partner.

Because we need to stay engaged in money making activities, we sometimes hire out for help. We have a technology integrator who has installed racks and fiberchannel and storage arrays, etc, etc. And then we've hired out people from a company called All Bases Covered to set up mail servers, ftp servers, things like that.

As for coming up with a concise list...You want a concise list of everything? The things you need to know are so broad and conditional that it's hard to make a list. And in the time it takes to generate these things the conditions will change.

The key, as far as I'm concerned, isn't in knowing the facts. It's understanding them and being able to use them to come to good conclusions. And, of course, you can give me all the facts you want but you can't understand them for me. I have to handle the comprehension part myself.

So, there are three things that are useful: problem solving skills, research, and hands-on experience.

The hands on experience comes from trying out the things that give other forum members problems, and actually editing video. (I do a lot more of the former than the later, unfortunately.) You get experience by testing and trying.

The research part largly involves reading. Read the forum, read hardware review sites like Tom's Hardware, and make use of USENET groups. I cannot stress this last one enough. Usenet is the oldest forum on the web, with tens of thousands of discussion groups. The best way I know of to search it is through the groups tab on the Google website but even more important is to subscribe to it in some way so that you can post questions.

And don't forget to use Google to search regular web paes as well.

Problem solving, when it comes to hardware, could very well be published as a list or guide. I'll bet there is such a thing on the web. At this point I find that my guesses are getting luckier and luckier so I suppose expereince helps. I've screwed up and fixed plenty of systems.

Here are the problem solving tips I can think of:

--Find out if the problem is unique or if everyone has the same problem. If other people are getting things to work then you should be able to as well.
--Have faith that software and hardware is designed to actually work. Maybe not well designed, but someone somewhere thought it worked well enough to sell it.
--Simplify the problem by standardizing the system, removing hardware, going back to default settings. Get rid of all the custom tweaks because you need to start with a baseline system.
--Start doing tests. Make hypothesis. If I do X I should get Y result. And If I get Y result then what's the next test?
--Be willing to throw out assumptions. Be skeptical. If you get a result, what is the minimum that it could mean? (for instance, know that the main result of a phone survey is that 100% of the respondents answer the phone when it rings. That's the most basic fact.)

Rob Mack

And it's nice to have a guru buddy that eats, sleeps, and gets some kind of sexual satisfaction on binary things.

JJK

I have a similar situation that sometimes occurrs with Vegas 6c on my laptop (P2 with XP Pro sp2).

There is one particular wmv file that gives me fits whenever it is loaded into a timeline. It shows to be encoded with Microsoft MPEG-4 video codec V3 (352x240x15p). In Vegas, I can not play this file without the processor completely bogging down. I can watch the task manager as the cpu usage goes right to 100% and the page file usage starts climbing past 1 GB. Eventually, the computer stops and tells me I need more memory allocation. The preview window just goes black also and the frame number has a little trail of periods after it (like it is working).

As long as I don't try to scrub or play the video, it is fine. I can re-render the file into another wmv and all is perfect! I can load the file into Ulead VideoStudio 9 and all is perfect.

I don't know what it is about this file, but Vegas really hates it!

Mike B

All .wmv's do that to my system. WMV is considered a "delivery" codec. Editing them chokes most machines, I expect, just like HDV m2t.

If I need to edit wmv, I render them to uncompressed, then use that.

Left Brain
Logical
Sequential
Rational
Analytical
Objective
Looks at parts

Right Brain
Random
Intuitive
Holistic
Synthesizing
Subjective
Looks at wholes

I don't claim to have very much of either side,----but it seems we moslty right-brained folks find it difficult to get our heads around technical stuff that seems intuitive to our left-brained friends. We're kind of wired differently I guess. Not a matter of good and bad.
Guess that's why I personally find this community to be helpful.
Though I must say I sometimes feel guilty for taking so much knowledge and leaving behind so little.
I think the really bright folks here have both sides working at about 110%.
A rare combination we call benefit from.
We know the developers in Madison do!
And though Vegas isn't perfect that team is committed to making our NLE consistent.
No easy task.

Thank you again everyone!!!

I have tried more and more items and some of it appears to be working (for now)...

As the thread comes to an end, I will do my best to post a list of System Optimizations after this. (things I did)

A few side notes, I was actually a computer repair person for a few years and somewhat know my way around comptuers. Of course as the technolgy keeps changing I can't keep up. One of the most difficult tasks is I had such high expectations because my editing background was with Premiere on a Matrox Digisuite. The other issue being most of the items I did for system optimization where not the same methods I did for Premiere (as well as Windows 2000). Plus I truely believe Sony needs to fix this entire swap file and preview setting option. It makes no sense to have to continuously change a Preference in order to edit smoothly.

All of this aside, Vegas has it right... It makes sense to just bumb to clips and let them overlap for a transition. Duh! None of this need frames at the end of a clip to drop a dissolve on there....

Until my next problem, thanks everyone!

I just can't understand what the problem really is here - I've never had any of the problems you're having - 8 fps??? on a simple effect? or with opacity???

makes no sense to me period.

Wish I could get a look at it myself (not that I know half as much as some of these gurus out here).

Hope it works out for ya.

Dave

You don't normally have to bump the RAM preview setting back and forth at all.

Most people set it and forget it. True, you can set it in a way that causes problems but once you've got it where it works you're fine.

Rob Mack

My HDV avi files will run around 17 to 21 frames with occasional drops to 11 frames on the preview using the best full setting. And thats with all the stuff applied.

JJK