Jerky Preview

colnol wrote on 7/31/2006, 6:23 PM
I have recently bought Sony Vegas MS +DVD Platinum Ver. 6.0 (b) and have captured my first video from DVD camcorder disk. Editing of project proceeds fine but when played back thru Preview screen at Preview (auto) or Draft (auto) quality, the video and audio output is very jerky, bordering on stalling - the same occurs when playing captured video files in preview screen.
I have dedicated hard drive for video editing, have turned off all other programs including anti virus and have defrag'd - min system requirements are exceeded except for HDV uses that I am not using.
I am a convert from Pinnacle Studio where I could not capture video to dedicated video hard drive but could save edited project to this drive - this may have been due to low data transfer rate. Help required.

Comments

rustier wrote on 7/31/2006, 11:06 PM
1) when you say you have a dedicated drive for video editing is this a physically separate drive or a partitioned drive?
2) is VMS installed on the same drive or is it on the C drive (primary) and you just store the video on the other drive?
3) if you capture to your primary drive does this problem go away?
4) what kind of video card do you have?

not being able to capture do a hard drive sends up a flag to me - is this a usb drive?
colnol wrote on 8/2/2006, 12:35 AM

Thanks for your timely comments.
In reply:
1) Yes it is a physically separate drive - 80 Gb
2) VMS is installed on C drive (primary) - 20.5 Gb of free space available
3) I have just tried this (capture and edited project to C drive) and it appears to work much better. I've only edited about three minutes of video so far but I note that it does not seem to be handling scene transitions very well. This could be moreso an issue resulting from my unfamiliararity with this aspect of editing with this software. I think I might also try capturing video to C Drive and saving project to G Drive (dedicated for video use). Any comment?
4) 64MB DDR nVidia(R) GeForce4 MX Graphics Card w/TV-out.

No, the separate drive is not a USB drive - it is an internal separate drive.
Looking forward to your further comments, rustier!
IanG wrote on 8/2/2006, 2:07 AM
A couple of thoughts - if you're editing footage recorded to DVD it'll be in MPEG-2. That's always going to be slow because of the amount of work required to uncompress it on the fly. Transitions will be worse because you've got to uncompress and apply the transition at the same time - more work!

If things are better when you just use one disk, maybe there's a problem with the other disk? Is DMA enabled? Are you using a modern, 80 wire, IDE cable? And something I've just found out - the middle connector on a lot of IDE cables only supports IDE33! And then there's the universal panacea - defragging. I don't think it makes much difference, but others swear by it!

Ian G.
rustier wrote on 8/2/2006, 6:14 AM
I believe it is safe to say under "normal" circumstances having the operating software and Vegas Movie Studio software on one drive and the video on another (internal) drive would be ideal - especially when it is time to render - as it significantly reduces the time it takes. This has proven to be true with my computer.

I believe dvd's don't need to be captured - all you need is to copy the vob's over to the computer. That being said I honestly don't know if VMS 6 doesn't just do that when you tell it to "capture" or if it processes it in some other way ( I capture from tape in avi). I am sure someone in the forum can answer that.

I believe from my experience that DV-AVI video is to VMS like mothers milk to a baby. It works with other formats- but works best with that. As lang's comments mentioned, the jerkiness you may be seeing could be from the format (mpeg) which is a much more compressed form. I did a family reunion video which was "captured" (if you can call it that) in the windows pvr format - which is a "special" form of mpeg - which has to be stripped of info by another program to be reconverted into an mpeg VMS can work with - a messy deal - but the way I had to go at the time. Anyway - the video looked like large blocks rather than individual frames when I zoomed in on the timeline. I was able to edit it and produce a DVD but it was awkward and difficult at times -AND - the preview was jerky. The dvd turned out fine. This may be the case with you as well. You might want to try a very short test video with a couple transitions to see what a rendered project looks like - but not through the preview window. Watch the file through windows media or better yet make a dvd and see what it looks like on your TV.


As far as not being able to capture to your dedicated hard drive - it still sounds like you have some issues there - not sure what to tell you without more information on your system. What I was fishing for earlier was bottle necks which can slow down your computers ability to deliver frames of video. It is my understanding that USB drives can cause that sort of thing.

have fun with it