lengthly scroll time when object is dragged off screen

Laurence wrote on 8/16/2003, 1:33 AM
I'm working on a project with a lot of still picture movement. If I zoom way in to get a precise edit and drag either a video or audio clip past the edge of the screen, it starts a good 5 minute drag to some location well past the end of the project. If my reflexes are slow, the scroll can get up to 10 or 15 minutes! During this time I can't do a thing. The mouse is unresponsive and nothing I can do will stop this endless scrolling! This is driving me absolutely nuts. Is there something I'm missing? It only happens when I'm zoomed in pretty close, but that's how I like to line things up. There must be some way to stop this. I sure can't find it though! When this happens, I usually just take a break, go to the bathroom, make a phone call etc. At this point, I know better, but in my clumsiness I accidently do this once every couple of hours. Does this happen to everybody? Am I missing something or is this an incredibly horrible flaw in an otherwise almost perfect program?

Laurence Kingston

Comments

jetdv wrote on 8/16/2003, 8:21 AM
I guess I don't understand what you are saying. When I drag something past the edge of the screen, the screen scrolls until I release the mouse button. The object is then placed at that point.
Laurence wrote on 8/16/2003, 9:28 AM
If your not zoomed in too close there's no problem. If I have big files and you zoom in tight enough to edit to a beat, dragging a clip off the edge of the screen will start a four or five minute scroll while the clip slowly moves incrementally to some place way beyond the project end. I can't be the only one running into this.

Laurence Kingston
BillyBoy wrote on 8/16/2003, 9:52 AM
It sounds like you're working with super-sized images, and a under powered system. Scrolling SHOULD BE nearly instant. I tired to see what you're talking about and while slow when working with massive sized images and high zoom levels the process took me seconds not minutes.

The solution is obvious... You're expecting Vegas to do something it wasn't designed to do. That it CAN do it at all simply shows how good Vegas really is.

Just curious exactly HOW big an image and how far in have you zoomed for it to take 15 minutes to move it around?
Laurence wrote on 8/16/2003, 11:43 AM
My system is a P4 2.4 with a gig of RAM a dual head 128 meg GForce graphics card and a 200 gig Western Digital hard drive. The jpegs are big (about a half meg each) but not huge. I think the culprit might be the three lenthly mp3's of complete songs that I have on the timeline. If I zoom in to the beat level and nudge a jpeg, an mp3 or even just the selection tool past the edge of the screen, I'm out of commission for several minutes while it scrolls.

Laurence Kingston
BillyBoy wrote on 8/16/2003, 12:23 PM
Keep in mind "big" is relative. While a 500K file is small if being worked on in Photoshop, it is pretty large for a video editor relative it taking up a single frame. If you're trying to match fractions of a second to some beat on your music to some position on a picture the level of zoom you're using to get in that close is causing Vegas to do a lot of caculating. Its moving all those pixels around that's taking the time. I'm surprised it takes as long as you say however. I can see maybe 10-15 even 30 seconds, but 10-15 minutes sounds more like Windows is starving for resources and maybe is trashing away moving stuff in and out of the paging file.

If you have XP use Task Manger to get an idea how or if Windows is using both physical RAM and Virtual Memory. Since the display from Windows is real time you should be able to see in straining, if it is. Just bring up Task Manager and have it float over Vegas as you do whatever you're doing.
Laurence wrote on 8/16/2003, 12:30 PM
What is a good resolution to work with? Also I used minimal jpeg compression which also makes the files kind of big. What's the easiest way to set a bunch of jpegs to a given resolution? When I used to use a Mac, iPhoto let me export whole groups of jpegs at a maximum defined resolution. There must be some way to do that on a PC as well.

Laurence Kingston
BillyBoy wrote on 8/16/2003, 12:40 PM
Because high resolution images will be compressed a lot anyhow if rendering to MPEG, I try to avoid having any source still image more than two, rarely sometimes three times the frame size of the project. Remember... in digital video resolution is a none issue. Its all BITRATE. The idea of staring will a larger sized image is the detail should be cleaner if you plan on panning/zooming.

As far as compression, the mistake you're making in the source files is first compressing them at all (JPEG). I would try using a lossless file format or if you have Photoshop, just drop the native Photoshop file on the timeline. Vegas handles them fine.
Laurence wrote on 8/16/2003, 1:03 PM
I tried native Photoshop files, but found it strained my system more. Maybe if I cut them down to size it would be fine. I would have loved to use Photoshop files because of the layering options, but got smoother performance out of the jpeg files. Using an uncompressed or losslessly compressed file doesn't make sense to me. It seems like Vegas should have an easier time decompressing the data than handling the extremely large picture files that lossless compression would generate. Plus, the files are already jpeg compressed. Wouldn't I just be increasing their size. Photoshop takes forever to load uncompressed Tiff files. Vegas should be even worse.

Laurence Kingston
BillyBoy wrote on 8/16/2003, 1:59 PM
Have you tried TAGA files? They are lossless and smaller than TIFF. You want to try to avoid a format like JPEG if you can since that's already compressed and if you're going to render to something that compresses again like MPEG in Vegas, its just the double compression thing.
Sol M. wrote on 8/22/2003, 7:34 AM
I'm curious; is the playhead playing while you're trying to drag the event (image, etc. whatever it may be)?

If so, I have the same problem. If the timeline is being played and I drag something past the visible area of the timeline, the mouse, nay, the entire system becomes unresponsive until it reaches the end of the sequence. This also happens when playing a clip and using the mouse wheel so scoll sideways.

The problem seems only to truly present itself when zoomed a lot because then there's more timeline to scroll through.