Loading still photo thumbnails...

24Peter wrote on 6/30/2015, 12:16 PM

I am doing a lot of time-lapses with still cameras and am importing 12MP still images to my projects/timelines in VP 13. I have an older computer and video card and will be upgrading soon, but I am noticing that loading thumbnails of my still images - both in the Explorer window and when I actually add the photos to my timeline - brings Vegas to its knees (we are generally talking 600+ still images per timelapse, sometimes more.) Once the thumbnails are drawn, the program works normally and rendering is faster than I would have expected. So... any suggestions on how to deal with the initial importing of images? It can literally take 10 minutes to fill the Explorer window in Vegas with thumbnails and the program basically hangs while that is happening...

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 6/30/2015, 8:24 PM

Well, you probably don't need to use 12MP images, for one thing. If you're working in HD the video frame is only about 2MP. That means you're loading 6 times as much data for each frame as you need. Resizing the images first to something closer to your project frame size will speed it up immensely, for thumbnails, previewing, and rendering.

Still though, thumbnails of stills are one of Vegas' downfalls. It's never been zippy at it.

How are you importing the stills? If you're getting such bad performance on the timeline it sounds like you're using them as individual events. If that's the case you should consider the Import / Still Image Sequence function. This makes Vegas treat the entire batch of stills as a single video event rather than hundreds of separate files. That should aid preview speed as well. As far as in the explorer window, dump the stills into their own separate subfolder and just never open that folder again. Once they're on the timeline you shouldn't ever have to look at them in explorer again.

24Peter wrote on 6/30/2015, 8:31 PM

Thanks Chienworks. I am already down-rezzing in-camera for 24MP to 12 MP to ease performance issues in Vegas. I don't have the option to create smaller files and didn't want the extra step to go through Lightroom or Bridge. Plus I am doing panning and cropping in Vegas and will eventually be doing 4K time-lapse. I will try to Import>Still Image Sequence - good suggestion.

Another question: I know this has come up many times and I am not sure why I am having this issue right now (all I did was delete the last sequence of events and am reusing the timeline for a new project): the preview window is black when I try to play my timeline. How do I reset that?

24Peter wrote on 6/30/2015, 10:08 PM

I had to delete the offending video track, add a new one to get a video preview back.