Major Difference Between VMS and Full-Blown Vegas?

brentnhunter wrote on 6/30/2007, 11:39 AM
I know the full version of Vegas has more features but is the full version actually better with the features it has? Here's an example -- I use VMS and sometimes when I play videos on the timeline, the audio plays but the video scene shows up but there is a delay and it is jerky.... even though the audio sounds fine... If the preview doesn't allow me to always see the output without jerkiness or ridiculous delays, it's much more difficult to edit. So I'm wondering does the full version of Vegas also have these delays? This seems to be the major problem I keep running into with VMS. (I have a fast dual core PC with 4 GB of RAM so my machine shouldn't be the problem)

Thanks in advance for any help or information anyone can provide.

Brent

Comments

Tim L wrote on 6/30/2007, 12:37 PM
(Oops -- Double posted...
I hit my Back button to edit my post instead of clicking Edit... See below)
Tim L wrote on 6/30/2007, 12:40 PM
I had VMS 6 and upgraded to the full version Vegas 7 last September. I don't think there's any difference between VMS and Vegas as far as previewing performance, render quality, etc.

What does your project consist of? Still photos? Std Def DV? High Def HDV?

I have a 3 Ghz P4, and my preview performance is generally acceptable when I have the video in the smaller preview window (i.e. not full size). I know I have had issues like you describe -- jerky, laggy performance -- when I had a bunch of 4 megapixel still photos on the timeline. Resizing the photos down to something smaller -- maybe 900x600 or so -- before bringing them into VMS helped me considerably. Also, applying FX to the video -- like color correction, chromakey, or overlaying titles, etc., can slow things down as well.

Also, at one point operation of VMS got just horribly, horribly bad. I'd remembered that I'd gotten a message from Windows that it was increasing the size of my page file. However, I think the page file was then very fragmented. Eventually, I de-fragged the drive, and that helped a great deal.

You might have to reduce the preview quality down to "Good" or "Preview" quality to get acceptable performance. I generally have mine on on "Good / Auto".

Tim L
brentnhunter wrote on 6/30/2007, 2:42 PM
Thanks Tim. I have this problem under a variety of situations but today I ran into it again, this time I can't for the life of me figure out why -- I know when I have lots of different video and audio elements in the timeline and lots of files in the Media library, it can be slower but today I only had one 2.5 hour movie and the part in the timeline was about 5 minutes long -- I snipped everything else out. And it was still jerky!

Do you know, is VMS the same version of software as full blown Vegas minus a few features, i.e., it uses the same core engine? Or do the two pieces of software actually have a different core?
Chienworks wrote on 6/30/2007, 2:50 PM
It's been mentioned that they're compiled from the same source code. Whether that's actually true, or still true, i wouldn't know. However, in about several zillion aspects they are identical so i would tend to believe it.