Making media thumbnails appear faster

AnthonyGA wrote on 3/6/2012, 8:27 PM
Is there a way to make Vegas display thumbnail images faster in the window where it shows all the media clips I have? Every time I scroll through this window, Vegas takes a long time to display the thumbnail images, even if it has already displayed them before.

Also, the thumbnail images are displayed with an icon from the VLC program, which I use to watch the .m2t files, but VLC doesn't appear to be actually starting, I think that's just because of the file type association in windows.

Anyway, if there's a way to get these thumnails to display faster, I'd like to know about it. You'd think that Vegas would render the thumbnail once and then just store it somewhere, instead of reading the clip again and again (which I assume it is doing).

Comments

chulaivet1966 wrote on 3/6/2012, 8:46 PM
Well....

I think those that can really assist may need to know more about your computer specs?

It's exactly the same for me....those screen re-draws are annoyingly slow but I only have 1 gig of memory on the machine I was using so that stands to some reason.
I think they would draw much faster on my 4gig of memory laptop.

I'm likely little help but you got a bump.

Good luck....
Tim L wrote on 3/6/2012, 9:28 PM
EDIT: Ooops -- completely misread that. You are talking about thumbnails in the Project Media window, and my answer was refering to thumbnails on the timeline. Sorry!

...............................................................

This won't do exactly what you are asking for, but it should speed things considerably:

Click Options > Preferences, then click the "Video" tab.

The fourth item down (at least in Vegas Pro 10) is "Thumbnails to show in video events". It is probably set to "All". Try changing it to "Head, Center, Tail".

This will give you only three thumbnails for each video event -- one at the beginning, one at the end, and one in the middle. You might not like it at first, if you are used to seeing a constant stream of thumbnails, but after a while you get used to it and probably won't miss the old way at all. This should be much faster.

If you zoom all the way in to frame level on a clip, you'll still get to see all the frames.

Tim L
AnthonyGA wrote on 3/6/2012, 10:00 PM
I'm talking about the thumbnails you see in the window where you've imported all your media clips. They take forever to render. I have 4GB on the machine, Windows XP.

The thumbnails on the timeline actually aren't a problem. They render fast enough that they just always seem to be there. But when I scroll through the project media window, the thumbnails are very slow to display, as if Vegas reads the entire clip to create each thumbnail, and it seems to do that every single time you scroll, not just once.
chulaivet1966 wrote on 3/7/2012, 9:12 AM
Oh jeez.....I'm guilty of misunderstanding also.

Given you have 4gig memory I'm SOL on any assistance at the moment.

Sorry I'm no help OP.....
Steve Grisetti wrote on 3/7/2012, 11:00 AM
An XP computer? How fast is the processor and how memory is on your video card?

If it's not a quad core or i7, you may just be seeing your computer struggling with hi-def video.
AnthonyGA wrote on 3/7/2012, 11:38 PM
XP and Core Duo 3 GHz, I think. nVidia GTX250

If it were struggling with high-def video, I'd see everything slow down, but it's just the thumbnail display that's slow.
philRmonic wrote on 3/8/2012, 3:16 AM
This is something that has annoyed me for years! It takes 2-4 seconds to refresh each Project Media window and if you are looking for a particular clip in several hundred then that is a real chore.

The only way I have found to reduce the problem is to get organised at the start of a project and put the clips into separate media bins. This doesn't speed up the redrawing but at least you have an idea where to start looking.

And no, it doesn't depend on computer spec - I have an i7-2600 cpu, 8 GB of RAM and a nVidia 550 Ti video card and it is still slow!

VMS is a very powerful program but in this area it seriously lags behind others!
AnthonyGA wrote on 3/28/2012, 4:39 PM
Looking around in the application, I think the problem is the "details" option for project media display. If you select details, you get all sorts of information for each clip … some of which requires reading the entire clip file (I think). My guess is that Vegas is doing this even when you have the display set to thumbnails. That would explain why thumbnails appear so slowly.

The obvious solution would be to not read the file unless the display mode for Project Media is set to list or details. For thumbnails it could just read the first image on the file and display that with the file name, which would make the display lightning fast.

I'm not holding my breath to see this happen, though.
Chienworks wrote on 3/28/2012, 4:43 PM
It would be far better yet if Vegas cached that information and the thumbnails, just like most other graphics software does. It should only read the file and regenerate the thumbnail if it notices the file modification date change.

*sigh*

I just give up and use detail view instead of thumbnail view and make sure my files have very descriptive names.