One thing is for sure... V9 demands more memory. As you playback a section of the time line it gets loaded into memory and if you play it back a second time the play back (if rough before) will playback even smoother. This occurs in V8 but it seems to be occurring at a much higher and more efficient rate in V9. In playing back 15 seconds of avchd, my taskmanager shows that my memory climbed steadily from 1.95 to 2.37 gigs

It appears that you only have 2 gig to start with which isn't much... even for V8. I would kill as many tasks as you can, drop your preview ram down as low as you can and increase the size of your page file. Also drop your preview quality down.

All good suggestions. I'd do them one at a time starting at the preview RAM setting (if it's set high).

Vegas caches frames into RAM as it plays so that a second play will be a bit smoother. If you've allocated a lot of RAM Vegas will keep filling it and eventually something has to be swapped to disk. It could be part of the OS, other programs, part of Vegas, maybe even your preview RAM cache itself could get swapped to disk, in which case you could get to a point after using Vegas for a bit where it's constantly going back and forth to the page file and can't play back your media at a reasonable speed.

Rob Mack

Dynamic Preview RAM is at zero -- same problem. And now I see that the render times are way beyond what I'm used to.

I have V8 installed on my Ath 64x2 dual core 6400. I also have V8 on my 4400. And the 4400 has neither of these issues. In fact, the 4400 renders are beating the 6400 by 75%.

Anybody know where I go from here? Is this a disk doctor thing or something like that? I almost never use the 6400 to surf the Web so I'm assuming there's not a virus lurking. But frankly, I don't know what to think at this point.

But, if it means anything, I edit HDV video constantly with my 6400, using my C drive (about a terabyte) and an external drive (another terabyte) and nothing else. I've edited over a hundred relatively simple music videos in the last year. I normally move the final products to another ext. drive and start the whole process over again..and again...and again.

Is this potentially relevant to my problem?

Help! Anybody!

So what do you see in task manager?

"Dynamic Preview RAM is at zero -- same problem. And now I see that the render times are way beyond what I'm used to."

Sorry... i should have explained to you the other extreme.... Don't set it too low either. Leave it at 128 or 256 or so.... Vegas seems to work best that way. If you need more for dynamic preview then turn it up but then reset it when you're finished.

The main thing I'm going on is that the timeline plays for about 3 minutes and then the playback rate slows way down. Playback comes back after closing and restarting Vegas but then after playing out about 3 minutes the playback slows again.

To me this sounds like you're filling RAM until you have to start using the page file heavily. In Task Manager you should see the page file size increasing as well as Vegas' memory usage rising. You should also be seeing a ton of disk activity light action.

If Vegas is trying to read from the same disk that the swap file is on (usually C:) and the page file is in heavy use then Vegas may not be getting data from the disk fast enough.

So, what does Taskmanager say about the page file and memory usage? Which disk is your media on? Which disk is your page file on? What was your preview RAM set to before dropping it to zero?

Try setting your preview Ram to something small like 128 MB. Not zero but not high either.

What else is running? Antivirus? Does TaskManager show other programs with increasing memory consumption?

Rob

"To me this sounds like you're filling RAM until you have to start using the page file heavily. "

I think you're hitting the nail on the head there.

All nails must be pounded flat! ;-)