Search for Adware and Spyware and Viruses. If you are running Antivirus program(s) while using Vegas, turn them off. How many items do you have running in the background? (ctrl+alt+delete and look at your processes tab) If you have a lot of things running that are not system processess, shut them down. You can also go into the start menu and click on run and type in msconfig and hit enter. From here you can choose the last tab called startup and click disable all and then restart. Once you restart it will say that selective startup has occurred or something similar- just check the box and hit okay. This should help your system to be more streamlined on startup and as long as you don't open a lot of programs, it should regain some of its speed.

j razz

Thanks MVPGuy and Jrazz for getting back to me.

Yeah, I've had the system for a while (few years), and the last gig was added about a year ago. Most apps run fine. My mobo is a little limited in the FSB dept.

Vegas has always been laggy when previewing. I've heard of folks getting accurate real-time previewing.

I've got a boatload of processes running (35-ish), although my performance is showing just fine. I'll have to get the msconfig over to my win2k machine from xp to try that. In terms of adware, malware, et al, I'm covered. I hadn't turned off Norton though. Will try that.


What do you think about a user account shaved down for NLE in terms of processes?

As always, thanks.

DMA. But if that wasn't set right, your captures would drop frames.

The drive Vegas is on was DMA, but my secondary IDE wasn't.

However, that drive has nothing to do with this particular project as all the project data is on a third SATA drive.

According to Vegas I need to make sure I've got unique IRQ's for video card, et al.

I'd rather not fool too much until this project is out the door in about 18 hours.

I've never even considered the DMA setting before...what's the significance?

...what's the significance?

If you do not have DMA enabled, it will slow down the function of your drive and as John said earlier, your captures will be littered with dropped frames.

Do a search on DMA and be enlightened :)

j razz

Found a few good reads on DMA and PIO.

I have two "secondary IDE channel" listed, and although both "types" have DMA if available, PIO is showing as the current mode.

That might have something to do with it, but I think some extra steps might be needed to get that tweaked to see.

def has something to do with it.

extra steps:

select DMA mode manually in dev mngr - hd ctrlrs

or, you may need to reinstall those drivers (or update to latest)

Interesting thing about DMA is that the bios on some of the newer mobos doesn't even show you any controls for DMA unless the drive is on the first controller. For example, I've got an Asus mobo that has an Intel drive controller, an ITE controller, and (my addition) a PCI-card with a Promise Ultra IDE controller.

Only the Intel controller gives me info in the bios or device manager about the DMA mode. For the ITE controller, it shows up as "SCSI controller" with no further info. The HD itself in dev mgr only tells the volumes (drive letters). For the promise card it shows the DMA mode during bootup and says the drives are all at DMA 5 (not configureable).

Point is, if you can't find the DMA info sometimes you should resort to using a disk speed benchmarking program. That's what I did. It found all the drives were very similar in speed and sustained throughput, so I am sure they are all DMA. No controller port has more than one drive on its cable (that's why I added the old Promise card - that way no ports got shared). This is also a good practice if you have enough ports - don't put two drives on the same IDE cable. If you were setting up an IDE RAID, that would kill your performance gain (the two drives can't both get full access simultaneously). If you do have to put two drives on the same cable, don't put the system and video drives on it (i.e. put some other HD on it). Just my 2 cents.

Soon I'll put two SATA drives in a RAID1 (this PC is a file server and occasional network renderer, not a video editor) and remove two of the IDE drives for archiving video projects. That'll allow me to yank out that old promise IDE controller.. Less HW is better.

DMA = Direct Memory Access. It lets peripherals send data to each other without having to send it to/through the CPU (the computer chip). This eliminates a major bottleneck and frees up the CPU to do more important things. The difference in performance is not small or subtle: it is staggering. I have changed dozens of computers over the past fifteen years, and it is like buying a whole new computer.

I think I gave some advice on how to do this in this old thread:

Improving Vegas Performance

thanks JM,

I've got such a long way to go in this....need to take a class and get some structure to it all.

Let's see if I can tweak this.

John, your explanation is alllmmooosst right. Peripherals cannot exchange data with each other in DMA. Only in and out of memory.

Here's how I explain it to non-tech people.

DMA is like a college assignment. The professor (processor) tells the peripheral: "I've set aside a big chunk of memory for you, here's the address, no go away and don't bother me until you're finished." PIO is more like Kindergarten. "Give me a piece of your data, and I'll put it into the memory, now give me the next piece of data and I'll put it into the memory, now give me the next piece of data, and it repeats this over and over and over until it finally runs out of pieces of data. Meanwhile all the other kids in the class are constantly interrupting the teacher who has to stop putting the pieces of data away into the memory to handle the interruption.

Steve M.

Peripherals cannot exchange data with each other in DMA. Only in and out of memory.

Your explanation is a good clarification to what I posted. Just for the record, what I said was:

"DMA = Direct Memory Access. It lets peripherals send data to each other without having to send it to/through the CPU (the computer chip)."

You are correct that the CPU still has to manage the transfer, but it never has to "touch" the data, and there is no memory fetch cycle involved. The key thing is that the CPU is basically freed up to do other things, and does not become a bottleneck to large data transfers. This is especially important when capturing video, which is actually nothing much more than a file copy operation, but one that must proceed without interruptions, because the tape cannot be stopped to wait for the computer to catch up.