Once I imported a clip, right mouse click on the clip and select "Create video proxy". All the clips reside on one drive. (I am not a Vegas expert, but did not see any settings to adjust proxy quality.) As I look at the clips now, the menu states "Swap Video Proxy", which I assume is back to the original quality since the Preview monitor is definitely not as high res as the source. This was all done in V15.

I just started rebuilding the project in V14 and the importing appears much faster. I do not see the same method to create a video proxy in V14. If that changes once the files are imported I will add that to the comments.

You may also want to look at this and see if that helps with the playback in VP15.

I tested my system with VP14, I don't have VP15, and it can handle 9 tracks of XDCAM EX 1280x720 60p from a SSD RAID 0 with preview at Best/Full no frames dropped. If I put the source media on a single spinning disk, the preview drops to around 45fps, that however is a slow SATA II WD RED drive.

So for your system, 4-6 tracks of the same material could be the limit considering your CPU and current GPU.

Also make sure you are in a 8-bit project.

Thank you OldSmoke. I really appreciate this detailed feedback. I'm going to give some thought on how best to use more than one disk for the source material and get the RAM installed. If I can simply get it playable where I can create sub-projects for each talk I'm assuming that should help performance. (i.e. 7 tracks but only one hour in length.) Make sense?

Vegas doesn't handle large amounts of ProRes well. I don't know that it's improved in this respect since this post.

Note that there are 2 separate proxy systems now in VP15 build 216:

1. Firstly there is the older system of creating .sfvp0 files that is well documented in the Help. "Create Video Proxy" is part of this system.
2. Secondly, in Project Media and Render Options there is the brand new facility to swap out any file for a file of the same name but different extension. That's not yet documented in the Help. "Swap Video Proxies" is part of this system.

Having these 2 commands right next to each other in the Project Media context menu adds to the confusion.

You may also want to look at this and see if that helps with the playback in VP15.

I checked a created .sfvp0 proxy file and see that it's an XDCAM EX file getting decoded by compounplug.dll, so disabling so4compoundplug.dll probably won't have any effect on playback of the proxies (or original ProRes files).

Thanks Nick. I read the help files - a miracle, eh? :-) - and thank you for the "Swap Video Proxy" explanation. Good to know I shouldn't spend any time on swapping out the so4compundplug.dll too.

Reading elsewhere it sounds like cpu cores and disk speed are the biggest contributors to video editing performance. I'm stuck at 6 cores but can distribute the files across disks and add a USB3 SSD to the mix. Is there a chance that this will work or am I doomed to failure?

As of now, Vegas prefers speed over cores. A 12 core CPU at 2GHz will lose to a system with 6 cores and double the speed.

It's not just Vegas' encoders that do best at 6-8 cores. They've found x264 behaves similarly.

Vegas is CPU/GPU bound for preview performance. I have only done 4 track multicam edits using Vasst UltimateS pro (which only handles 4 tracks). They used to make Infiniticam for 99 tracks, but it has been discontinued as of Vegas 13. I have noticed that preview performance has improved slightly in Vegas 15, including during my multicam edits, which allows me to edit in full preview whereas previously I was only able to do so in full draft.

Your rig is pretty decent and compares to my i7 rig quite closely. The only time I have seen disk i/o max out to 100% is when I first load my media and Vegas generates its proxy files. I can regularly max the CPU out to 100% but that is only during renders, and only when I run 2 or more renders. The only time I was able to max out both my i7 6th gen 4.20 ghz CPU and 16 GB RAM was with 4 x 1 hour renders running simultaneously. The disk i/o on the mirror wasn't even breaking out in a sweat.

I wonder if there are any consequences to editing an HD project in DV widescreen in then switching it back to HD for the render?

Yes, I predict that performance from timeline thriugh render will be slower in a project foreign to its source. Please do not confuse with output buss scaling, which is a Preview control.

Thought I would update this post with my latest findings. Had to optimize my computer and found that V15 is not ready for larger projects. Here is what we did:

DISK; Changed RAID arrays to RAID 0 and added SSDs to system using USB3. Installed PCIe USB3 card with separate controllers per input to maximize through-put. Used Blackmagic SpeedTest to verify read/write speeds on each disk which then determined what source files to put on each disk to optimize access speeds.

RAM; Went from 8GB to 32GB of ram which may not be required, but has generally made the system snappier and we are not swapping to disk. Our project appears to occupy about 8GB-10GB of RAM.

VIDEO CARD; Does not make any noticeable difference for our edit, but improves rendering speed. Our Quadra 2000 has 192 cores and about 40% are used during render. (Actually upgraded to Nvidia 1070 but encountered white screens so thought it might be video driver issues so reverted to Quadra. Actual cause may be V15 but do not have time to re-test. )

VEGAS15; Continue to get white screens and long delays during edit. Broke project down into smaller one hour segments but continued to happen. Loaded source files into Premiere and works like a champ. Just loaded files into V14 and appears to work fine. Conclusion: Stay away from V15 if you are doing over 2-3 tracks of video.

Before you beat me up on what may be my simplistic conclusions, the fact of the matter is I have spent way too much time trouble-shooting Vegas problems. What was eye-opening to me was that it just worked in Premiere. I have been opening tickets with Magix and getting no-where with support. I even paid for telephone support and cannot for the life of me understand how to get through their IVR to actually talk to someone. Clearly they are optimized for consumer business. Given that I have paid $500 to them over the last six months I would have expected more.

Bill