performance lag when "zooming in time"

fonografist wrote on 11/9/2016, 6:36 AM

Hello! I am currently working in Vegas 13 on some pretty big projects. At least most of these projects contain 5-16 simultaneous tracks of video and the same count of audio. When I zoom in horizontally, that is "Zoom In Time", after a certain magnification point everything gets really slow, each zoom inwards take multiple seconds. I believe it has to do with the audio event waveforms, because if I turn them off the lag dissapears completely. I still nedd to be able to see the waveforms, so its a big problem and time sink.

I know that the audio DAW Reaper had a similar problem, and it had to do with displaying waveforms directly from video files. My projects contain both audio that is recorded into the video files themselves, and pure audio .wav files. The video material is in .mov files and "photo jpeg" format, and the audio is uncompressed.

I've tried turning on and off GPU acceleration, tried things with the ram preview allocation, but with no difference. I'm on a pretty hefty workstation with 32 gigs of ram and Intel Xeon processor, so it should really be able to handle these projects I would think. I guess it's probably good to say that all the material is on a network drive, and not local.

Comments

Kinvermark wrote on 11/9/2016, 7:47 AM

Well, as you have suggested, network drive is not ideal - local drive dishs out data 10x as fast typically.

What about video clip timeline thumbnails? Turn those off?

 

 

 

fonografist wrote on 11/9/2016, 11:20 AM

well, the workflow doens't really allow for having stuff locally unfortunately. it's a loooot of material shared by many. and anyways, it actually seems like some form of bug inside of vegas, because its so strangely tied to zooming in waveforms to a certain degree, it just seems arbitrary. and yes, I did try with thumbnails on/off with no significant difference in performance.

Kinvermark wrote on 11/9/2016, 11:42 AM

Sorry, for your troubles fonografist, but you really don't have enough evidence to call this a bug!

Guys seem to be doing this a lot lately  - "doesn't work for me the way I expect, so must be a bug."

You have already said you are on a network drive - that's potential problem #1.

 

ADDED: As an experiment, why not copy the files (just for one project)  to a local drive to see if that solves the problem?   That gives you some more info to go on, whether it works or not.

 

john_dennis wrote on 11/9/2016, 3:01 PM

"...it's a loooot of material shared by many."

What is your network connection speed? Is the media server a small office - home office NAS or an enterprise storage system?

fonografist wrote on 11/9/2016, 5:03 PM

I don't acually really know the specs of the network or the acutal drive. We're a semi-large office, so I guess enterprise storage is probably a good way to describe it. I was acutally thinking of having a chat with the IT guys to see if it would be possible to tweak something to make this a bit smoother, but all that stuff is very much out of my hands.

And yeah Kinvermark, you're right, I was probably being a bit glib about this being a bug :) . I did actually try moving things for one project  to a local drive, and it did make the issue less pronounced, but did not remove it completely.

Kinvermark wrote on 11/9/2016, 6:47 PM

@ fonografist

No worries.   I tried a simple test with 32 tracks (16 video / 16 audio).   No problem zooming in/out - completely responsive.  So that is some positive news.

I am on Vegas 14 (should make zero difference) with a mediocre cpu, but with lots of ram and a fast local RAID drive.

Media was GH4 4k converted to cineform.

It may be worth your while to share details of the types of media files you are working with and project settings.