basically like you said. i have straight dv footage up until the cut where i apply a simple dissolve lets say. when i preview the dissolve, as soon as the cursor passes over the edit mark it gets jumpy and it is hard to see if the edit is smooth or whatever. i have 512 of ram. do i need more? are there some settings in the preferences of Vegas that i can change to fix this problem. i have a 1.8 ghz. its not extremely slow. please, more help. thankx.

What you are describing is fairly normal in Vegas. You have a couple choices in lieu of getting a faster computer. You can set your preview window to a smaller size and/or lower resolution such as Preview/Auto or Draft/Auto, which should increase your frame rate and give you a somewhat smoother playback.

Alternatively you can create a small region stretching over the transition and then pre-render the region [tools menu: Selectively Prerender Video or Shift+M] or do a ram render [tools menu: Build Dynamic Ram Preview or Shift+B], either of which should allow full resolution, full frame rate playback.

JL

would increasing to a 1gig of ram guarantee smooth playback or not? ram is a fairly cheap way to improve performance of your computer. also. how much faster than 1.8 ghz do you really need to edit video. my friend has an apple g4 laptop with a 1.8 in it and we edited video on it with final cut pro and it had no problems during playback of video and such. it ran smooth as glass. i refuse to believe my pc wont do the same.

Not necessarily. You may have to turn off anything running in the background, that's not absolutely needed. 1 gig would be nice, but as soon as you start piling effects and transitions and audio changes, your frame rate will go down. Also, be sure that adjoining section, doesn't have a white 'X' running thru it (similar to video fade), you may have accidently doubled that scene and it's playing over itself. My guess is, you should be able to see what you want, fairly clearly, with the 512 you have. Maybe not perfectly, but good enough. Try waiting a few seconds before playback of that transition section. Also I went back and noticed your 'extenal drive'. If this is what you store your .avi's on, this may be the problem, but without details(are you using firewire or USB, is it 5600RPM or 7200RPM??), I can only guess.

No, a gig won't give/guarantee perfect playback.
Set your preview to Preview/Full if viewing on an external monitor, set it to Preview/Auto if viewing on a computer monitor. You should see full speed playback for most transitions. If not, you've got something else going on in the background. As mentioned by JL, you can also use a RAM render to see it at full speed, and RAM renders are lightning fast inmost instances.

i have a lacie 160 gig hardrive connected to my laptop by firewire. it is capable of 400 Mbits/s. i think this is fast enough. all my avi files are stored on this drive and i run them off this drive as i edit. i also have the same avi files on my system drive which is a 60 gig hardrive but i dont have any idea what rpm it is. its just a standard laptop hardrive which i know usually arent even 5400. that is why im leaning towards the lacie. but you say this could be a problem? also i do get a little white x at the point where im inserting my transition. is this because my two clips are overlapping. i thought that was how i was supposed to apply a transition. i need a manual. i cant find mine and i cant find a tutorial book anywhere. all i need to know is how to cut and apply basic dissolves for now. im edting a friends wedding video and it doesnt need to be fancy. thanks guys for the input.

i thought my computer met all the requirements for realtime capabilites that is why im a little puzzled as to what is happening. could it be i have an athlon processor? i dont know much about computer hardware. i have 512 ram. an ati radeon 9600 series graphics card. my processor is 1.8 ghz. lets see what else...i have that lacie hard drive that is 160 gigs plus my 60 gig in the laptop and i have an external dvd burner which isnt hooked up right now. i dont have microsoft. net framework installed. would that make a diference in the previewing performance or not?

Playback can be jumpy during transitions because new video frames have to be generated which is very CPU intensive. It is the same for applied fx and pan/crop, etc. If your CPU cannot keep up at full resolution and frame rate during playback, the frame rate is lowered to what the CPU can handle. The instantaneous frame rate during playback is indicated at the bottom of the Video Preview window under ‘Display:’ and anything below about 18 frames per second will probably start to look choppy. This is normal.

You should be able to run Vegas quite nicely on your 1.8 ghz Athlon with 512 meg of ram, keeping in mind the above limitations. As previously mentioned you can adjust the video preview window size and/or resolution, or incorporate prerenders or ram renders into your workflow if it helps.

Overlapping events will result in an 'x' indicating the fade types, if Automatic Crossfades is turned on. This is a common way to create transitions. Other transition types can also be dropped on top of the crossfade to replace it if desired.

The Vegas Help pulldown menu contains a pretty good, albeit concise online manual. You can download a more comprehensive manual in .pdf format from the Sony Media software Support page.

JL

Another thing you can do if you want to see a smooth transition (or how it will look) is to select the area of the video where the transition occurs, then hit Shift + B and that will render that small section to your RAM and then you will get a full frame rate preview so you can see what your transitions will look like. This is one area that more RAM will definately help, the more RAM you have the longer previews you will get. "Vegas is not, nor is it marketed as a real-time editor."