Poor Preview Performance

songsj wrote on 4/19/2006, 7:36 PM
Here's my system
Gateway 832GM Media Center
3.0 P4 630HT processor
1gig ram
Integrated GMA900 Graphics
Audigy2ZS sound card

My previews are terrible even in the draft auto mode. It is getting so slow that some transistions don't even show up let alone be in time with the music. I've gone into device manager and checked my IDE
settings [ to DMA if available]. There are no other programs running
that I can see in task manager. With the system performace program running I'm showing my processor at 80 to 95 percent and my pages/memory at 100 percent. I've upped the DVM in Vegas options all the way to 742 [ no good]. I cannot figure out why this is performing so badly, I'm running one main video track [ still photos]
one track of generated media another track for 2nd media and PIP.
One stereo audio track and 2 audio effects tracks. I've even tried muting tracks and this does not seem to help. It's almost unworkable at this point. I have to be doing something wrong???
HEEEEEEELP!!!!

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 4/19/2006, 7:52 PM
What size still photos? what format?
rmack350 wrote on 4/19/2006, 9:02 PM
Still photos could definitely be the problem. Also, if Preview Ram is set too high you can force Windows to start swapping when it otherwise wouldn't need to. For a gig of ram I'd drop that preview ram setting below 500 MB. Preferably under 200 MB.

Some types of stills can be murder on Vegas. Also, if their dimensions are too big then great masses of them will cause probems.

Rob Mack
songsj wrote on 4/19/2006, 9:13 PM
I set the preview ram back down to 64mg which was where it was at as default. The stills are large [ shot with a 7+megapixel camera,
they are .jpg format, and I sometimes use photos as generated media [ Starry rotating sky as backround behind pictures.] etc.
Would a dedicated graphics card improve this stiuation or do stills take this much horsepower to run.
songsj wrote on 4/19/2006, 9:17 PM
Also is this a problem unique to Vegas or do masses of stills give all NLE's fits??
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/19/2006, 9:20 PM
It's not the number of stills, it's the size of them. Batch process them down to no larger than 1440 in either aspect, and you'll see a HUGE change in preview. You're asking Vegas to buffer monstrous amounts of memory. Use PNG for best results.
songsj wrote on 4/20/2006, 1:56 AM
Will I lose any quality in the stills by going down to 1440 and did I screw up in shooting these at such a high megapixel setting.For the newbie I am what is PNG and how hard is it to batch render?

Thanks
rs170a wrote on 4/20/2006, 3:41 AM
<I<Will I lose any quality in the stills by going down to 1440...

As long as you're not zooming into an extreme degree, you won't notice anything.

did I screw up in shooting these at such a high megapixel setting

Not at all. I regularly shoot at a high pixel count (for printing purposes) but downsize for video use.

what is PNG

It's another image format, generally considered lossless.

how hard is it to batch render?

Using an image editing like IrfanView, it's very easy.

Mike
mark-woollard wrote on 4/20/2006, 4:59 AM
>>Also is this a problem unique to Vegas or do masses of stills give all NLE's fits??

Same issues when using lots of stills with NewTek VT. NewTek recommends PNG (portable network graphic) format over JPG. The latter takes more CPU cycles to decompress.

Keeping file sizes down to just what you need (e.g. for cropping/zooming) helps a lot too.

I use IrfanView to batch process to PNG and/or to lower file size.

http://www.irfanview.com/

Jerfilm wrote on 4/20/2006, 6:11 AM
I have the same problem - slower and slower previews, jerky, etc. And I have very few stills and they seem to go the BEST! Go figure.

I have two gigs of RAM - should I be upping that to the four max for better performance??
songsj wrote on 4/20/2006, 7:12 PM
Thanks everyone, I downsized many of the pictures and the preview got much better. I do zoom and pan a lot so I am concerned about quality. Is there an easy way to convert .jpg to .PNG??

Also in my Windows picture editor I typed in 1440 x 480 for size and it defaulted to 722 x 480. Does this sound correct?

songsj wrote on 4/20/2006, 9:09 PM
Also, since my final product will be DVD for regualr television, should I be rendering to MPEG2 or .AVI to import into DVD architect?
rmack350 wrote on 4/20/2006, 9:41 PM
Windows picture editor is doing the right thing - resizing your pictures in proportion. I'd say that figure of 1440 x480 is probably a typo. maybe 1440x960 was meant - that's double the size of a standard def video frame, but it's also a "non-square pixel" frame size.

Basically, you want to leave just enough picture to do the job, but not much more. So if you are going to zoom in you want to have what you zoomed in to be somewhere around 655x480.

7 Mpixel jpegs may seem small but when they are decompressed they are probably around 20 MB each. You can really consume your RAM fast this way.

For NTSC, an image of 654.5x480 will fill a standard def frame in Vegas. Of course you can't make an image that's 654.5 px wide but you can scale up to a whole number like 720x528. And then for images you want to pan around in you can scale up from there. Double that size is 1440x1056. To me that seems like a good round number for most image dimensions, but save your original images. If that's not big enough you can go back to the original and create a bigger image.

Rob Mack
rmack350 wrote on 4/20/2006, 9:47 PM
It's probably better to render straight from the timeline to mpeg and to a separate audio file. Use the templates for DVD architect.

It really all depends. Rendering straight from the timeline is a lot like rendering from an uncompressed AVI, except that you don't actually have to store the avi file. However, if you are going to do this again and again fpr different file formats (or to experiment with mpeg settings) then maybe you want to actually create the final AVI file, rather than having to render things every time you output a file. Then you have to decide what type of AVI file to make. Uncompressed will look best but they take a lot of disk space so maybe you want to render as Sony YUV or something.

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 4/20/2006, 10:39 PM
One othher tip, well two actually.

1) Turn off thumbnails and waveforms in View, that'll speed things up a bit.

2) Zoom all the way out on the timeline.


Vegas can spend a lot of time drawing the thumbnails, bear in mind for large stills it has to decompress and the rescale them. Also the further in you're zoomed on the T/l the more times it has to redraw them.


There's another fix too:

Create quite small versions of your stills and put them in one folder to use as proxies. When you're done swap them for the real full res images. Sort of like Gearshifting yourself. I don't know if Gearshift will work with stills, might be neato if it did. I do a series of DVDs made from 1000s of monster sized stills, thankfully I've now got a PC fast enough to digest them but I could see a need for a simple work around.

Bob.
songsj wrote on 4/20/2006, 11:11 PM
I do a lot of panning and zooming so I kind of like the idea of down sizing for a working version then up sizing for final render.
The pics I started with were something like 3000x2000 and I downsized in Windows picture viewer to 722x480. If I open the picture with picture viewer and re-upsize it to its original will I just be bowing up the 722x480 or will viewer recognize it was a 3000x2000 and upsize it to those pixels. I'm sure you see where I'm going here,
I'm trying to figure out if I have to create 2nd copies each still or if I can down size and then re-up the same picture without quality loss?
rs170a wrote on 4/21/2006, 3:44 AM
I'm trying to figure out if I have to create 2nd copies each still or if I can down size and then re-up the same picture without quality loss?

You will suffer a (potentially major, depending on the original image size) quality hit trying to do this. As I said ealier, using something like Irfanview for batch resizing is very quick and easy.

Mike
rmack350 wrote on 4/21/2006, 9:23 AM
And doing so, here is a workflow I'd suggest using Bob and Mike's ideas.

--Using your favorite batch processor (Photoshop, Irfanview, whatever you've got), make reduced sized copies of your pics in a new folder. Make sure the names of the new files stay exactly the same as the old files.
--do your editing using these reduced files for framing composition.
--when ready to render, turn off thumbnails on the timeline and close Vegas.
-- Take the folder of reduced files and rename it or move it to another location.
--Put the folder of originals into the place of the reduced folder. Give the folder the name that the reduced folder had.
--reopen Vegas (Timeline thumbnails are off). It should see the folder, see the images in it, and use them instead of the reduced ones.

Rob Mack