I have this problem with VV, but I also have it with Premiere-- it just seems like a "where's the darn clip way the hell over on that thar firewire drive?" problem...
Mike

It is a firewire drive issue. With Premiere I get uninterupted playback but there are little dropouts and wierd things going on and with VV I have always gotten this blue screen 'zap' for no reason, like something is suddenly polling the firewire drive and this 'zap' of electricity goes through a suddenly blue screen until the playbalc resumes. I just do the final render over to a local (internal) hard drive for output to video. In VV I have my pre-render folders on a internal drive so when I do a PTT it plays with no problems. One tip I did learn is to turn off the firewire card as a network device, I didn't even know it was listed. I have not done anything in Premiere to see if that was the problem there. With VV I have only gotten one 'zap' and blue screen so *maybe* that was the issue.

Thanks for the replies. Well I heard there was no fix for this on another forum... Still, my other editing program has no problem previewing from an external drive, nor does Windows media player. I can also capture to the drive fine in Vegas. Hope they get this one fixed soon.

I've found that F5 to rebuild peaks and then zooming in (and back out if desired) seems a consistent way to improve things, at least in the trimmer - no idea why, but it works for me (even on big (>1G) clips).

Hope this helps.

I got the same problem.

The strange thing is that it was working fine at the begining with vegas 4.0 and since I upgrade to 4.0b this bug appeared.

I tried to change firewire port, delete all .sfk files... doesn't work.
Bokan

Yeah, its a major problem and I guess its starting to piss me off. I have a major project due in a couple of days with most of my clips on external firewire drives---I am getting constant freezes--sort of messes up the whole process. This is one issue that Sonic has to address. I have read on other boards that people are a bit put off by this 'bug' and I do hope it doesn't adversely effect sales of this otherwise great product. I hate to say it but I might have to do this project in Premiere.

Vegas have worked parfectly on my computer for hours using firewire dirves. Then, some days later, this bug raises. I tryed to solve it and now it seems to work properly since 2 hours.

Here is what I have done to solve the problem:
- clause Vegas, delete ALL .sfk files (go in root folder, search recursive for *.sfk then select all and delete this files). I first try to delete only some files, it wasn't working.
- I thought it could be a cache disk problem. I was having a huge file in outlook (wich is always running in background) I archive the mails to make this file is smaller.
- I restarted the computer and relaunch Vegas

Here are other points you may try :
- change the windows reading disk cache to a greater value.

I hope this problem won't raise again.
I propose you to try this and tell me about the results. I really like Vegas and I think we all need to make it run. So we can put effort together to find the solution.
I'll wil come back on this forum to se the results of your experiments.

I do think this bug appears when I imported a lot of files simultaneously to the media pool. Then I canceled the building peak task. I repeat this some times.

Hope I will hear from you all.

good luck ! :)

PS: for info My computer is an asustec notebook L3800C 2ghz, 512ram
My hard drive is a Maxtor 80 G that I mounted in a oxford based 1394 interface.
It's enough to make this software run properly.

Deleting sfk files means time spent each time you bring a Veg into Vegas rebuilding them. In my case, we are talking about a very large project. I will try it anyway to see what difference it makes.

True, Vegas isn't the only NLE with the problem. It would be great if SoFo were the first to fix it.

I love the quote but I think it's more like:
-Computer: Have you got the peak file?
-Drive: yeah, I've got it.
-Computer: Can I have it?
-Drive: Yeah, you can have.
-Computer: Now?
-Drive: Sure. Here ya go.
-Computer: Can I have the next peak file?
-Drive: Did you get the last one?
-Computer: I'd like the next one, please.
-Drive: what did you do with the last one I gave you. If you can't keep track of the peak files I give you...

And everything goes to hell. The difference betwen a peak file and a media file is the media file is so long that there's lots of time for the little transaction above.

Solution? maybe if you could set the peak file location to be on an internal drive, away from the media drive. After all, media plays fine without peak files on the 1394 drive.

Rob Mack

Yep. It seemed to get a little worse with 4.0b. Pity.

I wish you could specify where the peak files are kept. I'd keep them off the 1394 drive.

Rob Mack

How many 1394 drives do you have? Can you take one big one and mount it internally?

Rob Mack

Didn't have nearly the problems with version 3. Solution is a 100 gig Western Digital intenal drive with 8 meg cache (250 CAD) for the editing and store on the 1394s. I can get about 6 hours on the WD, far more than I will ever need at one time. After the project is done I reformat the internal drive.

Peter

The problem raise again on my computer.
I could make repair it this time and solved the problem without even restarting Vegas.

Try this :
- delete all .sfk files
- add your files to the timeline and let Vegas build the peaks alone. (have a coffe break, make some sport, watch 2 movies... ... it should be done now !)

This worked for me.

Please if you are experencing this problem, tell us.

I'm not sure I understand that last post when he says "add your files to the timeline and let Vegas build the peaks alone". Doesn't F5 rebuild peaks (adding new sfk files?)

Hello,

When I said "let Vegas build the peaks alone" I mean :"do not interupt it".

This trick work for only one reason, when building the peaks, windows disk cache system contain the peak files. So there is no need to read them on the drive.

If you turn of you rcomputer or have intensive disk usage on other files so as the files are removed from the cache then Vegas Will bug again.

I'm looking for a progy that can force windows to put sfk files in cache memory.
If you know one, let me know. Thanks