preview problems using text/media generators

Mindmatter wrote on 7/27/2015, 6:35 AM

Hi all,

so even with my new PC, the Vegas preview still seems to be an appallingly weak link in the whole program.
While editing a simple 1080p mp4 interview, I made an animated, transparent Sony media generator solid color square slide into the image, followed by an animated ( silde down) sony text gernerator template.
The framerate drops to 10 fps even in lowest preview mode, with GPU on!
I mean, really??? On an i7 3,3mhz 6-core with 32 Gig RAM and an AMP 290 card...
What is it in this case that eats up that incredible amount up resources? First I thought I'd turned GPU off or had some CPU hog on somewhere in the background or something, but no...it's V13. Even some of the NB titler pro 4 templates are not that taxing. I find that kinda hard to accept, unless Im missing something really silly here.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 7/27/2015, 7:26 AM

I assume you're talking about preview playback. If so, a selective pre-render will greatly improve your playback.

A soft render on-the-fly preview will always preview at reduced quality when effects or titles are added. (I assume you've played with the various preview playback settings to get the best quality vs performance setting.) How reduced that quality is depends on the complication of the title, complication of the animation, complication of the effect and how many layers of video you're layering. Also how closely your video project properties match your media specs -- but I'm sure you know that.

Mindmatter wrote on 7/27/2015, 12:05 PM

Thanks Steve,
It even happens in the lowest preview resolution - what I basically meant was how is it possible that , say, 2 or 3 instances of heavy FX like Colorfast etc. won't bring the preview to its knees like a simple text animation??
There's something in the V13 media generatores that simply seems to be a totally overhuge resource hog, and I'm wondering what and why.

NormanPCN wrote on 7/27/2015, 4:29 PM

" ...followed by an animated ( silde down) sony text gernerator template."

Which Sony Text generator? There are three. I have found Protype can be kinda slow in some animations compared to T&T for example.

Regardless, One thing I have found if you are animating the text movement by keyframing the X/Y position in the text generator, I could get MUCH better performance by doing that movement with pan/crop. I had not seen framerate drop like you state but I my exact situation was not exactly yours.

In part I think the framerate can drop with the text generator is because the text is generated new for each frame since it is moving around. Every letter is always rendered from the glyphs. With the text static but having pan/crop moving things around the text generator sees the text as static and can likely cache the previous frame for easy reuse. Pan/crop is moving whole blocks of pixels around and is thus super fast.

Mindmatter wrote on 7/28/2015, 6:55 AM

Thanks a lot Norman, that actually makes a huge difference!
The movements you can program are not quite as complex but that's really not an issue.
Thanks!

NormanPCN wrote on 7/28/2015, 10:13 AM

It's too bad the Vegas text is pretty poor with it performance caching of text generation. I guess nobody at SCS thought about or cared about animation performance. It would seem pretty simple to cache the text glyph render. As long as the size/scale does not change it can quickly be plopped/BitBlt anywhere in X/Y and also rotation with speed. Rendering glyphs to pixels can take a bit of compute.

Also, remember you can animate scale/size with pan/crop. Since Legacy and T&T do not have rotation we can get more total movements in pan/crop, and all in one spot.