I don;t think it is the drives since I have used the machine for over a year (always removing finished projects from the drive, then de-fragging) and it has never done this.

I am thinking a MS update, but I have not gone to SP3 and kept my updates ot a minimum...

Andrew

Certain FX seem to make this worse. Like 'Light Rays' , 'New Blue CartoonR' and others and if you pile them up it gets even worse. I usually "uncheck" them, unless I really need to see them. Sometimes, leaving the preview window tiny helps, but will still need to be resized from time to time. That's all I can suggest for now.

How high do you have your preview ram set? Does your page file grow as Vegas slows to a crawl?

Rob Mack

Rob said:How high do you have your preview ram set?
I recently upgraded and I notice stuttering in V8 where I hardly ever did in V5.
I wonder if V8 is just more taxing on my old P4, 3.0ghz (hyper-thread) or if I'm missing a setting I had in V8.
I remember long ago people were advising to turn off Dynamic Ram Preview (set to 0) if you don't use it; is this still the case?
Thanks,
Randy
Also....rather than bump my unanswered post from yesterday...maybe someone can tell my why I get an error when trying to open some .MOVs in V8 but V5 opens them with no problem.

Andrew B wrote: "I am thinking a MS update, but I have not gone to SP3 and kept my updates ot a minimum..."

I also dragged updating to SP3 as long as possible - it is allways better to install SP3b than just plain SP3 :-)) - but some other updates released after SP3 came out now really holds my machine for seconds and up to a minute.

So I took a deep breath, backed up everything, verified the backup and - shaking hands - updated to SP3...

Result: My machine now runs as fast as it did when it was brand new.

I personally can't recommend one preview RAM setting over another. I think some of the advice you'll get on this is good and other advice is just fiddly voodoo.

I also don't have any idea why a specific Quicktime file might play better in V5 than in VP8, except that SCS has tried to make all sorts of optimizations in V7 and VP8 to better use multiple cores and to better play certain types of media. I believe there have been some trade-offs.

Here's what I can say about preview RAM. When Vegas plays the timeline it tends to cache frames into the preview RAM so that subsequent playback of the same region will be better. It does this based on the settings of the preview window so that if you change those settings drastically then Vegas will overwrite the old cached info with new cached info.

The last time I really tested this was in an older version of Vegas but what I saw was that if you maxxed out the preview ram setting and then played the timeline, Vegas would gradually cache frames until the preview RAM was full.

Often, if Vegas used too much RAM, Windows would have to start writing something to the page file. Windows might or might not be writing parts of Vegas to the page file but as long as Windows was struggling to free up physical RAM Vegas' playback performance would suffer.

What Andrew describes fits the symptoms of having your preview RAM set too high. VP8 enforces more conservative limits on this setting than older versions did but evidently it isn't conservative enough. I'd think that if you have 3GB installed then a setting under 750MB wouldn't cause trouble. I keep mine set at 16MB but my needs are simple.

It's be nice to have a little ram management window for Vegas with a preview RAM slider, a usage meter, and a flush button.

Rob

I think Rob is right.... sounds like Preview RAM too high. To test, play your timeline until the FPS starts to drop, then switch your preview window setting (example: change from Best to Good, then back to Best). This resets the frame cache and you'll get your frame rate back (until the cache starts to get big again).

This drives me nuts sometimes. Vegas 8 is just like previous versions... you have to choose between lots of Preview RAM for long "Preview to RAM"s or choose a small amount of Preview RAM for faster framerates after playing for a while.

I find 256MB-512MB works better than 750MB but it depends on your system / project.

I would love it if a Sony developer just explained this for once! :)

Ben

So are you guys talking about the DYNAMIC ram preview?
If so I have it set to zero as I only use selective pre-rendering...if you're talking about another setting I haven't a clue as to what you're talking about : (
In V5 I never had a problem viewing on an external monitor with the "Preview full" setting with several tracks (unless using effects of course).
Now I especially have problems if I have multiple instances open.
Thanks guys,
Randy

I'm on my Ubuntu laptop at the moment and don't have a version of vegas available to check the exact wording, but there's only one preview RAM setting in the prefs. So, yep, same thing. The one and only.

I don't really know the nature of your problem but Vegas has changed over the versions as they've tried to improve HDV performance and things like that. It seems like theyve made gains in some areas at the expense of others.

Rob

Well maybe it has been changed in some way where I do need to give Dynamic Preview some RAM.
I just remember years ago the forum was basically saying if you never use that feature/tool (Dynamic RAM preview) to just set it to zero. I've always used selectively preview when needing to test an effect.
That said, I only have 2 GB ram...what do you think I should start with to see if it makes a difference?
Also, I'm still shooting SD but wondering if I should double my RAM if V8 uses more of it.
Thanks very much Rob,
Randy

Hi - just to chime in on the zero RAM setting - I have seen Vegas do some weird stuff using 0 dynamic RAM, specifically I was doing render tests to WMV9 which usually uses all 4 processors to their fullest, but when I had dynamic RAM set to 0 it would only use 1 processor. Apparently the setting affects Vegas's ability to buffer frames even when rendering - so I would use 16MB as an absolute minimum. I use a default of 128 and if I'm working on a specific project where I'm doing lots of dynamic RAM previews I'll crank it up to 512MB.

Thanks very much ScriptAddict...I'm about to start working on a new project this morning, I'll set it to 128 and see if I notice a difference!
Thanks again,
Randy

I'm actually noticing a lot o hard drive activity, so I am clearing off my main work drive and getting it back down to about 50% full. Then I will de-frag and see what happens.

I would love to bump up to SP3, but last time I checked, Pro Tools still was not completely compatible. I kept my machine at SP1 for an extra 2 years or so because of Pro Tools.
SIGH

Thanks for all the great advice, I will also reduce my memory setting to under 500MB. It has always been set at 1024MB...

Andrew