Production Assistant Lower Thirds Hangs V9

InterceptPoint wrote on 5/19/2009, 6:16 AM

I've got a problem with Production Assistant and the Lower Thirds tool. For an empty program the tool will display the various Lower Thirds options very quickly and everything works just fine. But for a complex project with several tracks the preview is agonizingly slow and will hang Vegas 9 when I try to check out more than one of the presets. It looks to me like PA is trying to re-draw all of the timeline thumbnails each time you select a new preset and it is just getting bogged down. In any case something is broke.

This is a serious problem for me since it makes the PA Lower Thirds tool basically useless. Hope there is a fix or there is something that I'm doing wrong.

BTW, I'm running a Core i7 machine with 6 GB of memory.

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/19/2009, 7:44 AM

Without using PA, please drop any nested veg on the timeline of the project in question and verify that it behaves differently?

InterceptPoint wrote on 5/19/2009, 8:53 AM

Spot: I'm not sure I understand your comment. V9 is only hanging in the PA dialogue for lower thirds. In all other regards PA and V9 are well behaved. It's only in the Lower Thirds dialogue. I just get that cute little Vista hourglass that runs forever.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/19/2009, 9:28 AM

Does it behave any different using the "other" way to start the Lower Thirds tool? There are two ways to start Lower Thirds. One is to select the Lower Thirds icon on the PA tool bar in which the Lower Thirds tool loads as a script which blocks all timeline access like scripts do. The other way is to use: View | Extensions | Production Assistant 1.0 | Lower Thirds Tool. This starts the Lower Thirds tool as a command extension and creates a dockable window so that you can have it always open and still interact with the Vegas timeline.

So what I'm asking is, does the this "hanging" behavior seem any different when you start the Lower Third tool as a script vs a custom command? What it is basically doing is taking a snapshot of your preview window so that it can display it with the lower third superimposed over it. To do this, it saves your current preview settings, sets the preview to Best/Full for the snapshot, takes the snapshot, and resets the preview settings back to what you had. If your project took a couple of seconds to draw one frame (as many AVCHD projects do), this switching and snapshot could take a bit of time.

What is the playback framerate like for this project? How long does it take you to set the preview to Best/Full and press the Copy Snapshot to Clipboard button and then change it back to Preview/Auto (or whatever setting you had). This is what the Lower Thirds tool is doing. I would be curious to know how slow that is when done manually.

We can certainly look into using a dummy default background with a button to refresh from timeline if dynamic preview is a problem for people. The Lower Thirds tool has been part of Ultimate S Pro for years (both 3.0 & 4.0 have it) and this is the first time someone has said it was hanging Vegas. Perhaps there is a Vegas Pro 9.0 problem that we did not find in our testing? There were several updates to how the preview works so this is possible.

Please let me know what you find.

~jr

InterceptPoint wrote on 5/19/2009, 11:02 AM

The View | Extensions ... approach works just fine. Very snappy. Doesn't hang. I can use it.

I then tried the Icon version again and it worked fine ... for the first 3-4 preset selections. And then it hangs. Hope this helps. You should try it on a complex project and see if you can reproduce the problem.

This is with Vista 64 bit. 64 bit Vegas 9. Core i7 6 GB.

The project is a mix of Canon 20D jpegs and 4:3 SD in a 1920x1280 project. I've got titles and a PA background to fill in the 4:3 SD. And lower thirds. The project will be about a 30 minute HD video when finished. The problem was noted and the testing was done on the first 9 minutes of the project that is more or less complete.

The stills preview at 29.970 fps
Transistions slow preview to about 15 fps
SD previews at 17-18 fps
The snapshot is essentially instantaneous

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/19/2009, 9:07 PM

Thanks for the feedback. I expected the extension to run better than the script version. I would use that for now.

~jr