quadcore, 4gbs ram, poor vegas performance

MrEdit wrote on 12/20/2008, 3:36 PM
I'm editing 15 min 720p clips and the thumbnail redraw is killing me everytime i move, undo, or anything else. Is this normal? Having to wait for the entire clip to redraw the thumbnail stills before i can play in preview and not have it stutter is getting old as. these are 15 minute chunks of a 2 and a half hour video. I'll have a beard by the time i'm finished.

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 12/20/2008, 3:52 PM
you need to say what format the video is before anyone can help. I edit HD in 1080 w/o any issues on my quad core.
MrEdit wrote on 12/20/2008, 4:47 PM
the format is xvid mp4 @ 6000kbps

each section i'm editing is about 690mb

thanks for any help

TheHappyFriar wrote on 12/20/2008, 6:05 PM
convert it to DV AVI (if SD) or HDV (mpeg-2, if HD). Editing highly compressed formats is going to be slow. Unless you convert don't expect it to be any better (all highly compressed formats will act the same).
johnmeyer wrote on 12/20/2008, 6:16 PM
XVID is going to be slow on the timeline because it isn't designed for editing and so has a very complex structure (like AVCHD) which requires reference to multiple frames in order to display a given individual frame.

The technique I describe here:

Using DGIndex and VFAPI to edit MPEG-2

might also work with DivX or XVID. If I get a minute, I'll test it for you. If it works, it should give you lightning fast timeline performance.

I just imported an XVID movie into Vegas 7.0d using my 6-year old 2.8 GHz single thread, single core P4. I got 29.97 playback using 655x480x32 display in Preview resolution. However, the seek time was awful. If I reposition to another location on the timeline and press play, it sometimes takes as long as ten seconds before play begins, and the playback is slow. If I immediately press space bar to halt playback and return to the start of the new playback position, and then press the spacebar again to restart from that new position, I once again get 29.97 playback.

I'll report in a separate post if I can remember how to use VFAPI to serve DivX/XVID into Vegas.