RAM and video cards

crooks wrote on 5/16/2004, 11:51 AM
I seem to be having a bit of trouble with Vegas 4; everything was ok, until I put about 26 5MB stills on my lacie 1394 HD ( vegas resides on my internal "C" drive, I capture to my internal 80GB "v" drive, then move captured video and stills/scanned slides over to my external 300GB firewire Lacie for use in my projects). After I did this, Vegas was very slow, would freeze, and crashed a few times. I allocated more virtual memory on my PC's 80GB "v" drive.... since only the vegas projects reside there. This did not help. But when I moved the stills/scanned slides from the Lacie 300GB firewire back to the internal 80GB "v" drive things got better again, but Vegas still slows down a bit, and freezes, but no crashes. My question is this: will bumping my RAM from 768MB up to say 1536MB help? Also how would having a cheaper video card with 32MB compare to a better card with 128 or 256MB?? Would the video card make a difference to my situation??

Jesse

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 5/16/2004, 12:54 PM
Large slides suck up ram a bunch. Go to 4 gig and set the paging file
to 4000 min and max. Open your task manager and watch how much ram Vegas sucks up when it starts to open the slides on the timeline.
Sobering.

JJK
crooks wrote on 5/16/2004, 9:01 PM
Any help or info with the video card question?

Jesse
MadMikey wrote on 5/16/2004, 9:34 PM
More RAM on the video card will not help with this.

MadMikey
MyST wrote on 5/17/2004, 12:11 AM
There were well documented problems when people used external drives with V4. Don't remember exactly what what they were, but if you do a search for EXTERNAL DRIVE or something similar, you might find some answers.
I forget if the problems were from USB or firewire drives.
Your situation seems very similar to what people were experiencing though.

Mario

PS: Make sure you're using the latest update of Vegas 4.0. If you're not, that's a starting point.
farss wrote on 5/17/2004, 2:43 AM
Any reason why your stills need to be such high res?
Also the format of the stills makes a big difference. .PNGs seem to put the least strain on things.
crooks wrote on 5/17/2004, 5:46 PM
The stills are from scanned slides, saved as tiff's. I want the higher res for zooming in and panning; I have not done tests to determine the lowest res that will work for me, but I do know that frame grabs from video are not good enough.

Jesse
vicmilt wrote on 5/18/2004, 4:05 AM
Video resolution is based at 72dpi. Higher resolution doesn't make anything better (sharper, etc).
Try reducing one of your stills to that resolution (in photoshop, for instance), and see how big the result is in size. I magine it will be huge, allowing a magnificent zoom, but overly large (and unnecessary) for everything else.

Take the shots that just need a little zoom or pan movement and reduce them to a smaller screen size, always at 72dpi. Your file size should drop to under (or about) one meg per pic, and your problems should go away.

As for file type, if in doubt, try BMP. It may (or may not) be the "best", but it definitely works.
riredale wrote on 5/18/2004, 9:23 AM
Over here in Oregon (NTSC) the video frame is a crummy 480x720, so any source resolution above that is wasted. When I began using the zoom capabilities of Vegas I experimented with just how much resolution was needed for the source images; I think you'll find that even a source resolution as low as 2x (i.e. 960x1440) is enough for most purposes. For those times you need to zoom in or out of a still more than 2x, you can set the resolution higher in the source.

Just do some quick tests; the limits of a given resolution will be pretty obvious. Also, for typical images used in video, jpeg is a common compression technique. Unless you go overboard with very high compression ratios the results will look just fine.
jwall wrote on 5/18/2004, 10:08 AM
Jesse

I had this EXACT problem about a week ago, TIFF's, from slides, and they were sucking up HUGE amounts of memory (virtual and real). All I did was open the TIFFs in Photoshop, change them to PNGs, and BAM!!!! no problem, whatsoever. I think part of the problem resides in how Vegas interacts with quicktime-based files.....I don't think it opens them natively, but uses quicktime to read them, or something like that....I'm not too aware of the technical nitty-gritty, but that's basically what I've surmised.

Edward Troxel was the one who suggested using PNGs......It's amazing....the problem will literally disappear if you just convert the file, and you won't have to buy more RAM. I too considered buying more, since the message windows was giving me said my paging file was too small.

On a side note....do you shoot slides, or are these from a client? If so, what film do you use? I've been using Fuji's Velvia for years...50 ISO, and LOVED the quality of scans it gives me. I've now switched to their 100 ISO Velvia (rlatively new), and can see no quality degredation. It's a lot easier to use as it's twice as fast.....anyway, just wondering. It's also a whole lot easier to clean up slides (dust, etc.) since they have such a small surface area, there is less dust, etc. that needs to be cleaned up. What a great medium!!!

Jon

--EDIT--

Also...if you're getting a bunch of noise on your zooms, pans, etc., what I mean is if you have a still of six people, and one of them is wearing a blue/white plaid shirt, and there is a whole lot of flicker when you zoom, add about 0.3-0.5 gaussain blur to the still in Photoshop when you change from TIFF to PNG, and it'll clean it right up. Sure, the blur is noticable in photoshop, but due to the resolution of video (as discussed above), you won't get any image degredation in your final product. That's a technique I read here on the forum a while ago......VERY USEFUL!!!! Much easier than blurring the offending portion of the still (shirt, etc.) each time you get flicker.