Compuuter Specs:

P4 3.2
ASUS MB
Enermax 500W pwr.
1GB Ram (Kingston, I believe)
2-7200 RPM RAID striped for OS
2-10k RPM SATA striped for data
3-external firewire drives
ATI 9800 Pro graphics
SB Audigy
Win XP Pro SP-2
Vegas 6.0c

I've been over the start-up files with our very competent IT guys, and we've turned off every unecessary service. Disks are defragged 3x per week.

System was built for Matrox x.100/Prem Pro system (still installed) and has been utterly reliable and stable for 2+ years -- until SP-2 was installed (Prem Pro 1.0 and old Matrox drivers not quite as compatible with SP-2).

System is fully realtime -- even off external drives -- with Matrox/Prem Pro. The last project edited with this combo had tons of p-i-p as well as color correction, and I seldom (if ever) dropped a frame.

The last 3 Vegas projects had no p-i-p, mostly just cuts, crossfades, color correction, and audio processing. For the last project, I embedded shorter projects into one larger one, and it had a severely reduced framerate on the computer monitor, and about 1 frame every 2 - 3 sec. on an external monitor (the embedded projects were mostly single-stream with cuts or crossfades).

We've toyed with reformatting and reinstalling the OS, but that's a two-day process I'd like to avoid unless it would really make a difference. We've also discussed a new workstation, but I haven't been able to come up with a solution that would carry us into HDV/HD editing.

Something isn't right with that system if you're not getting realtime previews off of it. That's faster than my laptop, and my laptop provides 30fps no sweat on standard DV editing. What are you using for your firewire converter? Do you have DMA enabled? Video scopes running for live preview? Set to Preview/Full for external?

Are you using any filters? - there is a small delay between audio and video if you don't have the audio delay set to be on (I usually set it to 4).

Filters will be the main problem though - if you are running a Color Correction filter or setting transaprency below 100% those 2 are gonna kill your frame rate - also large composites with transparency and you can kiss your full 29.97 goodbye.

if you are running straigh DV - you should have ABSOLUTELY no trouble getting a full 29.97 - I've got a laptop - with the same drive video as the system and exe's - 3.2 HT 1 Gig ram and still able to pull a 29.97 w/o filters.

Dave

Just to be clear, I DO get full framerate on an external monitor when the output quality is set to Preview Full or Preview Auto, unless there are filters, effects, or transitions.

External firewire converter: PYRO A/V Link.

DMA: set to "Use if available" for the ATA controller, but does not appear as an option for the on-board Promise RAID controller, which is what we are using.

Video scopes: OFF

Loss of A/V sync happens even when external monitoring is OFF. Again, I am NOT talking about the audio portion of an .avi file, but additional music and effects tracks. If I loop a small portion of the timeline (3 - 4 sec), the audio will eventually catch up to the video.

I'm hoping to get the same sort of external preview performance I get with Prem Pro or FCP 4.5 on our Mac -- full quality, full framerate, full A/V sync, with color correction and simple transitions. FYI, FCP and Vegas share the same PYRO 1394 converter, and FCP is realtime even when pulling .avi files from the PC's data drive over the network.

Framerate, even at Best quality setting on straight .avi (no CC or transitions), looks to be 29.97.

The A/V sync issue only occurs on music and/or sound FX tracks, not on the audio associated with an .avi file. If I loop a 2 - 3 sec portion of the timeline and let it play several times, the audio and video will eventually lock up with one another.

I'm used to hardware-accelerated systems that are always full quality, full framerate, full A/V sync -- even with filters and effects -- and would like to get similar performance with Vegas.

Dual duals - that would take care of ya :)

Dave

Are you doing 4:3 or 16:9 footage/projects. Aspect ratio conversion can be even harder on real time previews than filters. That's why I'm asking.

Another question/observation:

When you set the preview resolution to something low, draft auto for instance, are you previewing full quality video in places where there are no changes to the footage? You should be. That is an easy way to make sure your 1394 preview is set up properly. Vegas should be just directing the bulk of your unchanged footage to the firewire port without any processing whatsoever. You should only be seeing the lower quality preview type footage at the transitions or where changes like color correction or filters are occuring. I typically disable color correction and filters while I am editing and just turn them back on to check the look and for renders.

Do you have any experience editing HD or HDV with Vegas?

We've discussed the move to HD or HDV, but are holding off until I'm reasonably confident that I'll be able to reliably edit the footage -- with realtime external monitoring, of course. I would have spec'ed out a new computer months ago, but I want to make sure it will be able to adequately handle HD editing.

My system is a 3.06 P4 with two gig of RAM. I can only edit Cineform codec HDV at low resolution, but I can work wonderfully well with HDV using Gearshift proxies and a 1394 setup. I preview everything in real time. I usually set the preview resolution to "good auto". Any color correction or filters that I use I set then disable. Most of what I do is straight cuts with occasional crossfades and quite a bit of photo montage type animation (straight ahead documentary style projects). Even though the resolution is set to good auto, I am viewing the SD DV proxies at full resolution due to Vegas passing the video straight to the 1394 setup without processing. It works just wonderfully well and the HDV renders look spectacular.
I capture with a free utility called HDV Split which separates the m2t captures into scenes. The m2ts and proxies together still take up less space than Cineform capture avis do.

As Douglas has said, it wouldn't be enough to get the BMD card. You also need a system capable of feeding it. For all I know you may already have that.

For Vegas it seems like there are a few systems out there that are a bit quirky. Normally, with a fast system you can get full rez playback with some effects at SD resolution. Even with a couple of tracks of video.

Here's a random sampling of points about Vegas playback:
--Not all firewire devices are created equal and some older cards and converters just don't play well together.
--Firewire cards are automatically configured as network interfaces. Disable the 1394 network interface if your computer has one.
--Setting Preview RAM too high will cause Windows to start swapping. This will effect Vegas' playback. If you see that your page file is rising as your framerate is falling then try reducing the preview RAM
--Vegas sends whatever is in the preview window out to the 1394 converter and external monitor. If the preview window is set to one of the "auto" sizes, and that size is less than full frame, Vegas will send the small preview out and scale it up. Looks bad, sucks CPU cycles. Preview rez needs to be set to "Full"
--"Good" preview quality is usually good enough. "Best" adds bicubic interpolation, which comes into play if you're resizing media or moving it around on the stage.
--People have mentioned in other threads today that you should try muting the audio to see what happens. Audio cards can share IRQs with other things.
--Similarly, you can try turning off the timeline thumbnails. This has the effect of turning off the use of SFK files. I've not heard of anyone having trouble with this lately but once upon a time this would solve a problem of stalling playback from 1394 discs. My own assumption about this was that a bad card or bridge board would balk at transferring a little sfk file along with the media.
--If you are using a 1394 interface provided by your Matrox hardware this may not really be OHCI compliant. I don't know anything about that system but it's something to consider.

Here are some other things to look at.

How hard is your CPU working during playback? If it's hardly working that might be a sign that it's waiting for data from the disc drives, or that it really doesn't have much to do and your converter isn't keeping up.

Do you get the same bad preview output using generated media? If so, then it's a good sign that it isn't a disc throughput quirk. And if it happens with generated media then you can easily share offending Veg files with other users here and they can tell you what sort of performance they're getting.

Rob Mack

Thanks -- some really good info. here.

Just disabled 1394 networking -- no difference in framerate.

To give you an example of my framerate, with output set to Preview Full:

.avi file plays at 29.97fps, with 4% CPU usage.

Same .avi file with Gamma changed via Secondary Color Corrector, plays at 22fps, with 53% CPU usage.

Raw .dv format clip plays at 20fps with no filters or effects, with 56% CPU usage.

Raw .dv format clip with Velocity Envelope (no change until last 2 secs of clip, which slows to freeze frame) plays at 17 fps until velocity changes, then increases to 20fps. CPU usage stays at 56%.

A 6-second portion of the timeline has a 720 x 480 .png on the lower layer and a 1080 x 812 x 32 .png with transparent background on layer above. Using the upper event's Pan/Crop tool to slowly increase its size over time (p/c is the only effect in this portion of the timeline), the average framerate is 5fps, with CPU of 56%.

Generated media: Puffy Clouds with horzontal movement via 2-keyframes plays at 29.97fps on external monitor with 48% CPU usage, and 26fps on external monitor with 53% CPU usage.

Interestingly, the framrate for last item stays the same regardless of whether I'm viewing on the computer or an external monitor, whereas the framerate for the others decreases by about 5 fps.

Muting the audio produces no change in framerate.

Ditto for turning thumbnail preview OFF.

The Matrox hardware uses a standard 1394 controllers; all 1394 controllers in my system show up as TI devices.

Lowering RAM preview from 128 to 64 produced no change in framerate; the Page File does not change size with this setting.

Looking at all the running process, every other process shows 0% CPU usage when Vegas is playing back from the timeline.

I'm set up with Symantec Anti Virus corporate edition, which I cannot disable.

All audio, video and still are stored on internal RAID 0 array (2 - WD Raptor 10k RPM drives). Prem Pro with Matrox hardware can do multiple streams with this system. Mac with FCP Pro 4.5 can also do multiple streams when pulling media off this PC over a 1GB ethernet connection, with full framerate, full quality playback using the same PYRO A/V link converter box.

If I liked cutting with FCP or Prem Pro my problems would be solved...

-"-Setting Preview RAM too high will cause Windows to start swapping. This will effect Vegas' playback. If you see that your page file is rising as your framerate is falling then try reducing the preview RAM"

Could you suggest a number for the RAM? I always thought more was better (I have 4GB onboard) but that's not what I'm reading here and in some other posts... Also, how do you monitor "page file" and what to look for?

New to all this .... Thanks,
Teaktart

In Windows 2000 or XP you hit <Ctrl+Alt+Delete> to start up the task manager and then you look at the "performance" tab. Basically, if the page file keeps growing then your Preview RAM is set too high. Because Vegas caches frames as it goes it'll eventually fill up the memory you've alloted just in normal playback. If you get to a point where writing to the swap file is slowing down playback, Vegas will try to cache more frames while it plays, which could increase the PF activity, spurring Vegas to try to cache more frames, etc.

If your page file hits a plateau and stops you're probably fine.

Rob Mack

Dynamic RAM preview setting is in the Vegas Options/Video tab. With 1GB of physical RAM, I would set it at 128, works well for most things, don't go lower unless you set it to 0, as final rendering/encoding does not appear to need this setting. If you are working with a large selected region on the timeline, that may not be big enough. I wouldn't go higher than 256.

Symantic stuff is suspect---some of their products slow down a computer by 20%. Go into your advanced system folder and uncheck all of those fancy "geegaws" (mouse trails, etc), there are about 25 of them. This will definitely help your playback but not a whole lot.

JJK

I haven't read the entire thread. I assume someone mentioned that the Vegas videoscopes, when enabled and on the screen, will slow down external preview considerably.

"If I liked cutting with FCP or Prem Pro my problems would be solved..." :-)

Looking at what you're describing, it may be a matter of expectations. The Matrox/Premiere system should get you good playback up to whatever number of streams the card can handle. For that matter we had a demo Axio/PPro system in our office for a bit and playback from that rocks. But you need to feed it from a pretty fast array - a pair of Raptors might not cut it, even though they're fast drives, they're still on a PCI RAID controller, right?. The Promise RAID card itself probably adds a little CPU overhead.

To me, what you're seeing isn't surprising. I'm sitting here right now playing out a DV25 avi file to my ADVC100 and I see under 10% CPU usage at good/full. The preview screen says "Preview on External Monitor" but it doesn't say "(Frame recompressed)". The later is Vegas telling you that what you're playing has to be converted to a DV25 stream before being sent out over the 1394 interface.

I don't think my computer (an Ath64 3200+) would do as well with a DV25 file in .dv or .mov wrapper as it does with an AVI encapsulated DV file. I may be wrong about this but I don't think Vegas can play quicktime DV as well as it does DV in an AVI wrapper.

I just played through a program at good/full and saw similar framerates. I think my system is probably comparable to yours except for disc throughput, which doesn't seem to be the problem.

(Time passes and now I'm at work on a 2GHz P4 without HT. Outboard converter here is a DSR11 DV deck.)

For the two-PNG example, I put a background PNG with a fair amount of color variation on track 2 and on track one I have a PNG at 1080x812x32 on track one. The PNG is of some large text filled with a gradient and with a drop shadow behind it to use it's 8-bit alpha channel. I have an event pan/crop as you describe and I get between 6-7 FPS outputting to a DSR11 deck. This is at Good/Full. At preview/full I get a little over 12 FPS outputting to a DSR11 deck. This system is a bit slower than the Athlon64 3200 at home.

So maybe your system is a little slow but not terribly out of expectations. The one difference I see is that my CPU gets up to nearly 100% while yours is running around 56%. So either the drives aren't feeding data fast enough (doubtful) or Hyperthreading is messing you up. You might try turning that off if you can figure out how to do it.

As far as the BMD card giving full framerate output from Vegas, I can't answer that but maybe someone else can. I know the recommended specs for that card are pretty high.

Regarding the Axio performance I saw (and the boss decided to buy three of them), bear in mind that that system was a) hardware accelerated by the Axio card, b) hardware accelerated by the PCI-e graphics card, c) running on two dual-core Opterons, and d) being fed over fiber-channel by at least a 10 disc array. (I forget what was really feeding it but it was something like that.)

The point I want to make here is that Vegas would run quite nicely on that system without actually requiring (or being able to use) any of the hardware acceleration. And a system like that would support the HD version of the BMD card. It wouldn't perform as well as the Axio but it's not supposed to perform as well as a hardware assisted program.

Rob Mack

This looks interesting. I wonder how well it works?
http://www.hdvrecorder.us/

Thank you very much for the response. I've always edited on hardware-based realtime systems, mostly with Premiere/Prem Pro and, more recently, with FCP on a dual G5 system, which also has realtime output to an external monitor.

I have a couple of tight-deadline projects to do before NAB and was hoping to either speed up my current system or get a new one. But based on your comments and the others I've received, it's about as good as it gets, so I'm going to wait until after NAB. to make a decision.

Thanks again for your insights!

I think that every idea I had was a strike-out but that's actually encouraging to me because most of what I mentioned was old problems.

Did you get a chance to look into disabling hyperthreading? Just curious.

Rob

Yes. In a nutshell, the framerate was slightly higher with HT enabled in the BIOS. With HT disabled, CPU usage got into the 90% range. With HT enabled, CPU usage never got above 62%.

Curiously, with the display quality set to Best Full, there was only about an 8%difference in fps between internal and external preview, vs. a 12% difference when set to Preview Full.

If you want the nitty gritty details, here are the numbers:

HT OFF
Simple crossfade, External Preview OFF:
Preview Full -- 29.970fps, 30 - 55% CPU
Good Full -- 24.5fps, 27-55% CPU
Best Full -- 24.5fps, 29-68% CPU

Simple crossfade, External Preview ON:
Preview Full -- 26.6fps, 15-52% CPU
Good Full -- 22.8fps, 7-63% CPU
Best Full -- 22.8fps, 11-63% CPU

2 P-I-P windows, External Preview OFF:
Preview Full -- 28.5fps - 29.9, CPU 85-90%
Good Full -- 14fps, 85-90% CPU
Best Full -- 6fps, 90-93% CPU

2 P-I-P windows, External Preview ON:
Preview Full -- 22.8fps, 85-90% CPU
Good Full -- 12.3fps, 88-90% CPU
Best Full -- 5.6fps, 91-93% CPU

HT ON
Simple crossfade, External Preview OFF:
Preview -- 29.970fps, 15-33% CPU
Good -- 24.8fps, 14-37% CPU
Best -- 24.8fps, 14-40% CPU

Simple crossfade, External Preview ON:
Preview -- 27.4fps, 4-29% CPU
Good -- 23.3fps, 4-30% CPU
Best -- 23.3fps, 4-40% CPU

2 P-I-P windows, External Preview OFF:
Preview -- 29.970fps, 50-58% CPU
Good -- 16.1fps, 52-60% CPU
Best -- 6.5fps, 50-58% CPU

2 P-I-P windows, External Preview ON:
Preview -- 26.6fps, 58-62% CPU
Good -- 14.2fps, 54-61% CPU
Best -- 6.0fps, 50-58% CPU