Suddenly getting shocking performance 8c

alltheseworlds wrote on 9/16/2009, 5:40 AM
I'm using 8c and have been very happy for quite a while. Using a quadcore with 4Gb, three drives etc, everything great.

The suddenly yesterday I'm capturing some HD from my Sony HC9 by Firewire and the capture is stuttering. No dropped frames though. Odd, but I keep going.

When I came to edit it was painfully slow. I had NO effects, just the single HD track in a 720x405 project. Just trying to click from place to place in the track would give a delay of a few seconds and sometimes the display would drop to just 6fps !!!

Something's screwy. So after checking various parameters and preferences I reinstalled Vegas. And rebooted, and defragged. And switched off all misc processes. And Avira.

Then I tried a different capture. The capture went smoother this time (back to normal), but the editing was still really bad. Much worse than normal.

I just can't figure out what's killing the speed. It's not the CPU. Sometimes I'm at 80% free when the framerate is dropping to single digits.

I've never encountered such a weird problem before and it's virtually impossible to edit. I've now got two projects stalled and am getting worried.

Help ! :-(

I need suggestions . . .


Comments

farss wrote on 9/16/2009, 5:47 AM
I've had this happen and it was a disk going down. Wierdest thing is I offloaded everything from the disk, reformatted it and it's run fine ever since.

Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 9/16/2009, 3:42 PM
Go to the Explorer window in Vegas (NOT the generic Windows Explorer window).

Right-click on one of your captured files, and click on the option at the bottom of the pop-up: "Properties."

Scroll to the bottom of that dialog and see if the third-to-the-last line reads:

"Format: Sony M2TS"

If instead it says:

Format: MainConcept MPEG-2

then the capture program has screwed up and given you a file that is in the older format that Vegas decodes more slowly.

The other thing to do, as always, is to turn off the computer, wait a few seconds, and then turn it on again and when the re-boot is finished, immediately start a new project and drop just one of the files onto the timeline and try to play it (DON'T re-open the existing project). If the video now plays fine, then you've done something "bad" to your project file.

alltheseworlds wrote on 9/16/2009, 5:41 PM
John & Bob, am very appreciative of your thoughts. Checked out both and incredibly it does look like my main storage drive is faulty.

I transferred some video files to a USB drive and the performance was back to normal ! Wonderful news, but a bit sad my 1Tb main video drive is kaput. I'll try the reformat trick and see if that helps.

Once again, thanks :-)
fldave wrote on 9/16/2009, 6:46 PM
Seagate has some bad 1T drives. If you have a Seagate, check the model # and go to their website for a possible fix.

Caution - one of the original fixes wiped the HD, so back all of your stuff up.
alltheseworlds wrote on 9/16/2009, 9:22 PM
Spot on ! It is a Seagate and it is on the firmware upgrade list.

Blessings upon this forum and its kind crew :-)
johnmeyer wrote on 9/16/2009, 10:18 PM
It is amazing what can go wrong. I thought I lost a hard drive today. Turns out the ribbon cable connector (it's an IDE drive) popped off the ribbon, just sitting there in the case! The pins on the connector that normally are pierced through the ribbon were just sticking up into space, and the plastic retainer was popped off and just dangling there. I guess that's what six years of heating/cooling cycles can do.
Steve Mann wrote on 9/16/2009, 11:40 PM
Not just the 1T drives. My HP desktop has a Seagate 630Gb Seagate, and it had the buggy firmware in it. Did a firmware upgrade and wow, my PC is really fast again. (Pun intended).

It did make a significant difference, but it still takes it ten minutes to fully finish the startup process in the morning.
alltheseworlds wrote on 9/17/2009, 12:07 AM
I'm using three Seagates 2x500Gb and 1x1Tb. I've had intermitent problem with them and so should have realised what was happening sooner. I've had a lot of disk activity and increased noise.

I've just ordered some new Western Digital drives instead. Please, WD horror stories :-)
johnmeyer wrote on 9/17/2009, 12:14 AM
but it still takes it ten minutes to fully finish the startup process in the morning.Ten minutes??!!

Wow, any computer that takes more than about 60 seconds to be ready to use after first turning it on needs help. Most of mine are ready to go in about 45-50 seconds, although I do have these annoying Marvell high speed interfaces that have their own BIOS startup (like the old SCSI drives) that does add about thirty seconds to that time.
farss wrote on 9/17/2009, 1:51 AM
[i]"Please, WD horror stories :-) "[/i

There was a protract thread about drive reliability on OCAU.
Some very insightfull people eventually convinced everyone I think that there's not a shred of hard evidence to indicate any are less reliable. The problem lies in statistics, not a dissimilar problem to cancer clusters.

Bob.
alltheseworlds wrote on 9/17/2009, 2:55 AM
I left out the "no" ! LOL