Timeline Thumbnail View: All or Head/Center/Tail?

Sidecar wrote on 10/10/2009, 6:48 AM

All previous versions of Vegas until 9 defaulted to show each clip as a continuous series of thumbnails on the timeline.

With 9, the timeline defaults to show each clip with a thumbnail at the head, one at the middle and one at the tail of the clip.

As I had never seen this before and was so used to seeing all the thumbs, I was afraid something had gone wrong with my install. But as usual, it was only a checked preferences box somewhere.

It took a while to find the control in Preferences: video tab: "Thumbnails to show in video events" where I can choose None; Head; Head/Tail; Head/MIddle/Tail; and All.

Is it just a personal preference thing or does it make a performance difference? My ancient P4 machine running in preview in the "all" thumbs visible mode plays an 1080i AVCHD file at less than one frame per second no matter whether I am viewing all or some of the thumbnails.

And if it doesn't make a performance difference, why did the default view change?

Turning the thumbs off or using the Head/Middle/Tail mode seems to allow a tiny bit of performance improvement, but not much.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/10/2009, 11:57 AM

Preview playback always takes a hit when the timeline redraws. With larger source formats and some long GOP compression methods it can take quite a while to pull the new thumbnails from the file. Multiply that by several tracks and performance can be quite bad indeed, especially if you're zoomed in far enough for the cursor to traverse the entire width of the timeline rapidly.

If you're just working with a few tracks of DV material the difference. On the other hand, this is probably necessary for AVCHD editors to keep their sanity.