Update on "What is killing my real time performance?"- still no solution

musman wrote on 10/19/2004, 4:18 AM
Thanks for the help before to this thread:

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=322443

Unfortunately, I'm still having the same issues and lousey real time performance on my p4 2.4gig 1gig ram workstation. Can't get much of any preview of my current project on my data bridge or firewire HDs. I emailed Dr. Dropout to try to take him up on his offer to send in the firewire drive, but he said as the problem was happening on 2 different drives that the problem was a "drive / system issue" and sending in the drive wouldn't resolve the problem. So I gather that the problem is deep within the bowels of my computer and II'd have to send in the whole thing to them to solve the problem. He suggested I go to this site to find some articles on troubleshooting the problem:

http://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/vegasvideo.html

Went there and there are a lot of good tutorials, but I haven't found anything that would help with my problem.
Could spyware be the problem. I run spybot a lot and find that it always turns up something called "DSO Exploit" with 5 entries. I try to get spybot to delete it, but it turns back up went I immediately run the scan again.
If this isn't it, could my firewall or antivirus be what's slowing things down?
I'm running out of ideas, but any help or thoughts is greatly, greatly appreciated!

Comments

farss wrote on 10/19/2004, 4:36 AM
Here's a thought as I've just learnt this from the school of hard knocks.
Are all your audio tracks at the sample sample rate and bit depth as the project?
I've found having even one audio track at 44.1K and the project at 48K can really fool with things. Having more than one could make things really sticky.
My approach now is whenever I have to handle audio that's not at native project res to render it to a new folder at native res and things flow much smoother, Maybe I'm deluded, interested to hear what others have to say about this.

Bob.
winrockpost wrote on 10/19/2004, 5:49 AM
If you have enough space I would try to get all the media off the firewiredrive and at least eliminate that as an issue. The antivirus and firewalls and spy remover stuff is probably not helping matters
Bill Ravens wrote on 10/19/2004, 6:15 AM
The things in anti-virus routines that slow things down are:
1-unprompted system scans running in the background
2-if you have a full time internet connection, the software takes resources to go out and look for intruders.

It's wise to disable anti-virus software while running your NLE.
Also, I've found that some spyware prevents itself from being removed by putting a "read only" and a "hidden file" permission on itself. The only way I've found to delete these files is to go into "safe mode" and manually delete them. It's also possible to get a virus on your boot sector which is unrecognizeable by the system. The only way to get rid of this is to reformat the drive.

Another thing you can do, if you haven't already, is open the Task manager, go to the Process Tab and check to see which executeables are using system resources. By clicking within each column header, for example, if you click in the header labelled "CPU", Windows will reorganize the entire list by this columns heirarchy. This makes looking for the resource hog easier. Barring other executables running, "System Idle process" should be taking all of the available CPU cycles.
Good luck
BrianStanding wrote on 10/19/2004, 8:27 AM
Every so often, I find it helpful to completely flatline my system: format the boot drive and reinstall the OS and all programs. I do this about once every year or two and find it breathes new life, speed and stability into my system. Make sure to back up all your Vegas preferences and customized settings.

This may sound a bit extreme, but you can do it in a day. How much time and agony have you spent trying to bird-dog your problem so far?
musman wrote on 10/19/2004, 1:29 PM
Wow, thanks for all the great suggestions! Each one different and each one probably will help out. Maybe it's just a matter of a bunch of little things slowing me down rather than 1 big thing.
I'll try these out and get back to y'all. Thanks!
Jay Gladwell wrote on 10/19/2004, 1:46 PM
Now that this has been mentioned, I thought it was just me, I'm having the same problem. Ever since I loaded 5.0, the real-time performance has dropped. My editing computer is not online, has no anti-virus software, no firewire drives, so...

I will give Farss' suggestion a try!

Any other ideas would be welcomed.

Jay
Rednroll wrote on 10/19/2004, 3:13 PM
As Brian mentioned the reformat and start anew seems to alleviate a lot of sluggishness. Maybe it's just me, but I've done this many times and it feels like I got a brand new speed demon PC again when I'm done.

Also, to add too what Brian said, what I do to save time in this process.....but admittantly haven't done in awhile. When you reformat and reinstall the OS, the first thing I do is make sure all my hardware is configured right as far as IRQ assignments and latest drivers installed. Once everything is at a bare minimum and running smooth with no programs installed, the first program I install is my hard drive image software and then create an image and burn to DVD. This way the next time you go to do this process, you save a lot of time by just loading in the image. Then from there you start adding your software programs. Software programs always seem to be getting updated on a regular basis, so creating an image today with them installed makes it outdated the next time you load the image back on.
musman wrote on 10/20/2004, 2:48 AM
Thanks again everyone for the help and suggestions. I tried pretty much all the recommendations except reformatting the drives and all that. That's a bit out of my league, so I may have to get my partner (who installed Vegas in the first place) to give it a whirl.
For the record, I checked the task manager and even with the antivirus turned to snooze, the firewall off, and nothing showed using power but Vegas and idle. Vegas was generally 80- 98%, think it dipped down into 80% or so when I actually tried to play the clip. WHen I tried to render a different project I noticed the task manager showed Vegas going sometimes as low as 50% with idle occupying the rest. I'm guessing this is normal. Perhaps the clip just is too much for my p4 2.4 1 gig ram and Vegas.
farss wrote on 10/20/2004, 5:29 AM
Did you check all the audio formats?
Remember Vegas does all it's audio calcs in a FP pipe, any sample rate conversions would involve a big CPU load.

Bob.
Jay Gladwell wrote on 10/20/2004, 7:11 AM
Bob--

Please excuse my ignorance, but what is "FP pipe"?

Thanks!

Jay
apit34356 wrote on 10/20/2004, 8:12 AM
"FP pipe" refers to the floating point math unit on the CPU.
musman wrote on 10/21/2004, 2:19 AM
Sorry I didn't make that clear before. I resampled the audio to 48 hz and the playback still went bad after a few seconds, even with all the antivirus, etc turned off. I'm thinking this must just be too much of a load for my machine.
I still don't understand why I can't get a good preview after I selectively prerender though. That one really thows me.
farss wrote on 10/21/2004, 2:41 AM
Hm,
it played OK fro a few seconds? That's interesting. Thats about how much stuff some sort of buffer would hold, could be disk performance. If even the audio files are far apart on the disk then the heads have got to fly around an aweful lot. I'm assuming the drives are DMA enabled and defragged? I'm guessing you've tried copying everything to an ampty drive?
The last thing can make for a big difference as it ensures all the files are close together.
The point here though is if it manages a few seconds OK then the CPU has enough grunt, it's the ability of something to feed the data fast enough that's holding the CPU back.
One odd issue I've had is with drives over 120GB and the Enable Large LBA setting. This can cause Windoz to have to do a lot of calcs it seems and disk I/O slows to a crawl.

Bob.
JJKizak wrote on 10/21/2004, 5:37 AM
Farss is right. Make sure your file allocations are all the same on your drives as Vegas does not like to work on different allocations especially if installed on one then import a veg file to another Vegas app on a drive with a different allocation. It will crawl. I know because it happened to me.

JJK
johnmeyer wrote on 10/21/2004, 6:50 AM
Have you tried re-setting all of your option settings back to default? If you hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys immediately after you start Vegas, until the main screen comes up, it will reset all the options to factory default. It's a little bit of a pain to have to re-do your toolbars and other options, but at least it's a way to make sure you haven't nudged some setting and by doing so, caused your problem.
wizlinks wrote on 10/21/2004, 8:02 AM
Hi guys I am new here.

Thought this was sticky, and similar to a problem I have. Audio n video goes out of sync after a couple seconds. After some experimenting found that Vegas has a problem if any changes are made to the pagefile. Meaning, if pagefile is extended to other devices or changed to another device. Doing so increases system perfomance as we know. But Vegas has to be reinstalled.

I use a 160GB Raid 0 config to store all video files, perfomace++. But you have a lot of audio tracks plus some video compositing tracks you say. We know that video editing applications unlike desktop applications, use enormous amounts of disk space for undo files. The larger the project the more disk space required for paging. There could be bottle necks.

If you could do your previews on a Video monitor via the firewire using a deck or camera, you should be able to narrow down your problem to the source.

What is your hardware configuration?
musman wrote on 10/21/2004, 2:51 PM
Thanks again for the advice, y'all. You know, I've been wanting to defragment but was warned off it. Here's the link:

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=314288&Page=0

The summary of this is that I lost an audio file and had no idea what happened. It was suggested that the drive might have been failing and I should back it up and run scan disk. Defragmenting was warned off at that time as it could lose data. Chienworks and johnmeyer both advised against it for that reason. I'm obviously out of my league here, but here's what I'm wondering: I dragged and dropped the files of this project from my E drive onto my firewire drive (the backup) so that's why its performance is just as bad there as the E drive. But, as its backed up now, I should be safe to defragment. Right?