You may need a network guru for this. What O/S are you using on the client and on the server? What is the network transport (TCP/IP, NetBeui, IPX, etc.)?

I ask these questions because I have spent six months trying, without any luck so far, to track down and fix a massive performance problem that only occurs between different flavors of Microsoft's operating systems. Depending on which end of the connection initiates the transfer, performance in copying files can be 4x to 8x slower. It is a well-documented problem (at least in terms of number of people complaining about it). It occurs primarily between older architecture Microsoft O/S (Windows 95,98, ME) and the newer O/S (NT, 2000, XP). Thus, if one computer is running Win98 SE and the server is running an NT derivative (2000, for instance), the problem will occur.

Anyway, while this information will not help you directly, it is meant to suggest that you try also asking questions in forums that discuss networking issues. My guess is that Vegas is not directly responsible for the problem (although I've been known to wrong before ...)

BTW, if you have a "mixed" O/S envronment, and this turns out to be the problem, the one solution that does work is to make the clients and the servers all run O/S based on the NT kernel (NT, 2000, XP).

All the machines on the network are running Windows XP Professional, using nothing but TCP/IP as the trasport. Normal file viewing and transfer across the network is very quick. I'll post elsewhere and see if anyone else has any experience in this kind of setup.

Thanks,
Dustin

I'd definitely look for other programs to compare file transfer with. Not neccessarily another NLE. For instance, I maintain a huge site in Dreamweaver. I wouldn't try it across a network. Too many little files to negotiate the transfer of.

How's the performance playing a single media file in WMP?

I'd also look into the threads about firewire drive stalls. What happens if you turn off thumbnails on the timeline?

Rob Mack

rmack350's suggestion of looking at performance of playing media files over the network is a good one. Make sure you play at high bitrate file, like a DV AVI file. If you play an MPEG file, it doesn't require as many bits go across the network.

I'd be interested if Sony has any comments on this. Perhaps there is something in the internals of Vegas where it is taking advantage of something that only happens when reading/writing to a disk drive (like caching) that doesn't always happen when doing the same operation over a network.

Thanks for the replies. I've played several DV AVI files across the network and they're not jumpy at all. Also, when I preview within vegas once the project file has opened, it doesn't have any problem. It's only while the project file is loading up that I have the issues. This leads me to believe that the problem isn't with the throughput on the network, but with something local to the machine and the install of vegas. I'll turn off waveforms and thumbnails and see what happens.

What's probley going on is that when Vegas loads, it's reading ALL the files in the project. So, it's not like 1 DV file playing, it's like 15 (in a project i'm doing now). So, it's reading 15 DV files, all at once, over a network connection that has limited bandwitdh, much less then the transfer speed between your local hard drives. Also, I belive Ethernet networks go slower with more traffic on them (less error checking = more bandwith to xfer). So, you could be getting a lot of data collision with everything transfering at once. Once Vegas cache's all the thumbnails and waveforms, it's fine. I bet if you zoom in pretty far you'll have to wait some more too.

Also, networks are funny things. At my weekend job I replaced an 8 port switcher with a 24 port hub (only 9 ports used) and their xfer speed dropped from ~300kps to 4. Go figure.

Ah ... maybe it has to do with the temporary file.

Options -> Preferences -> General (tab) -> Temporary File Folder

Does this point to a local drive? Change it to the network drive from which the files are coming. Conversely, if it points to the network drive, change it to the local drive.

I thought about that too, but as far as I can tell there's no way to set the temporary files folder to a network drive. The only options available are local. My Network Places doesn't even show up. If Vegas caches everything related to the project in the temporary files folder, these problems would make a lot more sense. Anybody know how to trick Vegas into letting me use a network drive for temporary storage?

On a side note, I just got DSE's book, and so far it looks pretty good. He does make mention of using Vegas over the network, so maybe if he's reading this he can chime in and let us know if he's experienced anything similar to what I'm going through right now.

Dustin

Can you map the network drive (in Windows Explorer)? This lets you take any network folder and map it to a "local" disk drive letter.

I'd have the cache on a local storage device. The cache is a working snippet or alteration of the sources. So its contents stand on their own. I wouldn't recommend having that transferred over the link aswell.

I'd look to using gigabit transfer optimisation techniques such as increasing the MTU (for IP or NetBEUI (latter is slimmer but I doubt has the controls to do this)). An MTU approaching 64K would be ideal, but even 8192 would be fine. The ethernet generic 1500 is just too small for SAN purposes. These fatter than normal frame are known as giants, and in most implementations of GigE NIC, will reduce the CPU overhead at both ends (less interrupts) too. You have to change both ends, well all ends really.

The benefits of a central server are for warehousing of sources and targets. If you are not working collaboratively, it wouldn't matter one jot if you brought the sources locally for the duration of the project. If you are working collaboratively, the files you adjust would be locked anyway, so lock them until you upload using an admin tool maybe?

Having a 64bit slot gigeth NIC or i875P also makes for friendlier networking alongside your disc/DV-OHCI I/O resource absorbing NLE. IMHO.

There are higher than 1Gbps NICs, but not for desktop PCs and you're not reaching the ~120MB/sec theoreticals even with a single transfer (concurrency=1).

Incidentally you shouldn't have collisions with full duplexed GigE, even with a switched hub enroute, these should be non-blocking wirespeed units if you've done your homework. Certainly not with point-to-point either - although firewire networking can do this quite well instead.

Professional GigE SANs use iSCSI for overcoming some of the shortfalls of the setup that started off this thread. Watch your pockets though. This stuff is supposed to be cheaper than FC-AL SAN but is rarely so.

Well, I tried mapping a network drive and trying to write the temp files to it, but if anything that made the problem even worse. What's more, I noticed that not only does it take forever to open a project, but the CPU utilisation goes up to 100% and stays there for three or four minutes. I checked the task manager and it's vegas40.exe that's taking up all the CPU cycles. While this is going on, the server sits there happily, not taxing the CPU at all. This is really strange. The server is a P4 3.0 GHz with 1GB of DDR400 and four 120GB SATA 7200 RPM hard drives. The lab machines are Athlon XP 3000s, each with a gig of DDR333. All the machines have gigabit nics, and transferring AVI files over the network is a piece of cake. There's got to be a way to make this work!

Dustin

I wish Sony would give us a clue on this one.

Two years ago I got my school district to purchase thirty licesnes for Pinnacle's Studio software. They use it on a network, with a server holding the repository of student's video. Works fine. I'd like to recommend updating to Vegas for at least some of the workstations, but obviously cannot do that if it can't be made to work effeciently over a network.

I mentioned this on another forum but have you checked the file allocations on all of the drives and which drives your veg files were saved on. I would make sure they are all of the same allocation (512, 4096 etc). V-4 does not like to open a 4096 veg file on a 512 drive. Takes about 5 minutes to work.
I know because it happened to me but not involving a network.

JJK

How do you change the drive file allocation size?

This is probably completely irrelevant, but I had a severe multiple-file-transfer speed problem over fast ethernet, which turned out to be a virus checker on my PC insisting on examining every new network file opened for viruses! But that showed up just transferring a folder with a few hundred JPEG images, it had nothing to do with Vegas.