Vegas 8 playback bad

overyonder wrote on 8/22/2008, 3:44 PM

I'm still trying to get full framerate on Good/Full, no effects, standard DV avi files, but it's very intermittent, most of the time at 20 or 23, often starting out at 8 to 11and improving slowly over the first five minutes of work.

I have XP, P4 3.0 gh, there's 600 Mb (1gig installed) of memory available for Vegas, few extraneous processes running, Task manager shows no CPU being used by anyone else, usage only at 50% or so.

Someone once gave me a tip on changing a file in the system/32 folder when I had similar issues with V6... which helped, but I don't remember it or know if it would work in V8.
Thanks for any tips,

John

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 8/22/2008, 4:05 PM

With DV AVI, using 7.0d, I get 29.97 playback using Best/Full. I have a computer that is almost six years old. Task manager on my XP Pro SP1 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 (single core, single CPU, single thread -- really old) shows 44% usage.

So, something is not right on your computer.

First suspicion is DMA. DMA MUST be enabled on your disk drive for video editing. You'll find the DMA setting in the System section of the Control Panel. Look under the Primary IDE section.

Second is background processes. It sounds like you have very few processes running, and none of them are sucking CPU, but playback, as you have found isn't CPU-intensive until you start adding fX and doing compositing. Simple playback doesn't tax the CPU that much. What it does tax is the disk subsystem. If any of the other processes are hitting the disk, that could be a problem. Open the task manager again, and then click on View -> Select Columns. Enable I/O Reads and I/O Writes. Sort the column heading on I/O Reads. Don't run Vegas, and watch the numbers. Is process causing the numbers to increase when nothing is happening? Also, is there a really large number next to any of the processes?

The final thing to check is Vegas itself. It is very easy to "nudge" a setting and as a result be altering the video without realizing it. The opacity setting for each video event should be at 100%, and the track header level should be 100%. I wrote a script to check for such things and I think it is still posted at VASST:

Audit Script for Opacity Levels

[edit]I just found a link in my database of Vegas posts in this forum. This talks about Vegas performance issues related to capture and dropped frames. IWhile this isn't the problem you are having, it may still be of help:

Improving Vegas Performance

farss wrote on 8/22/2008, 4:14 PM

One thing that can really suck up CPU is having the scopes being updated in real time. Probably not the issue here but worth adding to the list of things that contribute to the problem.

Bob.

johnmeyer wrote on 8/22/2008, 4:54 PM

Bob,

Good one. I forgot about that. Scopes definitely slow down playback.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 8/22/2008, 9:04 PM

how's your file fragmentation/how much free space do you have?

just a thought.

Dave

overyonder wrote on 8/24/2008, 8:38 AM

Thanks all,
Thanks for the read/write tip - I didn't know that existed.
DMA I don't think applicable on SATA drives.
Plenty free space on drive, good tip on the Scopes thing...

I think I figured it out though:
I usually have my project properties set to progressive - I guess I thought because I'd be outputting that way I should go ahead and use that setting. BUT, when I turned it to interlaced (which is what my files are), voila, I get full rate in Best/Full. Great.
Though I am curious: Is that what one should expect with my system? If I were to have a "mixed" timeline with some prog footage and some interlaced, and I set props to prog, should I be getting a big slowdown when it hits the interlaced footage on the timeline?
The way things are now, which is of course a huge improvemt, is that I get Full rate until it hits a crossfade or generated title then it goes down to 20 for a few seconds, then back up again.
Does all this seem normal for my system?

Thanks again

johnmeyer wrote on 8/24/2008, 11:25 AM

If your source is interlaced, your should set your project properties to interlaced and you should encode to interlaced. I really don't understand this fascination with progressive. It is NOT better; it is simply different. Unless you are attempting to create a specific effect, there is no need and no reason to change to progressive.