Vegas 8 Pro Video Preview performance

FightingIllini1977 wrote on 9/15/2007, 10:58 AM
I upgraded to Vegas 8 Pro hoping for better performance on the preview window and I'm not seeing a huge difference that I expected. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Any help would be appreciated.

Performance Problem: When I select a photo to motion track accross the screen, the preview window shows the picture skipping accross the screen rather than gliding. If I decrease the size of the preview or quality of the preview, it does get better but the skipping is there but just less noticable. Also, if I selectively pre-render the video then the preview shows without the skipping.

For such a basic tasks, I'm surprised it skips. Please help....here is my current PC setup:

PC Specs
Vista Business
E6600 Duo Core
8800 GTX 768 MB
2 Gigabytes DDR 800 Kingston Hyper memory
Geforce 680i motherboard
23 inch Dell LCD Monitor

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 9/15/2007, 11:05 AM
Just out of curiosity, if you select a 5 second stretch of the problem area and then generate a RAM preview, how long does it take to make the RAM preview?

I'd think if it takes more than 5 seconds then there's no way your original can play in real time without the prerender. I could be wrong there, but generating a RAM preview seems like it involves the same task as straight playback.

rob mack
Cheesehole wrote on 9/15/2007, 11:12 AM
What resolution is the photo? Vegas doesn't handle high res photos that well. It is best to resample it in Photoshop down to about 150% of the resolution you plan to actually use in the video (depends on how far you zoom in on the photo).

With 1024x768 photos the motion should be pretty smooth in the preview (use Preview Full).

(Actually I haven't tried this in Vegas 8 yet...)
FightingIllini1977 wrote on 9/15/2007, 12:01 PM
The Video is only 29 seconds long so it's very short. I tried the dynamic RAM preview on just 10 seconds of the video and the picture still skips.

I think CyberBen may have pointed out the limitation with Vegas's preview that I wasn't aware of. All my files are size 3648 by 2736 pixel ratio or higher. I took my pictures with a Nikon D200 so all of my pictures are large.

Is there a way to mass change the pixel ratio on a group of 250 pictures or do I have to manually go through each file to resize? Is there possible a batch mode with Adobe CS2 that will handle this?

Anyhow, I will shorten my current pictures and see if this helps. I'll post the results when I do this later after the Illinios football game.
rmack350 wrote on 9/15/2007, 12:20 PM
Yes, you can make an action in Photoshop that resizes the images and then run a batch job (file menu) that uses the action.

What's your image file format? If it's tiff that could be the problem since Vegas has to go ask quicktime to handle it. You might just make an action that resaves everything as PNG.

Rob Mack
FightingIllini1977 wrote on 9/15/2007, 12:52 PM
I found the Photoshop action to resize all my images. What a time saver!!! Luckly, I have them all saved as .jpg so the batch job did it's thing. Now it's time to see if Vegas performs better...

What is the minimum size I can make a picture before I will start seeing a lack of quality on a 57 inch TV?
FightingIllini1977 wrote on 9/15/2007, 1:09 PM
Ok. I resized everything to be as suggested and the preview performance is MUCH better. When set to GOOD(auto), the video pretty much plays back without any skipping. When you set it to Best (auto), it still skips but I can live with the GOOD working.

I still would like some suggestions on what the minimum size a picture can be before you start seeing detail loss in your videos.