Vegas choking on little projects

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farss wrote on 12/31/2006, 2:25 AM
It isn't blurring, GB does produce useable blur.

I think the QB FX is too subtle for something as coarse as this image.
Grazie wrote on 12/31/2006, 2:48 AM
It isn't blurring, GB does produce useable blur.

Well, matter of opinion really? - As the SONY help file on this FX it also states that this is a fast convolution blur, therefore the effect is subtle. And it goes on to say that more substantial blur is required use GB. But, for what it says on the "CAN" - Quick Blur - then it does it.

However, Bob, being interested in the Previewing FPS, my guess, our friend here, was only applying this AS a point of reference, and wasn't asking about the value or not of the amount of blur? Just that he'd applied an FX?

farss wrote on 12/31/2006, 3:09 AM
However, Bob, being interested in the Previewing FPS, my guess, our friend here, was only applying this AS a point of reference, and wasn't asking about the value or not of the amount of blur? Just that he'd applied an FX?
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Well yes,
but different FXs require different amounts of calcs. My comment was mostly directed at the point that blur and glow kind of FXs take much more CPU to render than say levels.

A levels FX only needs to recalc the value of each pixel based on the value of that pixel.

GB requires a calc that looks at the value of adjoining pixels, the more blur, the larger the radius of pixels involved in the calcs for each pixel.

I've seen a demo of GB used to show how capable a RT NLE system was, it might be one of the worst of the stock in trade FXs to render, unless the system cheats, which was also a point of the demo, that they were doing a real GB.

Bob.
Grazie wrote on 12/31/2006, 3:18 AM
I understand. And, with respect to this question your point is?
farss wrote on 12/31/2006, 4:12 AM
That he was using one of the more difficult to render FXs, therefore unless he was using that kind of FX a lot it wasn't a good benchmark to judge the suitability of Vegas to his needs.

On the other hand if (as he seems to be doing) he has to do a large number of small projects that require image manipulation rather than plain editing then he might have a justifiable gripe.

Case in point is his sample avi, the image looks aweful, one might be able to improve its looks by a combination of Blur followed by Unsharpen Mask. Now that can get you into seconds per frame land at Best / Full. That's fine if you need to fix a bit in a long project. If you've got hundreds of little projects on a tight deadline that need careful tweaking I think you'd soon be getting kind of frustrated.
Grazie wrote on 12/31/2006, 4:22 AM
Aha-ha! There we have it:

#1 - You need to have the correct FX as a benchmark.

#2 - You need to satisfy the "range" of media/workflow to be benchmarked.

#3 - You need to have "other" FXs to improve what you are doing.

As to having a "justifiable gripe" I'll let others comment on that one! I did the job of testing what our colleague had provided.

alltheseworlds wrote on 1/1/2007, 6:39 AM
Grazie, Farss and others: you guys are amazing. Irrelevant of the outcome, the time you've taken to look into this and help is really appreciated.

As guessed, that clip I posted and the effect was purely for testing purposes, not for any artistic critique.

But the result seems to be that the performance I'm experiencing does NOT indicate any severe or fundamental problem in my set up ? I suppose that makes sense since the machine performance fantastically well with audio.

But is there anything you can recommend that will give me some more real-time display grunt ? Would one of those 256Mb Many-Big-And-Unfamiliar-Acronyms video cards make any difference ? Is my old Matrox 550 not the best choice for editing ?

thanks again
rmack350 wrote on 1/1/2007, 11:36 AM
Just for the heck of it, because I'm not feeling so smart today, I'm rewriting your link to make it easier to download your file.

Here's the file. Right click and download

Rob Mack
rmack350 wrote on 1/1/2007, 11:49 AM
This might be too obvious, but the file provided is lower field first while "PAL Standard" is upper field first. That alone will slow down your previews.

Bob and Grazie, I'm not in the land of PAL (which we all know is superior), but with NTSC Standard an extra 6 pixels is added to the height of the frame. So 720x480 DV becomes 720x486 NTSC Standard. Is this not the case for PAL?

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 1/1/2007, 1:12 PM
PAL DV is 720 x 576 Lower Field First, a lot more than 6 pixels is added! The supplied file is correct PAL DV.

Standard (as in I think PAL for analogue broadcast) is UFF, same applies with NTSC. The field order is reversed between analogue and DV.

Bob.
rmack350 wrote on 1/1/2007, 10:10 PM
What I was getting at was that "alltheseworlds" instructions were to put it into a PAL Standard project rather than PAL DV. It's a media to project mismatch and will slow down playback.

I suppose the instructions could be read as PAL DV because I think he actually said "PAL DV Standard".

The 6 pixel thing in NTSC Standard actually accounts for retrace time in an analog signal. That's why there is a six pixel height difference between NTSC DV and NTSC Standard.It's not actual picture, it's just time. I guess this isn't so for PAL.

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 1/2/2007, 12:15 AM
My bad,
sorry I thought you were saying PAL was 486 lines, must read more closely next time.

I'd assumed he meant PAL DV but then again, maybe he is running PAL Standard as the project settings which as you rightly point out would incur more CPU overhead.

Just went a checked all his previous posts and he does say :

"but also editing in Pal DV 720x576"

Might be a good time for alltheseworlds to chime in.

alltheseworlds wrote on 1/2/2007, 12:19 AM
The original clip I received was a screen grab AVI which I rezized and rendered out as standard PAL DV. Then I just started a new PAL DV project. So far as I know everything should be standard PAL DV since I'm not aware of changing any of the default settings....
farss wrote on 1/2/2007, 12:47 AM
Cool,
where the confusion comes from is there's two PAL (and NTSC) templates in Vegas. One is "PAL DV", the other "PAL Standard".
So when you say "standard PAL DV" it's easy to worry that maybe you were using "PAL Standard"
Vikes121 wrote on 1/2/2007, 9:48 AM
Dont mean to sound uninformed here but where do you go to adjust the ram settings and thread usage? Unable to find it in system settings

Thanks
Grazie wrote on 1/2/2007, 1:35 PM

Options > Preferences > VIDEO TAB

alltheseworlds wrote on 1/2/2007, 9:32 PM
At the risk of making the Gods angry, can I ask the Oracles of vegas one more question ?

Is there any PC hardware I can get to improve my preview power ? Is my Matrox 550 no good ? Would a "gamer" high-spec 256Mb card be better ?
Vikes121 wrote on 1/3/2007, 1:10 PM
Thanks, I was looking in the system properties of the PC after adjusting my paging.
rmack350 wrote on 1/3/2007, 1:41 PM
I think the answer is to build a faster system. The problem there is that there will always be some level at which Vegas will start to degrade it's preview.

I'd think that the basic requirement should be to play back a track of SD media with basic transitions. It gets more complex with HD media but that would still be the benchmark I'd set (with the caveate that it'd depend on the media type)

Graphics cards shouldn't make a difference with Vegas unless your current card is just too slow to reliably display an HD preview. Vegas currently makes no special use of the GPU.

It's a subjective opinion though. Some people expect Color correction, for instance. As a side note, the Media100 844 system had a hardware card option that was specifically for handling blur FX. The point here is that some FX will never be real time in Vegas without some serious hardware acceleration.

Rob Mack
Flack wrote on 1/3/2007, 9:17 PM
I had the exact same issue with my laptop and my main system, it was my antivirus programe that was the cause of my slow preview, I am using Norton and it was set to scan all files.
Because you are using mpegs and jpegs it will be scanning all in your project.
If you are using Norton then check it for this, you can set it to only scan certian files and this is what I did and it works perfect now. I can't remember what setting I changed... but worth a try, and just disabling your anti virus is no good for checking it out because a small part of it is still running, I would uninstall it to get a true feel if its the cause.

Flack.
Tyler.Durden wrote on 1/4/2007, 7:12 PM
You are of course pre-rendering or ram previewing? It may be asking a lot of any system to realtime preview while compositing on the fly...


T.D




Grazie wrote on 1/4/2007, 9:24 PM

Good to see you back TD!! - Long time no-see - huh?