Nope, it's not that.

By default, when you switch focus to a different program from Vegas, Vegas stoppes accessing ALL files you have in your project. This lets you modify those file outside of Vegas & have them be updated when you go back into Vegas. Open up a Vegas projecyt while this browser window is open. Focus on the browser. Now change the size of the browser window so you can see the media pool. Everything is greyed out in the MP.

Don't belive me? Go to the Options-Pref's. Find the "Close media files when not the active application" & uncheck that box.

Now everything will move faster when alt-tabbing, but you won't be able to modify files that are used in a project outside of vegas. :)

Cool, huh?

I think the idea of using a dedicated computer is a good one, but one which was much more important maybe 5 years ago.

Right now, my AthlonXP 2100 (a dinosaur, relatively speaking) is running 61 processes in the background, according to the Task Manager, yet all that stuff is eating only about 5% of the CPU workload, again according to Task Manager. Out of 512MB of ram currently installed, RamPage tells me that 259MB is sitting idle, twiddling its digital thumbs. So I conclude that this little baby sitting under my desk (currently doing double-duty as a footrest) is just loafing along.

I never realized that bit about releasing files when not active. I just now went into my Preferences and unchecked it, and Shazam!--the Vegas apps DO open a lot faster! (I'm currently running two or three instances on the desktop at a time, copying and pasting between them for a commentary track.)

I think it's somewhat a matter of taste but also a matter of system security. Generally, I need to use Vegas, Photoshop, Outlook, Word, Excel, Dreamweaver, IE, and several shareware utilitities, all at the same time. It's just the nature of my job.

Others may only edit on their system and so it makes sense to have a dedicated edit system.

Vegas plays very nicely with all the other apps I have to run. The main slowdown is switching back to, opening, or saving large veg and vidcap files-especially when saving to my 1394 drive.

One thing I think would be a very good practice, though, is to have a second system that is dedicated to not run Vegas or other critical apps. This would be the sacrificial system you use to test out new software and demos, as well as leaving it to handle printing, email, ftp, and other jobs that would be better left to that machine.

Rob Mack

Vegas is well behaved as far as sharing system resources. While Vegas will hog a lot of memory if its running alone, (actually good) you can run other resource hungry applications at the same time with little impact on performance relative to how responsive each application is if:

1. you're running Windows XP
2. you have at least 1GB RAM
3. a decent sized Swap file (virtual memory)
4. no serious fragmentation on your hard drives

5 Seconds!?? - - Takes me that long to realise what I've just done!

Grazie

Totally amazing! That was it!

just so youknow, you can't edit the sounds in SF anymore & you can't edit pictures in Photoshop. They will say the file is in use(that';s why I put up with the delay!).