Vegas Preview Device is choppy

FightingIllini1977 wrote on 12/21/2007, 8:03 PM

I need some help improving my vegas preview device. I have a 4mb avi file in my project and a very small audio file. At this point, i have made zero edits to the video or audio and with display setting of "preview - auto", I'm getting .600 to 1.02 frames per second. As you can imagine, it is very difficult to edit with this frame rate without waiting for a selective render every 5 minutes so you can see the outcome. Any help would be appreciated.

My specs:
23inch dell lcd 1900x1200
Vista Business with Vegas Pro 8a
6600 Core Duo
2gb of ddr2 800mhz
geforce 8800gtx 750mb
250 western digital main drive
750gb western digitial with sata for my edit hardrive

Comments

ushere wrote on 12/21/2007, 8:15 PM

there's something seriously amiss - what are your project properties? you should easily have enough grunt to see realtime dv.... oh, and what's the audio file format?

leslie

FightingIllini1977 wrote on 12/21/2007, 11:52 PM

My audio file is .wav and was recorded through vegas. The .avi file is a video recording from CamStudio of me demonstrating a small task in vegas. The size of the .avi is a little awakward at size 1912 by 1148.

Project Properties
- Width: 1912, Heigth: 1,148 also tried 720 by 480 with no improvement
- Template: ntsc dv(720x480, 29.97 fps)
- Frame rate: 29.970 (NTSC)
Pixel aspect Ratio: .9091
- Pixel format:: 32-bit floating point also tried 8 bit
- Composting gamma: 1.000(Linear)
Full-Res rendering quality: Best
Motion blur: Gaussian
Deinterlace meth: Blend Fields

Audio file is .wav

FightingIllini1977 wrote on 12/22/2007, 12:09 AM

I deleted everything out of my project and added a mpeg recording from my hdd sony sr100 camcorder and the preview display is much better. At the best setting, I get 25 fps with the video display set to 360 by 240 and the project matches the video source of 720 by 480. If I raise the preview window to 720 by 480, I get a fps of 4 to 5 which again is not acceptable for editing IMO.

I find it hard to believe that at the smaller setting it displays fine but at the native size vegas choakes up.

At least in this example, I"m able to make the display really small so I can see my editing. I'm still searching for answers on why I'm getting this bad performance. Is anyone else having these troubles?

musicvid10 wrote on 12/22/2007, 1:30 AM

In the Project Properties, click the little folder icon next to the Templates line. Then find your .avi file (the same one you are working with), and click on it.
That will set your Project Properties the same as your .avi file.

megabit wrote on 12/22/2007, 2:37 AM

Trying to find the best settings of preview for 32bit, 1440x1080 projects, I've found these to be a good compromise between quality and speed (in fact, I'm getting full 25fps):

- size: 720x405
- scale video to fit display window (if you want to see the whole frame)
- Draft (Full)

FightingIllini1977 wrote on 12/22/2007, 6:19 AM

I tried clicking the folder and matching the .avi settigns that I'm using and I did see an improvement. Here are the results for the different preview settings:

Draft: auto 20fps
Good auto: 20fps
Best: auto: 15fps
Any option on Full: 18 to 20 fps

The draft/good are maxing out at 20fps because the .avi was 20fps based on the properties tab after clicking on the match setting.

I think we have resolved my Preview Device issues. Thanks for all the help!

farss wrote on 12/22/2007, 6:28 AM

"Can anyone run vegas with the good or best preview option and see a fps of 20 or better? If so, what do I need to change software/hardware wise to achieve the same?"

Sure and on a much lower speced machine than yours.
The core issue is what are you asking Vegas to do. In your case a lot of rescaling I think and at Best it's using bicubic resampling which looks great but uses a lot of CPU power. Preview / Auto would be good enough if your preview matched your source video resolution however that would take up most of your screen!
No doubt you'd like to keep all your source resolution so you can zoom in too. There's really no easy fix, at that res your source file might be quite big too so the disk has to work hard as well.

Also at what fps did you capture your screen at, you're also quite likely doing a lot of resampling as well. It might help if you took your original file and rendered it out to a standard format first, that might reduce the amount of work for Vegas and the CPU.

Bob.

FightingIllini1977 wrote on 12/22/2007, 6:42 AM

Yes, on full it's not possible to view the playback because I only see a small portion of the screen since I don't have a 2nd display device.

I'm going to redo my tutorial and I'll be sure to check CamStudio output settings so it's more inline with standard NTSC settings.

I am seeing huge improvements. I edited my last message which I said I didn't see improvements because I matched the wrong video at first.

Thanks again for all the help.