Vegas Pro 8b and Swapping

mr. g wrote on 1/21/2008, 10:07 PM
I am new to Vegas. Am a previous Premiere user. Installing and using the demo copy sold me on Vegas.

Now that I have installed the registered product I am finding Vegas is slow to come back after swapping back to it. Almost one minute. For instance I if I switch away to a bitmap editor to tweak an image and switch back to Vegas to import it I have to wait almost a minute to regain control. Meanwhile the system's hard drive light is on and hard drive activity can be heard.

I have monitored system performance and CPU usage spikes but is not serious. Page file usage is not significant.

I have a system with AMD Athlon X2 4200+, 2 GB RAM, 2 160 GB, 250 GB, 500 GB SATA HDs. I placed my Windows pagefile on one unused 160 GB SATA drive. Deleted temporary files and defragmented drives. Purchased a Registry cleaner and fixed all the errors it found.

No improvement. First I should ask if this is normal. If not, are there any suggestions?

Comments

farss wrote on 1/21/2008, 11:01 PM
Never seen it get as bad as 1 minute but I imagine with a big enough, complex enough project it could get that bad. You might also see some media show as Offline until Vegas sorts itself out again. Turning off thumbnails and waveforms should prevent the delay you're seeing. The issue is caused by Vegas building all those thumnails and caching them into RAM I think. When it looses focus it frees the RAM. When it gets focus back it has to reread all the media files to rebuild the thumbnails.

Bob.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 1/21/2008, 11:14 PM
Turning off thumbnails and waveforms...

Bob - I looked in the options section and couldn't find these two options - where are they located???

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt
farss wrote on 1/22/2008, 12:04 AM
Me bad, very bad boy.

It's under View>Waveforms and Frames

The other option that can slightly speed things up IS under Options>Preferences tick Build 8 bit Peak Files.

If you enlarge the waveforms a lot when using 8 bit files they'll start to look a bit ugly, that's the only downside.

You can also try Build Peaks For Visible Events Only, only saves time when you import media, once you put the media onto the T/L Vegas will build the Peak Files.

Bob.
Grazie wrote on 1/22/2008, 12:19 AM
Well, you got me looking too Bob!

Giving some further thought to this, maybe "Project Media" set to only Detail or List view, instead of Thumbnail, would that assist? Also, wasn't there/is only draw waveforms on viewable area - something like that? Or is this the Pref you listed?
busterkeaton wrote on 1/22/2008, 12:33 AM
You can tweak an image that is already in project media. When you save it, vegas will update the changes, no need to reimport it.
farss wrote on 1/22/2008, 1:08 AM
"Also, wasn't there/is only draw waveforms on viewable area - something like that? Or is this the Pref you listed? "

That'w what I thought to and used to think it didn't exactly do that however looking at V7 it does say "Build peaks for visible events only".

Now that means if I'm only putting 10secs of a 3 hour event onto the T/L I gotta wait quite a while while the peak file builds. In all fairness though Vegas has no way of knowing I'm only going to use 10 secs of the footage.

What we tend to do as we have one capture system and one edit system is after we finish capturing we open a Vegas project and just dump everything onto the Vegas T/L so all the peak files are built without holding up the edit system.

It would be nice if VidCap had an option to build the peak files straight after it finished capturing.

Bob.
Grazie wrote on 1/22/2008, 1:43 AM
however looking at V7 it does say "Build peaks for visible events only".

Does that mean it HAS been removed from VP8? If so, interesting.

farss wrote on 1/22/2008, 2:28 AM
"Does that mean it HAS been removed from VP8?"

No, still there.

Bob.
rs170a wrote on 1/22/2008, 3:22 AM
Options - Prefs - General.
Go down to the box titled Close media files when not the active application.
If it's selected, de-select it.
If it's not selected, select it.
See if that helps.

Mike
mr. g wrote on 1/24/2008, 1:29 PM
That did it! Thanks Mike.

"Close media files when not the active application" was selected and I unselected it. Now Vegas is well.

I can see why someone would want that feature, but not me.

Now to move forward.

Michael
marks27 wrote on 1/24/2008, 2:43 PM
I seriously suspect that this is a Windows issue, not a Vegas one.

In my experience after a lot of years in IT (20 :-\), Windows has the worst paging algorithm in the universe!

Have you got the pagefile set to a fixed size? On a 2Gb machine, a pagefile size of 2Gb should be more than adequate. I think you set that through System->performance or something (I forget)

Give it a try.

marks
mr. g wrote on 1/25/2008, 1:35 PM
Changing the setting in Vegas solved the problem. Vegas is now performing very well.

Regarding the pagefile I had Windows create a custom size ranging from 1.5 times to 3 times the RAM on a separate seldom used drive. The same recommendation said to keep another pagefile on the boot partition in case the other drive fails. Hinting that Windows would not be bootable in this situation.

Everything is well. As I understand more and more about Vegas the happier I get.

Michael