First question: I don't know how sensitive everyones eyes here are but I seem to be plagued with the ability to pick out the tiniest little visual abnormalities. I notice sometimes in my Vegas Preview Window that in footage with swift pans I see a graphical shearing, or "tearing" as they say in video game terms. Now with video games you get this phenomenon when the frame-rate in the game exceeds your monitors refresh rate. I don't know how that relates to footage being shown in Vegas's preview window but it sure seems to.

I noticed it much more when I had an LCD monitor. It was really bad- any time there was anything less than slow movement the image would look like it's being sheared. As soon as the motion slows down it looks fine. Maybe it looked more noticeable on my LCD because it needed to be run at a windows refresh of 60hz. Just a guess. I now use a LaCie Electron Blue IV 22" with 1280x1024 res @ 80hz. Despite it being less noticeable it's still there.
If your having trouble understanding what I'm describing there's something else you can try which give the same appearance but more drastic. Make sure in windows you have "show contents of windows while dragging" enabled. Open up an image in photoshop (fairly large- almost filling the srceen). Now grab the top bar and wiggle the box around the screen. You'll see the visual "tearing" I'm talking about in the Vegas window.
Does anyone know what causes this? Is it indeed refresh related?



Next question: Why is it Premiere and Premiere Pro use video overlay to display the preview window but Vegas does not. Is there a benefit to having the video preview window displayed via your graphics card video overlay? I know with overlay you can resize the display to any size rather than in 1/2 size incriments like in Vegas.
Thanks in advance!