Vegas slow down with scanned slides

chumash wrote on 2/15/2004, 7:12 PM
Hi All,

I am putting together a project using some OLD slides of my parents'. I have scanned them in at a 1200 dpi setting, as I have read on other posts here. The idea is to use pan/crop tool to add movement, etc... The problem I am running into is that when I import these files into Vegas, the program slows way down. By this I mean that every operation, opening a tool, moving things on the timeline, updating keyframes, EVERYTHING takes a long time. I thought it was my system, and as a test opened a video project I am working on, and it worked as always, ie.. great. No unexpected lag time. My question is this, would this type of file (JPEG) cause this kind of slow down? As this is the first time I have worked with this type of media in Vegas, I really don't know what to expect.

Thanks

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 2/15/2004, 7:54 PM
Yes, it will be very slow. Not only is the resolution very high for slides, but that resolution has to be dumbed down to DV as well, all on the fly. Keep in mind, each slide is using a HUGE amount of RAM. Video doesn't need recompression on the fly unless it's been filtered or processed, but slides need to be compressed to DV on the fly.
Liam_Vegas wrote on 2/15/2004, 8:36 PM
1200 dpi will result in images of an IMMENSE size/resolution for slides within Vegas (and is the cause of your slow-down of course). Curious... can you give a link to the post that suggested you should scan in at that resolution? I would like to read the thread that led up to that suggestion.

Having larger than 720x480 will be appropriate if you are zooming in... but unless you are zooming Waaaaay in you should not require such a high resolution (all that extra resolution will be wasted).

chumash wrote on 2/15/2004, 8:37 PM
Thanks for the info Spot. I can deal with it as long as I know it's the norm. I was afraid there was a problem with my system, I started to feel that little twinge of panic/dread. :-)
chumash wrote on 2/15/2004, 8:48 PM
Liam_Vegas, I have seen this info at least 3 times, but could only come up with this example:

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=222643&Page=0

I just assumed this to be correct, but in light of your post, I will have to experiment with the resolution settings. If it's overkill, I don't want to waste the time and disk space. But for close zooming, it might be what's needed.
Spot|DSE wrote on 2/15/2004, 8:58 PM
Keep in mind, it's slides, which DO require a higher resolution. But you might want to experiment with resolutions a little. Of course, if they are already scanned its a moot point.
Liam_Vegas wrote on 2/15/2004, 9:45 PM
Ahhh... "Slides"... I see what you mean. That bit did not jump out at me. I had it in mind the reference to slides was more a generic term (describing photos and the like). Silly me I should have thought more about that bit.

I guess a question to chumash is in order then. Can you verify what the dimensions are of your scanned "slides" are?
JL wrote on 2/15/2004, 10:27 PM
I find that scanning 35mm slides at 1200 dpi works well for my purposes for video. When saved as a .png, the resulting file is generally between 2 to 3 Mb. If the same scan is saved as a high res Jpeg the resulting file is about half that (as the .png).

At 1200 dpi, the scans allow a fairly generous latitude for pan/crop. If tight crops are not needed, you could convert the scans to a lower resolution to help on system resources.

FWIW, I have put 5 dozen 1200 dpi .png’s on the timeline and noticed virtually no change in Vegas responsiveness; (2.4 GHz dual xeon, 1 gig ram). In Vegas, I usually work with png’s, not jpegs.


JL
johnmeyer wrote on 2/15/2004, 10:43 PM
How many slides do you have on the timeline?

I am not sure that resolution is the only problem. If you have lots of pictures (over a hundred), I think Vegas will slow down. I have run into several problems with Vegas when I have more than a few hundred video clips in a single project. Everything gets very sluggish. I assume the same thing might happen with still images as well.

I've never had a problem with high resolution images slowing down the system. I really don't think that is the only cause of your problem.

Another thing that might help is to reduce the preview resolution.
JJKizak wrote on 2/16/2004, 5:23 AM
I have had 450 35mm scanned slides on the timeline at 1200 dpi jpg and the system does slow down quite a bit but I have found that less than 1200 restricts zooming at about the 10x level and also anything more than 1200 dpi doesn't seem to help much. When I increased the ram to 2 gig it helped considerable. P4 2.8 400ddr HT.

JJK
pb wrote on 2/16/2004, 6:18 AM
ditto on the extra RAM. 512 doesn't cut it with long still sequences or if one is using somehting like Graffiti.
chumash wrote on 2/16/2004, 12:26 PM
In answer to Liam_Vegas's question, I am using 35mm slides. I am still getting the slow down in Vegas when working on this project. However, I also notice it when working with these files in PSP8. It also is very slow. As I am working on an AMD Athlon XP1800, with 1GB ram, I think I probably don't have the horsepower in the CPU that's needed for these larger files. Short of building another computer, which will be a few months away (come on tax return) I don't see any other way around it. Unless anyone has a suggestion to fix the problem. I can definitely live with it in the short term. Thanks for all the info and help.
corug7 wrote on 2/16/2004, 12:41 PM
I just finished a 1 hour long production with over 150 slides at 1200dpi each. I'm using a P4 1.8ghz with 512megs of RAM. I ended up having to render every time I had over 30 slides, or else my computer would lock right up so that I could not even open my project (that got scary). If you need to do that, just be sure to render at Best quality. Also, don't forget to run the de-interlace and NTSC (or PAL) colors filters, as you might find that the scans cause mucho problems without them (especially bright colors). My project ended up being a success, but not without a lot of experimentation. Good luck!

Corey
chumash wrote on 2/16/2004, 3:46 PM
Corey, what kind of problems do the scans produce if the de-interlace and color filters are not used? Would that be in the final version on DVD, or while editing? And thanks for the tip, I had no idea about either of those points.
BD wrote on 2/16/2004, 4:07 PM
I'm finishing a slideshow with 500 PNG and JPG scans of 35mm and medium-format negatives, sized at 1.6 and 6.1 megapixels respectively, split into eight different VEG files. I've rendered each file into DV AVI, and now will paste those eight AVI files onto a "master" VEG for adding music and rendering to MPEG2. A desaturation filter was applied to each track that contained slides.

I made a border on a top track, so that the pan-&-scan edges wouldn't show too much if viewed on a PC or video projector in future years.

The high resolution of the 6.1 megapixel scans allowed me to zoom WAY IN on them. The pictures that were zoomed way-in had no interlace flutter, probably because their lines were more than a pixel wide. Some other pic's did flutter, so I applied various fixes within Vegas -- e.g., minimal Gaussian Blur (.000/.001), sometimes followed by an Unsharp Mask or Sharpen filter to "resharpen" the image (if that didn't reintroduce flutter).

I chose to stop the fluttering as viewed on my S-Video monitor, without worrying how it looked on a composite-input TV.

Cookie Cutter and Gaussian Blur fx were applied to copies of clips pasted on a higher track, when the flutter was bad, to soften a limited area of a pic.

No problems or noticable delays (Athlon XP 1800+ with 1GB of DDR RAM).

If you're still havin' problems, I'd be glad to mail you a DVD to view my results, along with a CD including the VEG files (so you can see which filters were applied to each clip). You could send your postal address to brandonsdaddy "at" juno.com.

Brandon's Dad