Video card revisit and Thank You!

david-ruby wrote on 6/4/2009, 8:08 AM
I am going to start this new since the Intensity pro card seems to work for us in vegas 8 on a 64 bit machine. Vegas 64 bit does not work with it of course but our ati 4850 card does. My final question here is this.

When we add an fx to our hdv footage the preview starts to slow down and lose frames on the BEST settings full, GOOD full and auto.
On the PREVIEW auto it is fine but the picture is blurry on our LCD 42 inch. Is this normal in a work flow with vegas? If you want to see the actual video with fx you must pre render that clip? Or switch back and forth to see what it would look like?

Our machine is a I7 processor with 6 gigs of ddr3 ram and a raid 0 setup.
An ati radeon 4850 card and a Black Magic Intensity pro card.

Any thoughts or answers will fall on open ears. Thank you for the responses earlier. : )

David


Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/4/2009, 8:34 AM
the CPU still does the preview work & the video card just displays it. The preview setting is 1/2 res I think, so it will look blurry. You also won't see any interlacing lines either.

I use ram render a lot, that's pretty quick for preview.
david-ruby wrote on 6/4/2009, 9:53 AM
Hello Friar. Thank you for all your help here. I mean that. Boy even if I take a 5 second hdv clip and add a New Blue fx to it and try dynamic ram it still is basically the same. Seems to be trying to keep up with everything as it drops behind. I guess it is preview on auto and blurry lcds. Not a very good way to work really. I can't imagine editing like this not seeing the actual quality as you edit. We are doing a tv show and I don't know if this is going to work for us then. Monitoring HD with FX in vegas doesn't look promising. I would be sad to have to use adobe for the acceleration. I have been with Sony/Sonic since the first product. : (

?

David

TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/4/2009, 10:25 AM
The HDTV I own is currently upstairs mounted on the wall & the computer is in the basement, so I can't test now, but I did @ one time hook it up & it shouldn't stutter, skip, etc. with a RAM preview it will play back @ full FPS/resolution the preview is set to.

With acceleration you have limits too. IE if the FX isn't built for acceleration, it will most likely need to render just to preview, you can't just preview @ whatever FPS you have.

What resoltuion is the LCDTV set to via the computer? Are you sure it's not @ a lower res then you're wanting? Same with the TV. could it be defaulting to a lower resolution?
david-ruby wrote on 6/4/2009, 6:22 PM
Sorry. I meant not to give off that after pre rendering the clip that it skipped then. It plays fine after it has been pre rendered. Ram preview does skip and drag when fx is added. Ram preview is alotted by default 350? I don't know if an increase would help.I will try. Still has a hard time trying to play back.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/4/2009, 7:41 PM
An increase would help but then you'll have less ram for the system to use.

It's natural it would skip on some things. That's 2,073,600 pixels vs 345,600 of SD. To render to new tracks for parts, or render to media player. Like I said, you can get acceleration, but it's not for everything. Could very well be what you want won't be "accelerated" at all.
rmack350 wrote on 6/4/2009, 10:43 PM
It's a little hard to picture what's going wrong here but I think some of the trouble is that the effect you're using as a benchmark is very CPU intensive. I'd try something more common like color correction or a simple crossfade to see how good or bad your preview performance is.

Another thing though. I just set up a 1920x1080 60i project, made some generated media, and then used two copies to make a crossfade. Performance on Windows Secondary Display at Good/Full isn't so great (about 4 fps) on my AthonX2 4400 (socket 939. Not a new CPU.)

When I do a dynamic ram preview (shift+B) of the xfade I can fit about 1;24 into 530 MB of Dynamic RAM. That's 1 second and 24 frames. At that rate you've got to be running 64-bit Vegas on 64-bit windows to be able to have lots of memory for a RAM preview. When fiddling with your Preview RAM settings you need to be sure to leave lots of RAM for normal operations.

The system David is using is much, much faster than mine but I think he needs to do prerenders to disk to get most things to play. He should definitely test on bread-and-butter things though.

As far as hardware acceleration goes, the nearest competitor is PPro and it can use the graphics card GPU for some things. Not everything. Vegas uses the graphics card for very little but the free AAV Colorlab filter uses the GPU and does a pretty quick Gaussian blur. That'd be a good thing to test to get an idea of what GPU acceleration could get you.

Adobe has trial versions of PPro if David is curious. In our experience with our three PPro2/ Axio systems the time saved with hardware acceleration is more than squandered by frequent lockups and crashes.