What is building peaks? Should I just ignore it?

PassTheHat wrote on 9/3/2009, 4:37 PM
I just started editing a new short film edit (my first with Vegas since switching from Final Cut). I imported my Cineform files using the import menu. A progress window opens and states that it’s building peaks. Could somebody explain the pros and cons of this process. It doesn’t take much processor power but it lasts awhile so I just waited before I started working on the files. Thanks in advance.

Comments

rs170a wrote on 9/3/2009, 4:44 PM
First of all, welcome to the Vegas community !!

What's happening is that Vegas is generating a file (*.sfk) that allows your audio waveform to be displayed.
if you cancel out of it, your audio timeline will be blank.
It only needs to be done once and most of us consider it to be a necessary evil :-)

Mike
John_Cline wrote on 9/3/2009, 4:46 PM
Vegas is building the audio waveform display for your source files. It should only need to do this once for each file and when you open them again, it won't have to build the peaks. By the way, the audio waveform files are stored with an .SFK extension and will have the same name as the corresponding video file.

While Vegas is building the peak files, you can go ahead and work, but you won't see all the audio waveforms on the timeline until it's completely done. It also doesn't take NEARLY as long to do as Adobe Premiere!
J_Mac wrote on 9/3/2009, 4:49 PM
Also if you cancel the process your audio will still be present, just not the visual waveform. John
PassTheHat wrote on 9/3/2009, 6:26 PM
Thanks for the welcome and the answer! I’ve been learning so much from this forum.
Laurence wrote on 9/3/2009, 8:35 PM
While we're on the subject, if you change, move, rename, etc. any of your video clip files from Windows file manager, Vegas will regenerate the sfk files the next time it reads them: quite an annoyance that many people here have complained about.

The way to avoid this is to do anything you want to do to your media files (delete, rename, copy, move, etc.) from the Vegas explorer window. Changes made here will happen to the support files as well as the media and save you lots of time. Once you get used to it, it's pretty easy to work this way.

If you really like having the separate window, the Vegas explorer window can be undocked and moved around like it is a separate program.