Hi Piotr,

I cannot answer your first question, because it refers to quite a precise set of circumstances (hardware, footage, etc.) that I don't have.  

However, in my case the timeline playback speed has improved with version 14, regardless of build number.  I typically use 4k DCI footage from a Panasonic GH4, convert it to cineform (4k), and then edit smoothly with 24 fps playback on a 1080p monitor even with several effects applied.  I couldn't do this on my machine before (i.e. Vegas 13) as it is not "state of the art".  (Old hexacore i7 cpu, 24 gb ram,  R280 GPU).

Not a lot of help I guess, but better than silence?

Right click on your media in Project Media Tab, then Create Video Proxy.

Do this help make playback faster?

Guys - thanks for your advise, but this is not my point (I know work-arounds for working with footage that won't play full speed natively). My point is - again:

My FS-7 footage used to *fly* in the original Sony Vegas Pro 13 on this new machine. Once I installed VP 14, the fps dropped by 25% in both 13 and 14. Now with the latest VP 14 build, it dropped even lower.

I'm looking for an explnation of that...

Piotr

VP14 should certainly not interfere with VP13's performance.

Maybe a driver issue? You could try updating or rolling back the GeForce driver.

Has there been a Windows update? Have you installed anything recently on the computer?

I know as a long-time user you know this stuff, but I wrote this yesterday, and maybe something in there will give you a clue: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-how-can-i-make-my-video-preview-play-smoothly-in-vegas-pro--104624/

I have just discovered something really strange... At the time I run my XAVC-I full speed/quality in VP 13 on my new workstation with GTX1080 (and wrote to this forum about how fast this was), I didn't have my Decklink 4K Extreme 12G installed yet. Afterwards, by the time VP 14 appeared, I already had Decklink - but it never ocurred to me it could interfere! And yet: today I was doing some hoesekeeping with my machine and had my Decklink removed for several hours; when I loaded my older VP projects (the same XAVC-I footage in 25p) I had to change the preview device to my Windows Secondary monitor running off the GTX 1080 - and to my amazement, I saw the full and stable 25 fps at Best/Full, and in 32-bit float settings too! So I installed the Decklink again, and opened the same VP 14 project to compare: as suspected, just some 15 fps max... I thought I've just found the answer to my problem I've been mentioning on this Forum many times lately: acha - so the fps drop I expereinced was not Vegas fault, but my monitoring with Decklink. But to be 100% sure, I switched the project to nVidia monitoring again - and no more full 25 fps :(  Just the pathetic 15 fps, exactly the same as with Decklink monitoring...

SO: it's the mere presence of Decklink card in my PC which is slowing down VP 13 and 14 preview by almost 50% - no matter if I'm monitoring with Decklink or GTX 1080.

Can anyone think of an explanation? I'm going to open tickets with both Magix and BMD, but I'm afraid both will be blaming the other party :( Plus, my Decklink is capable of full 50 fps DCI 4k (though only in Resolve), so nothing can be wrong with its hardware. Would it be the BMD drivers conflicting with nVidia's? Commnets welcome,

Piotr

They (BMD) might suggest you to test it with their DaVinci Resolve...

Exactly... And Magix will say they aren't responsible for third party hardware & drivers...

Piotr

That's interesting! 

I like Blackmagic, but I think it is fair to say they take an "aggressive" approach to product development and release.   I have an (now unused) old intensity shuttle (USB 3 version) that was definitely responsible for BSOD crashes on my current machine.  It did get fixed, but took several driver revisions until it was stable.

I still have the drivers latent on my machine; think I will now uninstall them and see.

I'm having some issue with external preview in Vegas Pro 14 using a Decklink 4K Extreme,
I've opened a new topic here.

It seems that VP14 can't send 50p preview on external monitor via Decklink that appears jerky even if the internal preview is smooth at full framerate, changing Projects frames to 25p also external preview has a smooth playback.
Please note that in Resolve, on the same machine, same card and same video files, external preview is smooth also with 50p framerate.

Piotr,

I would revisit the effect on PCI-E lanes based on the addition of yet another high bandwidth 8-Lane PCIe Gen2 I/O Card. Did I count correctly that you had three video cards and an M.2 card in the machine before you added the DeckLink card? All require PCI-E lanes and have IRQ sharing implications that I wouldn't even speculate on from 6,000 miles away.  

"2x nVidia GTX 1080 GPU accelerator + GTX 1050 + BM Decklink 4K Extreme 12G HDMI 2.0a  + Toshiba 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD cache drive."

 See pages 1-16 through 1-18 in the Manual for your motherboard.

John,

You are right; I have now reflected my latest hardware changes in my signature. In order to add the second compute GTX 1080 GPU that I need badly in Resolve, I had to remove my GTX 1050 card. Anyway, still at the edge of my motherboard capacity; just counting the lanes used even before adding M.2:

- 2x GTX 1080: 2x x16 = 32 lanes (Gen.3; at 7.8 Gbps per lane)

- Decklink 12G: x8 = 8 lanes (Gen.2; at 5 Gbps per lane)

- and it looks like all my 40 lanes are used. So when I installed my M.2 drive on the Asus PCIe x4 card into the only remaining slot (which is Gen. 2, so the 2,600 MBps transfers of the NVMe drive drop to just some 1,600 MBps) - all still worked, but Resolve couldn't reach 50 fps... I examined the Decklink by generating a report from its associated utility (BM Video Desktop), and voila! - the 8x 5Gbps throughput went down to just 8x 2.5Gbps! Meaning that adding the M.2 card caused the x8 slot with Decklink to switch from Gen.3 all the way down to Gen.1 😡... I already was close to give up (thinking my 40-lanes Asus MoBo just cannot handle all I'm trying to throw at it) - but for the last time I entered the BIOS, and - just for the sake of experiment - switched Wi-Fi OFF (I don't use it anyway). Rebooted, and my Decklink is back at 8x 5Gbps! Resolve is running at the full and solid 50 fps, and the M.2 drive - even though not performing as fast as it could in a Gen3 x4 slot - is plenty fast enough for my DNxHR 444 caching....

But all this didn't have any influence on how Decklink slows down Vegas Pro 14; during the entire configuration process I was checking it between any 2 consecutive changes to the hardware installed, and still I only could get stable 25 fps timeline playback when Decklink was not present, and I was using nVidia secondary monitor. With Decklink, I can preview VP 14 timeline at some 18-20 fps max. Oh well - the BMD drivers cannot be optimized for all the software out there - and Vegas pro certainly is not at the top of BMD's priority list... But - if it's Vegas at fault (slowing down playback when previewing with Decklink), and somebody from Magix is reading this - please oh please see to it, and try to improve!

Piotr

Have you tested that with the new build b211?

I have here also the Decklink 4K Extreme, as you know the 6G Version only. I test the Hardware with XAVC I 50p but I have set the Project properties to 25p only (due to may Limitation in the Monitor what is capable of 30p for the Decklink and the HDMI port only). I tend to use Preview/full only. But with that Settings I do not see a significant difference between the Decklink preview and the GPU preview (here an R9 390X).

I am not sure if you use XAVC I 25p or XAVC I 50p footage. If I set for my XAVC I 50p footage the Project seetings to double Pal (50p), I end up with Preview full with maybe 25-35 fps for the GPU preview (not overclocket, if overclocked slightly higher).

Hi Wolfgang!

You probably remember my enthusiastic post on the old SCS Vegas forum after I built my new PC, which - with its 8-core 5960X CPU and GTX 1080 GPU - was fully capable not only of full speed playback of my XAVC-I 2160/25p footage (this kept stable 25 fps even in 32-bit float projects) at Best/Full, but even the 50p was fluent at some 45-50 fps (though in 8-bit projects only). But that was before I ever installed my Decklink 12G card, so those timeline playback speeds I saw using Windows Secondary Monitor hooked to the GTX 1080 card... It so happened that upgrading to Magix VP 14 and installing the Decklink card (with Resolve in mind, of course) were coincident in time, so I really wasn't sure which of those 2 changes was the culprit when I having launched VP 14 for the first time, I never saw such great preview performance again... At first I was tending to blame Magix, but during some hardware reconfiguration I tried VP 14 on nVidia Secondary Monitor when the Decklink was physically removed and its drivers uninstalled - I saw those high fps speeds again! So at the moment I'm almost 100% positive the BMD drivers (and I used at least 4 or 5 versions already) do not go together well with VP (both 13 and 14)... It's a great pity, because I got used to the excellent quality of Decklink monitoring (it's fully capable of the solid 50 fps in my Resolve UHD, or even 4K DCI, 50p projects) - in VP however, I'm unable to reach even the modest 25 fps from my XAVC-I UHD@25fps, 8-bit projects! Not to mention 32-biit float, or 50p ones...

Piotr

And that is the funny Point: you know I have also the Decklink 4K extreme with Driver 10.6.5 here installed. I have also the 8 core 5960X GPU (that I can overclock to 4.2 Ghz if I wish). So the only differences that I see are

a) maybe another board (here ASUS X99E WS), what is not important maybe

b) the R9 390X instead of the GTX 1080 (what is important)

c) the smaller Decklink 4K Extreme Card.

I see another behaviour on my side - I always run my System with Preview/Full but not Best/Full.

But with my Settings I see here for XAVC I 50p (set in the Project properties to 25p) the full 25 fps with Preview/Full!! Both with 8bit but also with 32bit Floating Point Video levels. And with a Color Corrector applied to the Event in the timeline.

And I do not see a huge difference between the GPU preview or the Decklink 4K preview. I have the 25 fps with both Cards, again both for 8bit but also 32 bit Floating Point Video Levels.

I have also tried to disable the Decklink in the device Manager, but have not seen a difference really (have not taken out the Decklink Card from the PC and see not Need to do that!).

Have you tried to use the preview set to "preview/full"?

Yes I've tried Preview/Full; still no full fps even with 25p projects:( Which RAM buffer setting do you have?

Piotr

Dynamic ram preview is at 125 MB here.

Is it pure XAVC I UHD 25p, or do you have also any effects applied to the footage?

Even with pure XAVC-I UHD@25p material, playback is merely between 20-24 fps. I suspect the BMD drivers are somehow conflicting with nVidia drivers, or Vegas code itself.

Piotr

Hmm, what Driver do you use? Here it is the older Desktop Video Utility 10.6.5 (it is from May). And with that Driver I cannot repro your issue. And I have also nvidia Drivers in my System (for my Quadro K4200 the Driver 369.26).

I know a lot of times those blackmagic cards, and capture cards from the past, require you to use their codec to get optimal performance. Have you tested the device using the BMD codecs that came with the device drivers?

I saw earlier that your system seemed to be over loaded on the CPU side of PCIe lanes. Are the GPUs and BMD card all running the max interface speeds? GPU-z can help to make sure the GPUs are operating at 16x. The BMD device can only be assumed, but normally the drivers puke if they do not see enough bandwidth.

Windows display system will convert your timeline video to the format the BMD device needs. My guess is the system cannot keep up with the conversion to the BMD. If that makes any sense.

It's just an I/O card, format agnostic (taking RGB or YUV). And yes, all my cards are running full speed (except for the M.2 card that could perform better in Gen.3 x4 slot, and is now in Gen2. x4 slot - but my caching DNxHR 444 format bandwidth is still covered with lots of headroom).

Piotr

PS. Oh, and as I wrote in another thread: I don't need to guess the bandwidth of my Decklink, as its accompanying BMD utility (Video Desktop) can report it. It's now reported as 8x 5Gbps, which is exactly what it needs (Gen.2 x8 slot parameters, even though mine seats in a Gen.3 one).

PPS. I also remember from the old days of VP 10-11 that it could only be used with one specific version of BMD driver if the Decklink model of that time were to be used successfully; can't remember details but it was a known limitation. I guess I'm just bumping against a similar one!

And that is why I have asked what BM driverversion you are using?

Wolfgang - I tried all drivers in the range from 10.6.4 to the current 10.8.4; not a tiniest difference in performance.

Piotr