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Sony Vegas 10 Lag & Memory
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Hi,
Hope I’ve put this in the right thread, apologies if not.
If anyone can help, I’d be so grateful, I’m running on a tight deadline of making a video in Sony Vegas Studio HD Platinum 10. Up until now I’ve been making videos fine.
The current project is not working because there is so much lag, I can’t sync video with audio. I’m recording video with a Panasonic SD60 hd camera, and I have a separate audio track. I should note though that even without the separate audio track, just watching the video with its own sound is lagging.
I’m running Windows 7 on a Dell XPS 15. 4GB of RAM, i5 Intel Core, around 250GB free on a 500GB hard drive.
I’ve been searching for hours for answers. I’ve watched practically every video on youtube but nothing helps. I’ve already set preview to ‘half’. In fact, I’ve tried viewing in all settings but it doesn’t help. I’ve already tried zooming out of the timeline, that didn’t work. I’ve been through and tried the ‘Build Dynamic RAM Preview’ and that doesn’t work either. I’ve also tried to render, and here is where I’m getting another problem.
An error message keeps popping up to tell me that the computer is low on memory and to close programs. There are no programs on the toolbar and not much taking any CPU in the background. I have disabled my antivirus to help. The CPU maxes out when trying to render.
I have managed to render at a lower quality, just to see how the lag looked. The video was behind the audio. Back in Vegas I used the ‘Build Dynamic RAM Preview’ and then the video was ahead of the audio.
I’ve done everything I can think of, including clearing temp files, cache, system cleanup, system defrag.
I know this is two problems in one post but I can’t help thinking they’re related. If anyone can help, thanks so much. I’ve been using Vegas fine up until this point.
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7 Replies
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Define “Lag”.
Is the audio and video out of sync? Is the preview sluggish?
Do you only have the one hard-drive? This can be a real problem for previewing AVCHD as the disk head is constantly in motion servicing the editing program and the operating system requests at the same time.
Memory.
I am repeating myself, but here’s my canned reply on memory:Low Memory or Out of Memory does not mean “Not enough RAM”, though adding RAM can sometimes fix a “Low Memory” waning. A “Low Memory” warning usually means that you have exceeded your commit limit. You need either a bigger page file, more physical memory, or both.
One of the biggest sources of confusion over Windows memory usage is the whole concept of virtual memory compared to physical memory. Windows organizes memory, physical and virtual, into pages. Each page is a fixed size (typically 4 KB). To make things more confusing, there’s also a page file (sometimes referred to as a paging file and dynamic RAM). Many Windows users still think of this as a swap file, a bit of disk storage that is only called into play when you absolutely run out of physical RAM. In versions of Windows starting with Vista, that is no longer the case. The most important thing to realize is that physical memory and the page file added together equal the commit limit, which is the total amount of virtual memory that all processes can reserve and commit.
All Windows since XP (and Unix/Linux for that matter) always wants to have page space. Always. Programs (including drivers and codecs) like to and are allowed to pre-allocate as much memory as they want. Even if they are never ever going to actually use it. Sometimes those programs properly deallocate memory, sometimes they don’t (resulting in “memory leak”). Sometimes, programs leave parts of themselves in allocated memory just in case you are going to run that program again. (MS Word, Excel and other Office programs are particularly adept at this). If you have no page file and a program wants to commit some for itself, your PC will crash (AKA, BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death).
Paging file configuration is in the System properties, which you can get to by typing “sysdm.cpl” into the Run dialog, clicking on the Advanced tab, clicking on the Performance Options button, clicking on the Advanced tab (this is really advanced), and then clicking on the Change button. I would suggest a value of 1.5X the currently allocated value. The old advice of 2X or 3X your RAM is, well, old advice when a few MB of RAM was normal. The largest paging file that you can select in Windows is 4,095 megabytes (MB).
Also, Windows supports up to 16 paging files, but each must be on a separate volume, so if you have more than one internal disk drive you could try enabling a Paging File on your second hard-disk. DO NOT put a paging file on an external drive because if it’s not present when Windows boots, then Windows will crash.
For more information, see https://support.microsoft.com/kb/237740 and https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2267427
Hope this helps.
Steve MannSteve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Hi Steve,
Many thanks for your reply.My definition of ‘lagging’ (sorry) yes the preview is ridiculously sluggish. Being able to preview without lag is absolutely critical as the video is of guitar playing so as you can imagine it’s pretty important that the audio syncs up with the visuals.
I have one hard drive in the dell. I’m not quite sure what you mean by this… I mean, I have other hard drives lying around in old computers, but I’m not sure whether it would even be possible to use them, bit confused there.Thanks for the description of the virtual memory. I had already increased this before posting, by multiplying it by 1.5. It seems to have helped as far as rendering; I’m no longer getting the ‘memory is low’ warnings. But as far as the syncing goes I’m no closer to a solution. Unfortunately, I’ve left this late in the day as I haven’t encountered problems like this with Vegas before, and what I thought would be a fairly labor intensive editing session has turned into the impossible. If you can think of any solutions to the sluggish preview problem, I’d be very grateful. Thanks.
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The only bulwark against the massive compression in AVCHD is sheer bone
crushing-processor power and blazing fast disk throughput.Your processor is not the main problem here, your use of a single hard drive, however, is a performance-killer.
Laptop or desktop?
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Laptop, I’m afraid. I assume not much can be done?
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If you can add an external SATA disk to your laptop, you may see some improvement by moving your project files there. Even an external USB disk will be better than a single hard disk for everything.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
I moved all video and audio files to an external USB drive and ran them through Vegas from there. It didn’t make the slightest difference, unfortunately.
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At this point in time, the only thing I can suggest is the use of proxies with a tool such as Gearshift from VASST.
This inexpensive tool shifts gears (i.e. converts) your difficult-to-edit files into DV files for ease of editing.
When you’re ready to render, shift gears again and the DV proxy files are swapped for the source difficult-to-edit files.
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