• VEGAS Pro

  How do I get a performance increase for Vegas?

  Posted by David Dickerson on November 4, 2005 at 10:33 pm

  Hello, I’m an editor that’s using Vegas 4 (yes, still :p ), editing together documentaries and short films for a non-profit organization I’m a member of. I’ve been using Vegas for about 2 years now, and I love it.

  I edit on a Hypersonic Aviator ZX7 laptop, a P4 2.8Ghz with a 60Gig 7500rpm HDD (supplemented by Lacie 500gb externals), and 1gig Ram. Originally, I was running Vegas with 512mb Ram, but when editing larger projects, or running Vegas along with other graphic apps, I’d virtually bring this system to it’s knees, so we upgraded to 1gig ram.

  Though the out-of-memory problems have been taken care of, unfortunately there was hardly any increase in speed for the real-time previewer in Vegas.

  Viewed in the “Preview (Full)” setting, crossfades on my system drop the frame rate down to about 8-12 fps, and if there’s any effects on the clips, it’s more like 1-3 fps.

  I’d like to know what is the chief factor in having a more “real-time” playback of your projects – CPU, Ram, Graphics card, etc?

  Thanks!

  Rob Mack replied 20 years, 6 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Gary Kleiner

  November 4, 2005 at 10:54 pm

  The slow-down is where you have to recompress the video. What file format are you working with?

  Gary
• 

  David Dickerson

  November 4, 2005 at 11:15 pm

  Gary, I’m working with the DV Type2 avi’s that Vegas captures through the firewire from the DV cam.
• 

  Terje A. bergesen

  November 5, 2005 at 5:26 pm

  For rendering, the three most important factores are CPU, CPU and CPU.

  —
  Terje A. Bergesen
• 

  Rob Mack

  November 7, 2005 at 5:57 am

  I can’t really speak to Vegas 4 much any more. Certainly the CPU could be the issue but I kind of doubt it. You could try putting the media onto your internal disc and see if that makes a difference. Sometimes firewire drives are a culprit.

  Another thing that people are seeing on V6 is that if you set RAM preview too high Windows XP will start writing things to the swap file. That can drastically slow down playback so you might look at that. My personal rule of thumb is to keep the preview allocation to less than half of your installed memory.

  Even though you’re using V4 you still might consider playing with the ram preview size.

  Rob Mack

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