better quality during preview on external monitor

[Rick Mac]

[Jorge Mansur] “I would like to know if I add 3megs of memory into my system ( AMD 5000 with 1gig mem)I will have a better response during preview on external monitor.”

The amount of RAM in your system is just one of the factors that determine framerate playback from the timeline across a transition or just in general. From a hardware standpoint, the Speed of your processor, Amount of RAM, and Hardrive Speed all play a part. I beleive that the most overlooked item in this list for most users is the harddrive.
First, you should have a dedicated video drive that is seperate from your operating system drive. Even better would be a RAID setup for your video drive that consist of 2 drives striped together. It is amazeing how much faster framerates are when you have 2 drives working together on it.

Next there are many things within Vegas that can effect your framerate. For example, does your project settings match the type of video you have on the timeline. Let’s say that the video we captured is NTSC 29.97 720X480 interlaced lower frame. If we set our project settings to 720X486 or progressive scan, our framerate will drop.
For that matter I am sure that you have discovered that you can set your preview to several quality settings. The higher that quality the lower the framerate. I generaly work in preview quality full until I add a graphic that requires I look at it in a higher quality mode.
Let’s say that your captured clips are NTSC DV, and you are scaleing the video down to 320X240 for the internet. Just the act of scaleing it down in your project settings can cause a drop in your framerate.
Lastly, if you have added any effects to your timeline you will have a drop in your framerate. For that reason I generally cut my video first without effects and then add them before I’m ready to render.

But back to your original question. Adding RAM is also a good thing.
I beleive you might see a bigger improvement by creating a RAID drive for capture and playback. Heck, RAM is cheap. Do both.

Regards, Rick.

[Jorge Mansur]

Thanks Rick!

I have 2 sata drives that work together in raid. The picture of the preview is fine when I see it in a computer monitor even if there is a dissolve or any simple fx. But when I preview it on an exeternal monitor there is a losso of quality.
Lets see what happens when I add some more ram.
Regards
jm