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Choppy Vegas playback – what’s my weakest link?
Hey all,
I’m starting to get more into video editing, and am trying to figure out what’s causing choppy playback when previewing clips in Vegas. Maybe someone could look at my setup and tell me what the “weak link” is?
I don’t care about render times… All I want is “smoother” previews when playing clips back in Vegas. Previewing at lower quality and lower frame rates helps a little, but even then it’s still kinda choppy.
OK, here’s my setup…
Vegas 9 Pro
Windows XP SP2
Processor: Intel® Celeron® 440 Processor1 (2.0GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB) Chipset: Intel® 945GC
Ram: 2GB Kingston 667MHz DDR2
Hard drive: 160GB SATA II 3.0Gb/s / 7200 RPM / 8MB buffer / Media transfer rate max 966 Mbits/sec / Interface transfer rate max 300 MB/sec / 8.5 ms avg. seek time
* I could not find a “sustained data transfer rate” spec for this hard driveVideo card: Radeon X1550 64 bit 512MB
Obviously this computer isn’t a video editing powerhouse, lol, but I’m on a budget so I’ll just have to work with what I’ve got for now.
Also, I always make sure that no other programs or non-essential processes are running at the same time as Vegas, and that my antivirus / firewall is disabled. And virtual memory is turned off on that drive.
I’ve also fooled around with the ‘Dynamic RAM preview max’ setting, but it doesn’t seem to make a noticeable difference.
So, what do you guys think is the biggest culprit with my setup? Any low-cost suggestions you think might help?
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4 Replies
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To some extent, it depends on what you are editing. If you are editing SD DV video, this system should be OK (not great), but if you are editing anything HD, a 2.0GHz single-core processor is pretty slow. Unfortunately, there is no low-cost upgrade here, since you essentially need a new motherboard to upgrade the processor, i.e., a whole new computer.
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“Dynamic ram preview” does not have any effect on preview in the way that you’re thinking. Dynamic ram is a certain amount of ram that is set aside and reserved for use in Dynamic playback. If there is a complicated part of the time line that will not playback at full frame rate, then you highlight that part of the time line and then hit SHIFT B. This will load that part of the time line into your reserved ram (dynamic ram) and the successive playback will then take place from ram instead of directly from the time line. You are assured full frame rate play back with this method regardless of how complicated your time line is.
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As noted, the processor is slow. In addition, a second large, fast hard drive for the video is also a good thing.
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Thanks for the feedback guys. I plan to get a more robust PC when I can afford it, but for now I’ll just have to make the best of what I’ve got.
One thing I’ve found that does help is to loop a short section and then keep playing it back. After about the 3rd or 4th time through the loop it usually starts playing smoother for some reason. Not the perfect solution, but at least doing it that way I can see how it’s supposed to look before rendering it.
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