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Desperately in need here of some advice with the preview in Vegas Pro 12….
Hi there,
Ok – I am new to all this so please bear with me, and thank you in advance to anybody that may be able to help me!! I bought a GoPro camera, a Hero 3 Black – and it’s only when I returned from holiday with hours of footage and wanting to make a video that my laptop had nowhere near the minerals required to run a video editing suite.
So I have just built a brand new PC, which I believe should be more than powerful enough to run vegas well, but I can’t seem to get it to do that.
These are the specs
i7 4770k quad core 3.5ghz processor
16gb 2400hz ram
Asus DirectCU ii Top AMD 280x graphics card (basically an overclocked HD7970)The videos are all shot in 720p at 60fps
I have tried what I believe everything to get the preview to play well – and it does if I have no effects on it whatsoever – but even just one effect, say to play a short clip in reverse, plays back ridiculously choppy.
This is what I have tried so far :
– Experimenting with dynamic RAM preview from low numbers right up to high
– Unchecked “Enable Media Manager” in general tab
– Selected different displays (preview/good/best etc)
– My graphics card is recognised and GPU is 100% on…
– I am using videos stored on D drive which is a standard drive, so I transferred the same clip to my C drive which is a SSD to see if that was the difference, but it still, when added with just the reverse effect would not play back.
– I have tried the Shift/B pre-render, and on some clips it seems to work – but on others it doesn’t.Also – what I find quite strange, is that although I have 16GB of good quality RAM available, when trying to playback these videos, whether they have had an effect added or not, my CPU meter only shows me that it is using approx 2.5GB (max!) of available RAM, and also my graphics card monitor only ever shows up to 30% of maximum usage.
I cannot help but feel that should the programme be using all of the available resources (which to be fair I’ve spent a hell of a lot on primarily in order to be able to use this programme! :-0 ) to their maximum, it would work and run a hell of a lot better – but it just doesn’t seem to do that.
Is there any other settings I should be playing with in order for it to run better. I can’t work on it the way it is now – and I could have just stuck with my crappy dualcore 4gb ram laptop because in all honesty, this new PC is not that much better at all, but surely it should be!?
I read on many forums and did alot of research as to which processors and graphics cards work well on vegas 12 – and the intel quads, plus the OpenCL graphics cards from AMD seemed to be spoken of as an awesome pairing for Vegas. I just want to get this to run well. Im not expecting miracles from it, but surely it should be performing better than this.
any help would be greatly appreciated. Thankyou!!
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10 Replies
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[Matt Flay] “The videos are all shot in 720p at 60fps”
Is your project set up with the same settings? This is the single most important thing for getting your preview frame rate up (i.e., having the project patch the footage).
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Hi there. Thanks for your reply. Yes, I do have the project settings the same as the source. I may have made some advances with the pre render… As I said I am new to this – I am pretty good on a pc but looking into things like this now I’m only starting to learn how they actually work.
I said some pre renders worked some didnt. It’s because I did not have the ram set high enough (on those occasions it didn’t work). Sometimes I would highlight a section to pre render and it would only do a part of it. I allocated much more ram, and got my cpu meter up and could see that actually as u pre render something, the ram usage goes up each time that feature is used. I was under the impression that ram was used all at once, if that makes sense. I didn’t realise you kind of use it up as you go. So when I said it was only using 2.5gb of it, I now know I’d only used that amount… And not that it was not working incorrectly.
However!…. Do I really need to pre render every clip with an effect on in order to be able to watch it back?? My cpu usage on the meter also stays very low and does not seem as though it’s being pushed at all whilst trying to playback in the preview window. And why is my graphics card hardly being used for preview playback? I can run some incredible looking games on that thing at 120 + per second, yet it can’t play back a video with one single effect on it without me having to do that pre rendering stage? I get that vegas is doing a lot of work behind the scenes when I press that play button, but surely it should be capable of doing what I want it to do in at least ‘preview auto / half’ quality.
Again – just hoping there’s some setting I have not set correctly or some little hidden tip that gets it all running smoothly and have the system use it’s full potential.
Thanks again for your help
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Even though you put together a really nice workstation, and a quite powerful video card, I feel that this AMD-chipped video card is your bottleneck here. This card is excellent at gaming, but it’s going to act differently when using it for video editing. If you can return it for a Sony approved video card like the nVidia Quadro 4000 (or cheaper 2000, if it’s on Sony’s list).
It sucks to have to drop $700+ on a card but if you want professional results is really the only way to go. Maybe you can find a used one on eBay.
Dave
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[Dave Osbun] “Even though you put together a really nice workstation, and a quite powerful video card, I feel that this AMD-chipped video card is your bottleneck here. This card is excellent at gaming, but it’s going to act differently when using it for video editing. If you can return it for a Sony approved video card like the nVidia Quadro 4000 (or cheaper 2000, if it’s on Sony’s list).”
What can you offer to back that up? The AMD GCN 7950 and 7970 cards are some of the fastest GPU compute cards out there. Faster in OpenCL benchmarks than the cards you quoted.
On another note. GPU, AMD or Nvidia, has nothing to do with simple playback of a clip on the timeline without effects and such added.
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Thanks Norman… Yes, no disrespect Dave, I’m sure you know a lot more about this than I do – but I chose this card as within my budget, on vegas forums and benchmark tests it performed very well. It was clear the newer GTX series of Nvidea cards are not great on Vegas, but because I want to also use the pc for occasional gaming in high settings, an older gtx5** series was not going to cut the mustard for that. Read many people say they have a great experience on Vegas with the 7970 and 280/90x AMD cards.
And Norman, so you say the card is not used when viewing videos on the timeline – so are there any tweaks you can suggest that could be made to make it better? Even minus the GPU, its still a pretty capable processor I believe, and 16GB of ram should be enough no? Can always buy another 16GB, no big deal, if that will help you think.
Thanks for your help
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I just tried a 720p60 clip from my Hero3 Black. At half preview resolution it maintains full frame rate. When I change the preview to full it does not maintain full frame rate. My machine is a core i7 860 2.9Ghz.
I have never used 720p60 but I have had problems with 1080p60 files on my machine. I used smart proxy to help in this circumstance. My preview was always half. I have noticed that the 60p is much more difficult for Vegas.
Since decode of the high bitrate AVC streams is hard for Vegas, and single threaded (core) I might add, the simpler to decode proxy (mpeg-2) can help or you can use Cineform studio to convert the MP4 AVC files to Cineform AVI files and this will/should ease the higher compute burden some. It might help. I just tested and on my machine the full size preview comes very close to being perfect.
Bottom line is that 60p, full size preview, is going to be stressing the Vegas playback engine
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[Matt Flay] “so are there any tweaks you can suggest that could be made to make it better? Even minus the GPU, its still a pretty capable processor I believe, and 16GB of ram should be enough no? Can always buy another 16GB, no big deal, if that will help you think. “
Yes, that is the CPU I am about to upgrade my 4 year old PC to. Very capable.
It just seems the Vegas display pipeline is not quite as efficient as it used to be from things I have read. 60fps stresses it more.
See my other reply about some things I have done with GoPro Hero 3 60p footage.
As for RAM, if you open and play your project and then look at task manager and there is still a reasonable bit of free ram then you have enough RAM or more does no good. In my analysis, Vegas is not that big of a memory hog, compared to Photoshop for example. Video streams are so big you just cannot buffer them and need to stream them on the fly which reduces memory use.
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Nevermind……removed my post as i’m not trying to get into any pissing matches. I’m just trying to lend my experience of building editing workstations (and knowing hardware better than I know my own wife) since 1999.
Dave
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Unless I missed it somewhere, I didn’t see which version of Windows your are using. Any version of Windows 32-bit will only address about 3.5GB of RAM. You have to be running Windows 64-bit to be able to address the 16GB of memory you have. Also, you didn’t say which version of Vegas you are using. Vegas 12 is 64-bit only, previous versions are either 32-bit or 64-bit. Again you would need the 64-bit version of Windows to run Vegas 64-bit and to be able to address the 16GB of memory. I don’t know if this helps at all.
Andrew Lenczycki
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One thing to consider is that AVCHD is highly compressed video and requires substantial compute power to playback smoothly on the timeline. SVP12’s native proxy editing only works effectively in draft and preview though… .
My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6
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