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I tried everything to improve the preview.
Hello everyone,
Like many Vegas users, I have to endure the sluggishness of the previews every time I play my projects.
What is puzzling me is that I tried everything to have my previews run smoothly, but nothing seems to work.
Note that I am using Vegas Movie Platinum 9.0, and only work on HD stuff (M2ts files, 1920×1080)
I run Vegas on a Dell Studio XPS1640 laptop, with Intel Core2 Duo CPU T9550 @ 2.66GHz, 4Gb RAM, 32-bit operating system.
This is a record of what I have tried so far :
Shutdown all other unnecessary programs : no visible improvement.
Reduced screen resolution on my laptop : no visible improvement.
Opened windows task manager, upgraded the Vegas priority to “high” : no visible improvement.
Match the Project Properties” template with the files I’m editing : slight visible improvement.
Right clicked on the preview tab/window and de-selected the “Scale video…” option. Selected “Simulate device…” : no visible improvement.
Reduced quality / size of the preview window : surprisingly, hardly any improvement.
Enabled dual-core support on the preview screen, by clicking CNTRL+SHFT while clicking to load the Vegas preferences panel. This enables a secret tab called “Internal” where I can enable preview support for dual core CPUs to speed up things even more. Turned to TRUE the option that reads “Enable multi-core rendering for playback” : no visible improvement.
Tried proxy editing. Converted my M2TS into ugly 280×470 avi files. Ran the preview. It went smoothly for about 2 seconds, and then, started to hang again!!!
I’m clueless.
Does anyone have an idea of what I can do next?
Or does anyone out there manages to have smooth previews of his HD editing, with no hanging, no lagging, no frozen pictures coming 3 seconds after the soundtrack? If so, how does he do that?
Thanks in advance for your help.
JC
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3 Replies
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It’s an unfortunate fact of HD video editing that decoding HD video (especially AVCHD/H264) is VERY processor intensive. This is the main cause of slow previews in Vegas and other editors, and no amount of system tweaking will give much improvement. You need a modern quad-core to get reasonable previews in projects with anything more than a single track of AVCHD video. I have a similar Dell laptop to yours (with T9500@2GHz) and it’s only good enough for standard-def editing (but I also have a desktop PC).
Your proxy trick should have worked OK, but you need to choose a video format (codec) that is suited to editing – not WMV, AVC MP4 and the like. Remember that AVI is simply a container format which can internally use a variety of codecs like MPEG4, MPEG2, MJPEG, Cineform and more. The trick is to use a video format (codec) that is much less processor-intensive to decode. You can try AVI DV (the standard SD format), maybe MPEG2 in standard def. Cineform is not used as a proxy, it’s an alternative codec to transcode your HD video into to make it easier to edit directly.
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I thought the main problem with Vegas’ Preview window was that it was never threaded for multiple cpus/cores? I was really hoping they were going to implement that or GPU acceleration for version 10 but I never heard anything about that happening. Just the CUDA acceleration for h264 exports.
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Is your laptop running on battery? Mine, a Sony dual-core, slows the processor to 1GHz to “save the battery”. When I plug in the power supply, it goes back to full speed.
Because of the way that Vegas “edits” I really doubt that we will ever see GPU support for preview. This is a non-destructive editor. Everything you do on the timeline is recorded in the veg file. Preview is a frame-by-frame reconstruction of those instructions in the veg file. Very processor intensive. You won’t see any GPU acceleration because there is no frame to process in the GPU until the processor has generated it.
This is speculation on my years of experience in a former life as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. If anyone has any material facts to the contrary, I am all ears.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com
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