Jumpy preview

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

What is your source format? HDD setup? project settings?

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor

[Steve Rhoden]

No….nothing is missing and Nothing is wrong.
You are editing HD on a laptop that’s not fully
configured to handle the heavy resolution demand for a smooth
flowing HD workflow. Hence you will experience jittery playback.
And adjusting the ‘Dynamic Ram’ wont make a difference.(work with the default).

Steve Rhoden
Creative Director
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.

[Geoff Akerlund]

@Douglas

Here are the source video details:

Audio: Windows Media Audio 44100Hz stereo 48Kbps
Video: WVC1 1920×1080 29.97fps 5194Kbps

The HDD is a standard internal 5400RPM drive. Not sure what is meant by project settings, however right now it’s just a bunch of video segments (no transitions, etc.)

@Steve

Ah, I suspected it was going to be this. I guess my amazement is just how well HD video plays on the computer, and how much it struggles even with Draft/Quarter in preview. I know Vegas is not a media player and all, but it still seems odd to me. Oh well, it will give me a good reason to upgrade in the future. I still don’t understand why Vegas limits dynamic RAM to such a low number. I’m sure it’s for a good reason, I just don’t get it. Shouldn’t the dynamic RAM be proportional to the RAM of the host computer?

Thanks guys

[Steve Rhoden]

Yeah, so it goes Geoff,
When venturing into the High Definition or 2k realm, you have to make serious adjustments and upgrades to your hardware and workflow if you
want the same fluidity as working with SD-DV. Otherwise you will experience what you are experiencing now with some more choking along the way.
The 5400RPM Hard-drive also is slow…(7200 rpm is always recommended).

Steve Rhoden
Creative Director
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

The lag you’re experiencing has very little to do with the media being HD, and almost everything to do with being a high compression format. This format isn’t designed as an editing format, the frame structure is very CPU intensive (moreso than MP4/AVCHD) and is never likely going to be a fast decode…HDD speeds, RAM, none of it will help, not in the case of using VC1 as a source codec. It’s a deliver-only codec a far as most folks are concerned.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor

[John Rofrano]

What Douglas is saying is that you should seriously consider rendering the video to a codec that is more easily edited like M2T or CineForm AVI. The CineForm codec can be found in Vegas under the AVI templates with names that start with “HDV” and end with “intermediate”. They are very high quality and will be virtually lossless for the transfer.

If that doesn’t solve your jumpy preview problem, we (VASST) make a plug-in to Vegas called GearShift that will render to both CineForm and a DV Widescreen proxy and alow you to edit with DV proxies and render with full quality CineForm HDV. There is a 15-day free trail if you’d like to test it out.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Geoff Akerlund]

Hi John. Some very good suggestions. Unfortunately I own the Studio version, so the plugin wouldn’t work with me. I did not think to render to another codec. This leads me to another question though, as I see Vegas will only let me set my pixel width as high as 1,440. Don’t I need to set it to 1920 to preserve the quality?

I don’t suppose there’s a way to prerender video, but not have it invalidated when it’s modified on the timeline? (or is this what gearbox does?) I think that would be ideal.

[John Rofrano]

Hi Geoff,

Sorry I missed the reference to Movie Studio in your original post. You are correct GearShift will not work for you.

> I see Vegas will only let me set my pixel width as high as 1,440. Don’t I need to set it to 1920 to preserve the quality?

No. 1440×1080 @ PAR 1.3333 and 1920×1080 @ PAR 1.0000 are the same size. So you are not loosing any quality.

> I don’t suppose there’s a way to prerender video, but not have it invalidated when it’s modified on the timeline?

No, but that’s why I suggested just rendering to another codec that is easier to edit with. Since Movie Studio doesn’t have the CineForm codec, you could render to MainConcept MPEG-2 using the HDV 1080-60i template and see if the M2T file it produces runs any smoother. It should and if it does on your PC, just use that.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com