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long time Vegas user but cant fix terrible preview performance in 9c
I’ve used vegas 8 and then 9 (a then b) and never had the issues I’m having now. For the past year I’ve used a pretty solid XP machine which I keep pretty lean as far as programs, etc. It has a dual core with 4 gb memory and a 320gb hard drive spinning at 7200 with 16 mb internal cache. I usually use a good external USB drive to hold my captured video files.
I’ve started to experience serious performance issues with the preview when I simply play back the projects – the preview can’t keep up with the video, it will often start ok but then the audio continues and the video is way behind until I pause playback, then the frame will finally refresh a second or two after I hit pause, then I can continue playback and it will eventually keep up but will be “choppy”.
I’ve tried making a simple project, with a single video track just playing back regular 720×480 dv 29fps (both the clips and the project match, not even trying to de-interlace). It will play back ok but as soon as I try a single transition or even a 2nd track with a very simple graphic using a standard sony chroma keyer it again starts to get “choppy” or “stutter” when I play it back. It’s like Vegas all of a sudden can’t handle a simple simple project.
I’ve tried resetting all the settings when I started Vegas holding shift and ctrl, still awful. I’ve tried using preview in draft full (720) and draft half and even in half it is still shaky.
My drives are all defragmented, and I don’t have any other applications open. I have PLENTY of room on the drives (my pc and the external usb). I’ve even tried putting all the clips on my PC drive and still getting this effect.
I am stressed out because even the simplest most basic built-in stuff now is eating up enormous amounts of time to troubleshoot things that have always worked without any problem the past several years even back to Vegas 7 or earlier.
PLEASE HELP! I’M OUT OF IDEAS.
-Dave
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12 Replies
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Dave, I am having similar problems so I hope we get an answer to your’s and my issue. I have 12 GB of ram so mine is not quite as bad as that but it is jumpy.
Mims
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Vegas 9 is a pain, after all the good versions, sony really has a dud…I have had so many issues with this version and cannot go back to 8 because all my new projects are in 9. I really hope they get the video preview, rendering and other issues resolved soon or I may start looking at another NLE. To bad too, I have been with vegas since version 4!!
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Well if your preview was good before and is on the fritz now then there must be something with the machine that is causing the problem. If you can’t even playback standard definition without skipping then it simply can’t be a Vegas issue.
I have a Q6600 quad with 8 gig ram and windows 7 (64bit) and have very few problems playing back avchd at full frame rate (until of course I hit a transition.
I would say either your machine is buggered or you have some settings wrong in Vegas. What is your preview ram set at? What screen quality do you have set?
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>>PLEASE HELP! I’M OUT OF IDEAS.
Hi Dave.
This will probably sound very basic, and I don’t want to upset you any more than you already are; but have you run a malware scan?
Also, just as a ‘last straw’ kind of thing, have you tried 9.0c?
I sure hope that helps.
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I’m actually using 9c, and I run malwarebytes all the time, it doesn’t find anything.
I think I was ok when I was running 9b (can’t remember when I switched to 9c) but I know that since I have been running 9c I did 1 project, but it was a month or two ago and I was having to render tons of short parts of the project as I went along and play it in an external player to see what I was doing since preview was slow. At the time I thought it was due to the large size of a couple of the clips I was using. However, now that I started a new project as soon as there’s a psd image on one track or any kind of transition on the main track things get “choppy” or stutter, so now I know it’s not the size of the clips files but something else.
Since I reset all the settings in 9c a couple of times I have to assume it’s not something I mistakenly hit. I tried some other settings previously like pre-rendering and a couple other hints I found somewhere else to change a couple settings within Vegas but to no avail, that’s when I just reset evertything back to factory defaults and reset Vegas with ctrl-shift during launch
So if anyone has any other suggestions or thinks it would be worth trying to go back to version b I could use your suggestions.
Other than that, maybe I will try to go all the way back to 8 and see what happens.
Please advise if you have any other suggestions of what I can try
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I am running Pro 9c on an XP Pro machine with a 2.66Ghz Pentium and 1 gig of ram. Just to check, I just tried one of my current projects which has a DV file with video and audio at 720×480. I have had no problems of the type you describe. Just to test, I added a photo to a separate track, I duplicated the video track, and set the composite level of the duplicate to 50%. Everything continued to run smoothly with no stuttering and clean audio.
I am also editing a 2 camera shoot with a separate audio track and a multicamera track. It also does not stutter on the video although the audio sometimes stutters. I don’t see that as a serious problem.
I do have some differences though. I don’t use external drives for edits, and I don’t use C: for video files. All the video for these projects is on E: which is a 200 gig drive with 48 gigs currently free. I also have a D: (300 gigs with 152 gigs free), and C: is a 500 gig with 214 gigs free).
I also never use a PSD file in Vegas. I got burned on one project which used a lot of tiffs. Vegas would take forever to restart after I returned from a different window (i.e. Firefox) because it was reprocessing all the tiffs using Quick Time to read them. I now use only presized png files because I believe Vegas can render PNG files itself.
If I did use an external drive from within Vegas, it would not be a USB. I think the risk of slow USB performance is too great.
One other note. Do you run Diskeeper to keep your drive speed up? My systems group discovered Diskeeper several years ago. In my experience it will restore speed to a Windows machine which has begun to slow down.
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Any possibility that your pixel format is set to 32bit floating point (Full Range) in your project settings? If so, this could cause things to slow down. I can’t view my time line with this setting if there are any effects or transitions added, without it going choppy.
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I’m in the same boat, been using Vegas since 4 (skipped over Version 5 though) and 9 has been pretty disappointing. It came out in May and I STILL can’t use my firewire preview device for more than 4 seconds before it crashes Vegas. It worked fine in 9a, but that had the destroy all titles bug. I’m still not at the point where I’m considering another NLE though, I just love the interface too much.
As a somewhat related issue to the preview issue, Vegas accurately detects my second monitor, and lets me set it as the preview devices, but when I click on the external preview device it doesn’t show anything on that monitor. Any ideas?
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Guys,
I had just a little time but I think I read the whole post so if this ‘fix’ was already tried and it didn’t work, forgive my intrusion.
Please give this blog post a try:https://joecubicle.blogspot.com/2009/11/sony-vegas-preview-fix.html
Thanks,
JoeCubicle -
Pat G. Excellent blog, thanks. I will follow your site.
Mims
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