preview latency with V6 over V5

[Chris Young]

Working in PAL here and have exactly the same behaviour, as you are experiencing. With still images in 5.0d the image stays up on the external monitor but as you say drops out in around three seconds in 6.0c. Haven’t had any associated crashes though. With live video as opposed to stills both appear to behave much the same way, which is quite satisfactorily. I have not been able to find any setting that alters this behaviour. I wouldn’t mind betting it has something to do with the code re-write that enables 6.0 to use a ‘windows secondary display’, e.g. a computer monitor, or a Blackmagic ‘Decklink’ as an output option.

Chris Young
Sydney

[Zip-edit]

Chris-
If you dont mind…
Try quickly previewing odd file formats from an external drive.
IE: mpg1 then low-res quicktime then Stills of odd format.

Keep asking it to preview before its ready to. Hurry it along I guess to tax/stress the encoders on preview.
I would be showing someone pics/bakgnd options successively resulting in a freeze. I now feel that I have to undo EXT-PREV to save face and humility.

I have some motion backgrounds on external LaCie drive that will crash upon preview but NOT if I take them directly to the trimmer or to the timeline.
Once they’re on any timline they’ll play OK.
Zip-

Zip

[Chris Young]

Zip ~

Have had another look at this problemo! Have a work around for stills that works here in PAL. Should more than likely work in NTSC. The process, as you requested, was using external drives and external previewing of DV, QT, WMV, MPEG1, MPEG2, TGA, JPEG’s. With DV files the response could be considered instant, or almost instant. With the QT, WMV & MPEG’s the response was around 2>3 seconds after selecting the external preview. Then the playbacks ran fine. Interestingly I had an NTSC WMV file which when I selected it previewed back in the Vegas preview window even though external was selected… now how that works I don’t know?

With the different still formats they all took around 2>3 seconds to initialise on screen then stayed there for around three seconds and then collapsed away. I had no system ‘crashes’ or hangs with any of the files, video or stills. Agreed, with stills v6.0 is nowhere near as smooth in previewing as v5.0. What I did discover which will help if you have heaps of stills to preview to clients is the following work around. Go to ‘preferences’, select the ‘editing’ tab and change the ‘new still image length’ to say 30 seconds or so, apply the change, exit and now try your stills previewing. Here it worked a charm, nice long previews. Just have to remember to change it back to a reasonable length for actual project work. You can bring all your stills in under this longer length and change back to the five second or whatever length afterwards when you start working.

An after thought. Another thing about previewing I have found is that if you have 1>2 gig of ram on your system it best to set the ‘dynamic ram preview’ under prefs to around 16>64Mb, as Ed keeps pointing out, because the higher you set it the choppier your previews will become, especially on longer play out sections. It’s all to do with Vegas’s memory management, an issue that I still believe is an issue though it still silence from Sony on this point. It was never an issue in 5.0. Keeping ram preview at 16Mb and the page file stays at around 330Mb. Set it for 1Gig and the page file climbs and climbs and in our case on one of the units it tops out at 1.32Gig and the previews are as choppy as a chainsaw massacre. A shame, as in 5.0 this wasn’t the case. I often use the higher ram figures with ‘build dynamic ram preview’ to preview TV commercials as I can preview most full thirty seconders with 1Gig of ram. So I find that I am often switching between 16Mb and 1024Mb depending on whether I am just plain editing or building bigger ram previews.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Zip-edit]

Chris-
Noticed I had the default ram value still set at 64. (new recent install)
changed from 64 to 16.
I’ll run tests tomorrow, give an update.
Thanks

Zip