preview ram

[Mike Kujbida]

Dynamic RAM Preview is only used for previewing a selected portion of your timeline and has no bearing on actual preview performance.
i.e. highlighting an area of the timeline and then pressing Shift+B.
The higher this is set to, the longer your preview section can be.
There is a limit as to how high this can be set though.
On my XP machine with 2 GB. of RAM, my maximum is 1024 MB.

[Scott Francis]

Be sure to go into the settings and change to 0 mb when you are rendering!!! If you have high settings (up to 1024mb) it will take longer to render your project. I do not know why Sony set it up this way, but if you have a long project that will take a while to render…make sure to change this before rendering. I also close out of Vegas and re-open it to make sure that the setting takes…it has not in the past…good luck!

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Mike Kujbida]

128 MB. is the usual recommendation for rendering.
Lower than that has caused problems for a lot of users.
Lowering the number of threads is another suggestion but, once again, do this only if you’re having problems.

[Bill Mash]

I set it to zero and use other methods to preview, most often just simply setting the preview monitor to a low setting (draft) and looping through the video. This has the added benefit of having the cursor at your finger tips.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

[Ron Bakker]

Hmmm, I zoom right out on the timeline and set preview to draft, quarter and still she stutters a bit which is very off putting with this music video that I am doing where I have to sync to the music. It’s worse with clips that have effects in them which is no surprise. That is very intersting about the preview ram though.
Thanks for your replies by the way.

Pentium 2.4 quad|Asus P5G41C-M LX mobo|2 gig corsairs 6400 ram|Corsairs 630 power supply|Gigabyte 8800gt|2x seagate 500gig Hd’s|Lg dvd burner|windows7 premium , SV9E

[Matt Crowley]

With Movie Studio HD 10 (maybe also earlier and Pro versions), the Dynamic RAM Preview acts as a sort of cache for rendered preview frames, and these cached frames are used the next time you preview that part of your project (unless you make edits that affect those frames).

Try repeatedly previewing (playing) a section of project with transitions/effects that cause playback to stutter. I find that after previewing a couple of times the playback gets smoother, as more and more frames are cached. You’ll also see CPU usage drop as more and more pre-rendered frames are used. You can of course force the pre-rendering of all selected frames with “Build Dynamic RAM Preview” (Shift+B) which effectively does the same thing.

If you turn off dynamic RAM preview, you do not get this automatic caching. I haven’t found any effect on render times and I have 512MB preview cache. That seems to be enough for about 40secs of 1920×1080 50i video at preview/quarter quality.