Sony Vegas 11 Choppy Renders

[Mike Kujbida]

You don’t say anything about your computer specs but my guess is that’s where your problem is.
Too many users try to edit footage like this on an underpowered computer and are surprised when it can’t keep up.

[Matthew Sims]

My computer specs are as follows.
Cpu – AMD bulldozer 6100 6 core clocked at 3.6 ghz
Ram – 16 gigs of gskill clocked at 1600 mhz
Gpu- 2x sapphire 6850 in crossfire
Psu -775 watts
Plenty of cooling, max temps on full load are around 20 degrees C.
I am a little surprised because my computer is not slow by any means. I tried reinstalling sony vegas, no dice, and I had sony vegas 10 installed on my laptop from 4 years ago which has 4 gigs of ram, integrated graphics, and a pentium processor and it ran smoothly on that. I am truly baffled and I am convinced that the issue is some where in the software. It could be a glitch with drivers but those are all up to date. I’ll try reinstalling vegas 10 on my desktop when I get back, but that will be 5 days from now. If anyone has any suggestions of some setting in vegas that messes with avchd, please let me know. I really don’t want to convert to another format to edit as I want to maintain maximum resolution.
Thanks,
Matt

[Mike Kujbida]

OK, your computer is definitely a good one so that’s not the problem.
Upload a small piece of source video and not something that you’ve rendered for us to try.

[Matthew Sims]

Here is the link to some raw footage. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/39422120/00009.MTS

[Mike Kujbida]

You’re going to hate me but your clip (btw, it was only 1440×1080) played and rendered fine on my machine (Core 2 Extreme QX 6700 with Pro 10.0e on XP Pro).
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20488019/00009-TestRender.m2t
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20488019/00009-TestRender.wmv

Based on other user complaints, some things to try are disabling GPU acceleration, using 32-bit mode if you’re in 64-bit and vice-versa and trying the Compatibility mode as suggested below.

Running Vegas in Windows compatibility mode may resolve stability issues when using certain third party effects.
Right click on the Vegas launch icon, and select properties, then click the compatibility tab.
Place a check in the box “run this program in compatibilty mode for…”
Then select the Windows version for compatibility from the drop down menu available. Click apply + OK.
We recommend trying compatibility mode for Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

[Matthew Sims]

Ok, I messed with some resolution settings on the camera so that was probably the reason for the different resolution. I will try disabling the Gpu acceleration because I know I have it on. The files worked great for me too on vegas 10 but I don’t know if it is a glitch with vegas 11.

[Matthew Sims]

I messed with the resolution, so that is the culprit for that, but the footage plays fine on Vegas 10, but not 11. I will turn off gpu acceleration because I know that is on.

Thanks,
Matt

[Mike Kujbida]

“I will turn off gpu acceleration because I know that is on.”

I hope that will solve your problems.
FYI, not too many folks like your brand of graphics card.
Even though Sony says it’s acceptable, Vegas seems to have a preference for Nvidia.

[Matthew Sims]

True, but those two cards together are over 300 bucks and I am not going to just drop them because of nvidia being preferred.

[Dave Haynie]

Hmm… other than the obvious interlacing effects on the PC, this plays at full speed, totally worst-case, on my PC. That’s with the preview at Best(Full), and the project set to Best rendering quality and 32-bit. No effects applied, Vegas 11, GPU acceleration on, and with an ATi HD6970, which isn’t all that different than yours. My CPU is an AMD 1090T, six full cores at 3.2GHz… maybe a bit faster than yours (you have six integer cores, but only three FPU cores, in essence), but you should be plenty fast.

Some folks like nVidia. When Vegas 11 came out, I benchmarked the HD6970 versus the nVidia GeForce GTX570… both came in at about $300. The AMD/ATi won every test, sometimes significantly. Both worked fine in Vegas, but the nVidia crashed on a number of OpenCL tests and benchmarks as well. Yeah — that’s going to be totally due to the software, and it’s probably already fixed, but that led me to select the ATi, and I’ve been quite happy with it. So I think you’re ok here.

Assuming you see this ok in Vegas 10 and/or a media player like Windows Media Player (which will play AVC and MPEG-2 with video acceleration on Windows 7, so virtually no load on a good PC).

I know OpenCL doesn’t really handle SLI/Crossfire in the way folks expect it. That should show up in Vegas as the two different OpenCL devices, not one unified double-speed device, when you have acceleration on, but that’s one place I’d look. What happens when the GPU is off, or you disconnect the Crossfire cable?

Could also be that Vegas is just confused about the resources on the Bulldozer chips. Make sure you have all the AMD and Windows patches for Bulldozer. I have a four-core Bulldozer as my lab and multiple audio recording rig, but I have not tried it with video at all. Works just dandy at recording 16 track audio (96kHz/24-bit)… yeah, I know that’s not being helpful. And in fact, that’s all integer. Video decoding and rendering is FPU intensive.

-Dave