Sony Vegas 11 worht the upgrade? NOT

[Ted Snow]

It definitely must have something to do with your computer system. I have been editing a high def video which is over an hour long shot on two cameras. One is a Sony Z7U and the other is a Sony HD handicam. Editing HD footage for about a week so far on Vegas 11 64 bit and have yet to run into any problems.

I fully understand your frustration and know how maddening it can be when something doesn’t work right. But…there are too many other people who edit with Vegas just fine without experiencing problems. Although I do understand that there are quite a few others having problems also.

One of the positive things about my situation is…my editing computer is dedicated to work and nothing else. It NEVER “sees” the internet…ever! If I need a specific driver or upgrade I download it on my “online” computer and transfer it with a flash drive.

————————————————
ASUS P8P67 Deluxe MB
EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1 GB DDR 5
Intel i7 2600k 3.4 Ghz
Corsair HX750 power supply
Two Seagate Barracuda 500g SATA III drives
16 Gig G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600
Canopus ACEDVio card
Thermaltake V9 BlacX Edition case
Xigmatek Dark Knight CPU Cooler
Win 7 Pro
VEGAS 8.0
VEGAS 11.0 32 & 64 bit
Sony VX2100
Sony HVR-Z7U
Alesis HD24

[Dave Haynie]

A couple of things. Like some others here, I have used Vegas since the early days… Vegas Pro, before video. There was a time when it was the most solid piece of software I used, period… even including $10,000+ electronics CAD packages (several).

It’s not quite that stable anymore. But I also haven’t found all that many problems. The one I did find with Vegas 10 was that nested projects got flakey. Sometimes very flakey. I had a project saved off that basically crashed on load 9 out of 10 times… I wound up rendering out the subprojects (to 4:2:2 Cineform, which they finally got working in Vegas 10e), and all was right and good again.

While I will admit that to being a huge pain in the butt, it’s also true that I was making too many demands on subprojects. No, they shouldn’t crash. But once I added up my subprojects, I was over 50 layers of video, greenscreens, animated PNGs, etc. I certainly had no business expecting it to take up just little memory (particularly given that I never resize my graphics, and usually author my animations in 1080/60p, even if I eventually render them out to something lesser). And yet, it was photo work that got me to add that second 8GB.

So anyway, I just finished two pretty similar animation projects, the last one on Vegas 11. I actually felt a little vindicated on the Vegas 11 upgrade, despite the fact that I KNOW it’s an x.0 release and I should have been cautious when it was real work … and I had about 24 hours to edit, after the live part of the video was shot. One bug in one plug-in, that was about it.. and editing with GPU acceleration did make a difference. But I got it in on time: https://youtu.be/QYoszzMuaJE

What uprezed 4:2:2 format are you using? I have found DNxHD to be very slow given what it’s doing… that’s an Avid problem, not a Vegas problem. Cineform seems stable, though Vegas 10 broke it in amazing and stupid ways for releases up to 10c or 10d. I fault Sony less for trying something new (apparently they use a Cineform proprietary API to talk to the CODEC), and more for not offing me a get-out-of-jail-free card (a setup option to just use Video for Windows).

It can also always be greener on the other side, too. My daughter runs a Mac for High School (Communication Academy, going on to study Broadcasting and Digital Media in college next year). It’s a dual core i5-based Macbook Pro, much faster than my 4 year old HP Core2 laptop. Which can absolutely edit AVCHD with Vegas.. I’ve even edited 1080/60p on it, though I wouldn’t pick any laptop as my preferred editing platform.

Anyway, she shot some video on two of my cameras of her college trips, and wanted it on the Mac for editing purposes. No problems… I was pretty sure the AVCHD might be an issue (Final Cut Pro will probably insist on converting it to ProRes, which is of course fits the same niche as DNxHD or Cineform), so I rendered out 1/4 res AVC/MP4 (the MP4 wrapper is very similar to the Quicktime wrapper, should be a no-brainer on a Mac). Well… guess my surprise when Final Cut Express was driven to its knees by 960×540, base-level profile AVC/MP4! Way too slow for anyone to edit it.

Thus my discovery of Apple’s suggestion for editing: “iFrame”.. which is just that, all I-Frame AVC. At 960×540. And yeah, that was just dandy as an editing format. But seriously… people edit professionally on this platform? Particularly when you consider the only non-laptop Mac Apple makes is the tower-PC style MacPro, starting at $2500… ouch. And that one’s over a year old since the last update.

So it’s not just Vegas. But it sounds like you’ve not had the best experience possible, for sure. Most of us here will claim it’s usually much, much better.

-Dave

[Rob Artigo]

Like you my computer is dedicated. Was built for this purpose and is only used for this purpose. It has no speed issues and no problems with other complex programs such as the audio editor.

You are working with rather small file sizes in comparison. I’m using Neoscene converted 422 files that are quite large with hours of DSLR video from three camera.

This shouldn’t be hard for Sony Vegas Pro. But it is. I still have no proof it’s my computer. Looking though.

[Rob Artigo]

I’m using Cineform converted 4:2:2 from 4:2:0 SLR camera. I’ve found I can’t really layer more than a few effects without problems.

I know people love this program and I wish I could get mine to do what I’m asking it to do. Unfortunately I’m not there yet.

Thanks for the responses. I’m reading all of them and they are encouraging because there’s a glimmer of hope a solution can be found.

[Dave Haynie]

Did you try the Sony VP11 benchmark, by any chance? Probably not… but it’s worth a try, as a baseline. See here: https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro11benchmark

I did quite a bit of benchmarking when I first got VP11. I see this project in full quality 1920×1080 playback at 8fps in Vegas 11 no-GPU, 28.5fps (eg, nearly realtime) with the GPU enabled. No doubt Sony did this to show off GPU acceleration, but it’s a real short video, and not unlike some of the animated stuff I do (eg, mix of video and animated stills).

-Dave

[Al Bergstein]

Robb, I would have to agree with Danny and Matt. As far as what I would leave Vegas for if you have had it: I’ve used FCP 7 for a few years, and while I have not had crashes with it, it is much slower to work with than Vegas. So there are a lot of trade offs. I’ve learned to work around the crashes and save frequently.
There is always Adobe. It’s pretty expensive though.

But…I would really focus on the footage you are editing. I have found that raw footage from my Canon 7D is much more likely to crash Vegas projects than the footage from my Canon 300xf. The codec does matter.

While I won’t belabor their earlier points, I have built and used computers since the 1970s. I have stopped building my own computers because I know how much vendors like HP and Dell go through for compatibility tests with the BIOS and the various component manufacturers. And While some on this board, like Steve, seem to never have problems with their home builds, I have always managed to find some significant incompatibility with them, sometimes later than sooner. While neither HP or Dell are perfect, we have to remember that we are trying to build a machine comparable to a workstation, and those manufacturers, usually build much higher quality machines at those price points. So…your computer *could* be the problem.

I have not been experiencing many crashes with 11, but also found 10.e to be very stable. If you follow the suggestions at looking at your computer system, when you say that you have “crashes” I assume you mean ‘Vegas crashes” and not blue screens of death.

Could the crashes also be from your hard drives timing out? Sometimes these new eSata “green drives” wind down to send , and I’m unsure that Vegas (or Windows 7) is properly handling the spin up process.

Hope all this helps.

Alf

[Dave Haynie]

The length of a video really has no effect on performance; it’s all about the complexity of the moment. That’s true of any streaming application.

A couple of questions… are you using Vegas Multi-Cam for the 3-cam shoot? One guy here a week or two ago was suggesting that maybe multi-cam broke in Vegas 11, performance-wise. Not what you want to hear, obviously, but do you see the same performance drag with the three tracks as separate files?

How about your HDD performance. I found that, from a single drive, I maxed out at two 144Mb/s DNxHD files (at the time, Cineform was still broken) with Vegas 10… add a third, and I’m all of a sudden HDD-bound, when I really want to be CPU-bound. That’s particularly noticeable in editing.

As a musician, I was well aware of the realities of hard drive performance going way back to the dawn of practical audio multitracking on the PC (my first PC-based audio multitrack was Turtle Beach’s 4-track portastudio emulator). Basically, with a single track, you get the drive’s “straight line” performance, which might be 50MB/s-100MB/s these days. Add a couple of other tracks, though, and you’re going to see the drive performance start to move away from the peak burst speed and toward the seek time, which essentially means, forget about anything happening fast.

I haven’t seen problems with one or two Cineform tracks recently, but I did a wedding back in 2006 which really exposed the problem. I had only one HDV track for video. But as it was a single-camera shoot, I had stills from three different pro photographers essentially acting as my B-roll. Of course, these were all 6 to 8 megapixel JPEGs, and I didn’t downrez or anything, because I was getting all Ken Burns with these stills.

Bottom line: this reduced my system performance to practically nothing. I was seeing slow editing, renders that took 4x what they ought to, etc. Even render-time crashing, back in those days, Vegas didn’t like to be kept waiting, or maybe it was Windows issues. Anyway, once I relocated all the stills to a separate drive, and rendered out to a third drive, things got much, much better.

What you ought to see, for any render, is your CPU use, all N cores, as close to 100% as you can get. If you’ve got memory, I’d make sure there’s a RAM preview buffer set up… while this is supposedly just for RAM previews, I’ve experimentally found this is used for buffering during renders, too (which is precisely what it should be used for). If you’re not seeing close to 100%, there’s something wrong… and it’s likely affecting edit-time performance, too.

What goes wrong? The HDD bottleneck thing. A single-threaded plug-in… basically, you wind up funneling everything through a single CPU core. Bugs, yeah, that’s possible too, but if there is a bug, it’s likely been found here already, so you’ve come to the right place.

Another is just expecting too much. AVCHD is pretty damn difficult for a modern computer to decode. Without GPU, I can preview 720/60p track in Vegas in full quality realtime. More than one, and you’re simply running out of CPU. A good GPU might help here in Vegas 11. To make things a little more sane, I tried a four-layer composite of 720/60p converted to 50Mb/s MPEG-2, which is not as complex to decode. I saw about 2.4fps with three transparently layers over a non-transparent bottom layer, in full quality preview… that down from a just about full 60fps. With GPU, this boosted to 5fps. Of course, that’s four layers of compositing… four cameras with the occasional transition would still preview at 60fps, ‘cept during the transitions themselves (which is, of course, what selective pre-rendering can speed up). The GPU may help even more if you’re using an accelerated plug-in, versus no GPU.

-Dave

[Rob Artigo]

Thanks Al,

To clarify, the crashes are program crashes and not system crashes. The system hasn’t had any problems.

All my files have been processed to 4:2:2 with Cineform. That has been the recommendation.

[Ted Snow]

You’re absolutely right Rob…Vegas should handle your project, even if put under a little bit of strain. And with your PC build there shouldn’t be much of a strain anyway. Hope you can figure out what’s happening here. Once you find the problem you will definitely be able to help someone else dodge such a headache as you have been experiencing…!

————————————————
ASUS P8P67 Deluxe MB
EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1 GB DDR 5
Intel i7 2600k 3.4 Ghz
Corsair HX750 power supply
Two Seagate Barracuda 500g SATA III drives
16 Gig G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600
Canopus ACEDVio card
Thermaltake V9 BlacX Edition case
Xigmatek Dark Knight CPU Cooler
Win 7 Pro
VEGAS 8.0
VEGAS 11.0 32 & 64 bit
Sony VX2100
Sony HVR-Z7U
Alesis HD24

[Al Bergstein]

Well, that’s not good news…have you pinged the guys at Cineform, and seen whether they are fully compatible with the new version yet?

Alf