Sony Vegas – the never-ending, continuing story of a rubbish preview monitor

[Jeff Schroeder]

You left off your system specs. Maybe we could help you with more information.

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Steve Rhoden]

Calm down, Vegas Preview monitor has been the same as always,
and if you have “Adjust size and quality for optimal playback”
enabled, disable it. And set the preview quality to Preview(Full).
Final Cut and Vegas are two completely different beasts.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia
1-876-832-4956

[Dave Haynie]

One thing to consider… are you editing the same video format in FCP as in Vegas, or did you transcode to ProRes or something for FCP. Curious, since on my daughter’s loaner MacBook last year (slightly higher spec than my laptop), I couldn’t get FCP to work with native full resolution AVC even slightly (this wasn’t FCP-X, but an older version), while it’s always been usable on my laptop (not as smooth as a proper desktop, of course). Obviously, if the CPU is struggling just to decode the video, it’s not going to offer a smooth preview in a normal NLE situation. ProRes, Cineform, DNxHD, these all use dramatically less CPU than an AVC direct from the camcorder.

And yeah, system spec would be very telling. Without GPU acceleration, you may find basic AVC 1080/60i takes the better part of modern CPU core to decode… or two of something a bit more dated. Move to a different format for editing, and the CPU decoding part can quickly vanish into the background.

-Dave

[Rob Siegfried]

Jeff,

Speaking of system specs, it looks like you have a pretty beefy system yourself. I am running a single X5690 with 24GB in a Dell Precision T7500 workstation and I thought that was fast. But your system must just rip through renders. Does it not?

Rob Siegfried

Rob Siegfried

[Jeff Schroeder]

Rob, it is kind of hard to quantify, unless you render the same project on two computers, because I always have filters that add to rendering time, i.e. noise reduction, sharpen, levels, etc. So, I can’t say ‘it will render an hour of video in xx minutes. But, when I take the same project over to another computer, my old production machine, it does take twice as long. The old machine is an i7 at 3.2 with 24 GB.

However, over the weekend I re-rendered 128 hours of video (no fx, no transitions) from 1280 30p to 720 PAL 25i, in about 26 hours.

So, I do like the twin CPU’s.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64