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Vegas 12 audio skittering, screen buffer (+ bonus crappy Sony Support)
I’ve submitted this to Sony Support, which in years past has been both responsive and helpful, but in this instance, neither.
I upgraded to Vegas 12 from Vegas 10 for a number of reasons – I thought it would be nice to have GPU acceleration (found out by watching my task manager that when I render, Vegas seems to use EITHER the GPU or the Core i7-2600 3.4ghz CPU, oh well), and I liked some of the newer options.
When I have even as few as two or three audio tracks open, the audio in Vegas 12 (but not Vegas 10) stutters when the interface updates. What I mean by “when the interface updates” can be a variety of things – when you mouseover a clip, and the little color block in the top middle of it activates, or if I have a plugin open that has VU meters. It’s not video playback that’s causing this, but it’s drawing on the screen.
Here’s a video of the effect, taken with my iPhone. Funnily enough, I’d tried exporting from Vegas 12 directly to YouTube, and in the process, the video somehow became inverted. Nonetheless, here’s a short clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3vGrE3B3jw
It’s more evident toward the end. The audio renders just fine – you can hear the result at https://melissadunphy.bandcamp.com/album/june – but that glitchy lag makes it impossible for me to work with.
In that clip, I’ve completely removed any audio plugin, even the default Sony ones. It’s just a few tracks of audio. Here’s a track that plays swimmingly in Vegas 10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqrW7agodkg
Compare to https://upyourcherry.bandcamp.com/ …presumably this runs more slowly on account of the use of a number of VST plugins on the audio track.
I’m hoping anyone else may have had experience with this. I’m on a pretty new computer, with 16gb of RAM, a huge processor, AMD Radeon HD 6700, latest drivers and versions across the board. I’ve mixed much heavier duty songs on older hardware, and on much older versions of Vegas.
When I posted this to Sony’s support, they asked me to submit a crash report – even though Vegas never actually crashes. YouTube’s stats showed no views to the video, so they didn’t even bother to look at it. I ended up getting stuck in a Form Letter loop with them, ending with them suggesting I delete the .sfk files in the folder (which I reluctantly did, and as expected, that had no effect other than to force redrawing the screen)
Vegas Pro 12 was doing this in Windows 7, and continues to do it having upgraded to Windows 8.
I started using Vegas a very long time ago, when it wasn’t barely a video editor, and for the most part, I still mostly use it for multitrack audio, but also use it for a few video releases. This issue I’m having now has to do with audio playback, and if I can’t get it working, I’m probably just going to seek out a refund. 10 works good enough, and I can use the refund money to buy a license for Reaper.
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11 Replies
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What do you mean “a huge processor”? There’s more to it than hardware……
I have built computers for different people over the years, and quite a few over the last 6 months. They really fly when I deliver them, and the user is quite happy. Then after a few months they contact me saying “it’s not working the same….it’s not fast anymore…..something must have failed.” When I look at the system config file, I see 100% of the time that they downloaded/installed so much crap that it’s bogging down the system. So after about 5 minutes of ‘system cleanup’, the system performs like new again.
So i’m going to guess that you may have items that are chewing up system resources. Go to your Run prompt and type ‘services.msc’ (without the quotes), and sort the list by running processes. Take a good look at what tasks are running and start your cleanup from there.
Dave
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I know it’s hard to see (and I’m not being snarky when I say that) but if you watch the first video, I’ve got my task manager open while I’m doing these things, to look for spikes in things like CPU usage, disk access, even memory spikes. My “huge processor” I mean an Dual-core, multithreaded i7-2600 @ 3.4ghz with 8mb L3 cache, 1mb l2 cache, and 256k l1 cache. The computer’s about six months old, to boot. Still, it’s good advice, but I’ve been through that and didn’t see anything in the resource monitor.
Although I don’t download nearly as much random software from the internet as I did a decade ago, I still routinely check my services and startup apps for anything odd, and remove it. In fact, the Win8 task manager is fantastic for spotting stuff like that (although I still bust out the Resource Monitor when it comes to the details)
I’ve tried running Vegas both with GPU-acceleration enabled and disabled, that doesn’t have an effect on the stuttering. Given that no other program I have exhibits this issue (including Vegas 10 and Reaper) I’m pretty sure the issue is isolated to Vegas 12.
I realize it’s difficult to debug. I’m mostly hoping that someone has had similar issues.
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In Sony Vegas Options is the Audio Device Type set the same between version 10 and version 12? Also is version 10 64bit or 32bit?
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SOunds all to familiar to me. In the audio tab you can select the audio device. Per default it’s microsoft’s sourround sound mapper. You might have more success with one of the other 2 entries. The other thing I have constantly been running into is the proper audio driver. Sometimes laptop vendors seem to have some specials somewhere, and you really need to get the right OEM driver for it.
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Ah, I’d forgotten to mention that detail. I’ve got a ProjectMix IO by M-Audio, a GuitarPort, and the onboard sound, and I’d switched between them before and got similar responses. Still, I decided to go back, and I did notice that oddly enough, the ASIO driver for the ProjectMix introduces the most glitchiness, MS Sound Mapper the least, DirectSound somewhere in between.
I tried mucking around with the ASIO settings, but didn’t really have any notable effect. With the ASIO drivers selected, playback sounds like I’m running square-wave amplitude modulation across the track, until I move my mouse, and then the gapping’s exponentially worse. With Sound Mapper & DirectSound, playback’s not so bad (still the occasional glitch) but again, once I start moving the mouse, the skittering gets worse.
Definitely a good clue, thanks!
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I’m running 64-bit in both Vegas 12 and Vegas 10, although with Vegas 10 I had the option to download a 32-bit version, I’ve been running it in 64-bit for years.
Another reply in the thread brought up the Audio Device Type – they had both been set up to use the ASIO drivers for my ProjectMix IO, but prompted by the other post, I played around with them just to see.
Interestingly, ASIO fared the worst of the bunch! When I switched to Microsoft Sound Mapper, playback was almost smooth so long as I wasn’t moving my cursor, or no plugins were active on the screen. DirectSound wasn’t as smooth as MS Sound Mapper, but was better than ASIO.
I’ve also tried using my Line6 GuitarPort, but it has the same issue when I use it as the primary output (whether via ASIO or MS Sound Mapper, etc.)
It is interesting how they’re slightly different, but going back to Vegas 10, playback’s fine no matter which device I pick.
The difference between them in 12 is definitely interesting, but I’m not sure it’s the root cause. Thanks though, it’s a good direction to look in.
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Hi, looks like my issue with Vegas12 looks very similar. The same glitches and broken sound when moving the bars or going with cursor over the session. And the same experience with Sony support:)
Have you already found the solution? I have been dealing with this for 3 months now, and i am still unsuccesfull. The only way to get rid of the glitches is to bypass all plugins used in the session- but of course this is not the souluton. I was contacting my plugins tech support (psp audioware),- they had tried to help saying that this may be a vegas buffer setting issue. I made all possible changes and noticed, that the bigger buffer size – the smaller glitches amount . But they haven’t disappeared anyway. this is all I can say about that. Pleas LMK if you solved this problem already
best wishes
jacaszek -
Michal,
I kind of ‘fixed’ it by bumping up my ASIO buffer to 4096 in the Firewire control panel. I don’t get all the glitchiness, usually, but I also don’t get the instant-on type response when I hit play in Vegas. -
Thank you Matt! NIce to hear that you fixed it. I tried with asio buffer too, but unfortunately my buffer size (MOTU Mk3 hybrid) is limited to 1024., Shame.
good luck!
Michaljacaszek
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I am having the exact same issue, Acid 7.0 Pro works great, downloaded the trial of Vegas 13 and it’s unusable, audio skips a little if I do not move the mouse, as soon as I move the mouse, click or change the zoom level of the window, the audio starts skipping and stuttering. Completely unusable. I emailed Sony but since it was only a trial version, I don’t expect I’ll get a response. I also am running an M-Audio interface, and an NVidia video card. It seems to me like a conflict between the screen redrawing and the audio playback, but since it works fine in Acid Pro 7.0, it seems to be a software problem. I wish there was a way to run Vegas with the ASIO engine from Acid to see if that helps. I tried cranking my ASIO buffer up to 4096 and it only helps slightly, also tried increasing the buffer setting in Vegas, increasing and decreasing dynamic preview RAM in Vegas, etc. Nothing seems to make any difference except the ASIO buffer which only makes a marginal difference and still doesn’t make the software usable. Hopefully Sony addresses this soon or they’ll be losing current or future customers.
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