Vegas Moive Studio 8 freezing

[Mike Kujbida]

…I am about ready to blow it up. 🙂

Do that and you’ll only add to worldwide environmental pollution 🙂
Vegas is one of the most solid NLEs I’ve ever worked with.
The ability to do smooth playback is dependent on a number of things.
Please answer the following questions and we’ll do our best to help you sort things out.

Do you have a fast CPU?
What’s your OS?
Is your Preview window set to Preview/Auto?
Do you have a lot of FX in the project?
Do you have a lot of large stills in the project?
Are you rendering to the system drive or a dedicated video drive?

[Randy Rogers]

Do you have a fast CPU? 3.00GHZ Pentium4
What’s your OS? XP Sp2
Is your Preview window set to Preview/Auto? yes
Do you have a lot of FX in the project? No, Transitions yes
Do you have a lot of large stills in the project? Yes
Are you rendering to the system drive or a dedicated video drive? This is where I may need some education. I am still in the process of building the video so I haven’t rendered it yet. However, all the files are on my system drive because I the external drive I was using via USB was too slow in transfer rate. But I haven’t “rendered” the project yet.

Thanks for the quick reply.

[Mike Kujbida]

Do you have a fast CPU?
3.00GHZ Pentium4

By today’s standards, that’s a slow machine 🙁
I use P4 3.4 GHz machines at work and it’s fairly easy to slow them down.
My home machine is a QX6700 quad core and it flies!!

What’s your OS?
XP Sp2

Good choice. Some folks are running Vista and still having problems with it.

Is your Preview window set to Preview/Auto?
yes
You may have to drop it down to Draft/Auto to get acceptable preview speeds. The quality will suck but at least it’ll play.

Do you have a lot of FX in the project?
No, Transitions yes

That will have an impact on preview speeds but only at the transition points.

Do you have a lot of large stills in the project?
Yes

This will definitely have an impact.
The rule of thumb is that, unless you’re doing extensive zooming in on the image, keep the images to no more than twice project size. In standard def NTSC world, that would be 1440 x 960. This still gives you room to zoom in but won’t tax your system as much.
If these are JPEG images (from a digital still camera), the other suggestion is to change them to PNG format as that’s what Vegas likes best. You can use a free program such as IrfanView to do this.
IrfanView will also do batch resizing for you if yo need to.

Are you rendering to the system drive or a dedicated video drive?
This is where I may need some education.

Gladly.
It doesn’t make any difference if you’re using a laptop or a desktop.
You’ll get much better performance using at least 2 drives for editing (I have 3 and others have much more).
Programs reside on your system drive and that’s it.
All video files go to a separate drive.
Also, go into the various Vegas prefs and make sure that NOTHING points to C:\My Documents as a storage place, even if it’s temp files.
On my system, all captured material as well as graphics and music are on drive D. All rendering goes to drive E.

…the external drive I was using via USB was too slow in transfer rate.

Are you using USB 2.0 drives?
I use USB externals all the time and haven’t noticed a lot of difference between that and firewire transfer speed.

Finally, make sure you’re not connected to the net while editing as this will slow things down.

Try the suggestions you’re able to do right now and see if that helps.
As I said, Vegas is a great NLE but it and your computer need a little tweaking to get the most out of it.

[Randy Rogers]

Thanks Mike. I am going to try these suggestions and see how it goes. I did my research before buying Vegas because I felt it was the best. I try these suggestions and see how it goes.

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

Randy,
I’m 100% certain the problem isn’t so much Vegas as whatever you’ve got going in the background.
Antivirus?
Sound card on the same bus as anything else?
Video card on the same bus?
IRQ conflicts
1394 card on the same bus?

What other, if any, software are you running in addition to Vegas as a video app? Is anything Pinnacle on the sysetm by chance?

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor

[Randy Rogers]

I have antivirus running in the background but shut everything else down before I start editing. I think one of my biggest problems is that the still .jpeg pictures I am using are too large. I am convering them to png and resizing. I am using a USB 2.0 drive and will move all the video files back to that.

I upgraded to 3gig of ram when I first started having problems and it usually only eats up 1.5 gig or so. With the new version (d) build 139 I had a major problem with some HP office jet codec conflicting with the upgrade. It kept wanting to install Photogallery. What a pain that was. I’ll keep tweaking the system as suggested and see how that works out.

Thanks for you help.

[Adam Chesbrough]

I have a super fast computer (Dell XPS 720 H2C, overclocked to 3.66 GHZ, 4 GB memory) with top of the line video cards (dual nvidia 8800 ultras) and am having the same issues.

I am unable to “preview” (stream) the material that I am working in as the video lags behind the audio (slows/skips).

I thought the issue was with the computer, dell told me to reinstall the software.

I have 2 TB of space so save all my HD content on the computer. I am working with stills and audio all saved on the computers HD (could something be wrong with the HD?)

I read the posts above but am not really sure where to start since I seem to have the hardware and drive capabilities.

Any thoughts? Thanks a lot!

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

If you’re putting large stills on the timeline, I’d expect freezing. You have 4GB of RAM, but Vegas can only access a portion of that, then you put on a few 8MB stills…it’s gonna choke. First thing I’d do is a batch convert of the stills to a smaller size.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor

[Randy Rogers]

What I did was change the format of the my pictures to a .png format using Irfanview. I also resized the photos to “Best Fit to Desktop”. Once I did that, I had no issues what so ever. It took some time to reformat my pictures but I had no other choice and once I did everything worked flawlessly.

Hope this helps.

Randy

[Rowan Mumford]

hello Mike,

I have been a vegas movie studio user or some time now. I am starting to encounter problems much like these mentioned on this forum, where vegas makes the screen go black but there is still sound. actually i am having that exact problem, but it occurs in the rendering stage of things. after i have rendered the film, it plays but there are spots where it has rendered as a black screen with sound, yet in the rendering preview window on vegas it looks fine.

as the other person said – “I AM READY TO BLOW IT UP” lol.

My master files are using DIVX 7 format and i have had past difficulties with that, but it seems to be now working.

I am rendering as Uncompressed AVI so i can get maximum quality before compressing with divx 7 for DVD

mabye vegas doesent like DIVX 7?

don’t know what to do.

cheers hope you can help.

Rowan