[Arthur Bueno]

and to reply to your other questions: no scopes, no preview overlay, 100% track opacity, varied Ram to anything from 0 to 250 mb with no success.
In my last try though (with ram set to 16) preview full suddenly took only about 85 % cpu, an improvement already.

[Arthur Bueno]

Thanks for thinking this over Rob.
It is Vegas taking up almost all CPU power. Watching the task manager (performance tab) I can clearly see how as soon as I preview to a full size preview screen or the secondary monitor, the cpu usage rises.

You mention something that I don’t understand: you wrote “if you are seeing the message Preview on External Monitor (Frame Recompressed) then it’s a sure sign that what you are previewing is not just straight DV25”

Under Preferences/Preview Device there is an option “Recompress Edited Frames”.
If I put that off and playback through firewire, preview is fine and Vegas takes only about 14% CPU. The preview screen then says: “preview on external monitor”.

But with the Recompress option off and playing back to the secondary monitor, the image will show just the first image and won’t move. So in order to playback to a preview window or a secondary computer monitor I seem to be forced to activate the the “recompress edited frames” option. (preview window then says: frame recompressed).

[Arthur Bueno]

Isn’t a dual core 4400 about 3 times faster than a single 3400?

I just tested the situation you describe: rendered a noise texture to the PAL DV preset in a brandnew PAL DV project without any fx. Indeed this should guarantee that no rendering is taking place.
Like in your test, Preview device is secondary monitor (not OHCI Firewire, but a 1920 x 1200 Dell, “scale output to fit display” is off), I have preview playing simultaneously.
This gives me about 19 fps with CPU usage averaging something like 98 %. Believe me, I find it odd too.

[Arthur Bueno]

Enditall sounds useful (a little suicidal as well, I’m not THAT desperate). But will give it a try.
I’ve got my Prerendered Files Folder (if that’s what you mean with render-temp files) on another drive.
My system has an AMD Athlon 64/3400 CPU, if I’m not mistaken these chips don’t support hyperthreading?

[Arthur Bueno]

hardware acceleration is max for both monitors. No other programs at all, even turned off virus detection and firewall, and defragmentation only manual now and then.

[Arthur Bueno]

thanks ed:
I read posts on bad performance and have seen the checklists of possible culprits, and still can’t find it. I’m inclined to think ‘my computer just isn’t strong enough’, but I can hardly believe it when I compare to systems experiences of others.
The veg is the most simple possible: I place a totally ordinary PAL DV clip into an empty new default PAL DV project, and play it from the timeline.
I went on tweaking and trying with the following results:
In Vegas 6:
If I have the preview in a window (preview full) on the secondary monitor, Vegas uses 95% CPU.
If I set preview device to the full secondary monitor, Vegas only uses about 75%, and can scale the preview to fit the 1920 x 1200 monitor, so that’s already a lot better
If I play preview through firewire to an external monitor, I get full framerate full size and Vegas uses only about 23%. Now it becomes workable.
I have no idea why it should be so much more difficult for Vegas to output to a computer monitor, and if this is normal.

Another thing I found: performance of Vegas 7 is a lot worse than Vegas 6 when playing a VOB (for PAL DV): I can get full framerate full size on external monitor on V6, and only about half framerate on V7.

And just one thing I’d like to check: do you know what HDV performance I should expect for my computer (athlon 64 – 3400)? Vegas 7 previews m2t files a bit better then Vegas 6, but still only about 3fps preview full, and maybe 5 fps preview half. I have to go to a postage stamp format to get a frame rate that I can use for editing, but then I can hardly see anything. With cineform intermediate it gets better, but I never got a full framerate ever, even on small preview windows. So I don’t really get this HDV hype with Vegas, find it actually unworkable. Is it only for dual CPU’s of 4000+?

[Arthur Bueno]

sorry, link should be:
https://www.mediamax.com/arthur23/Hosted/TITLES%20WITH%20INKSCAPE.svg

rightclick and save

greetings,
-a

[Arthur Bueno]

thanks, I considered that and that is probably the path we’ll have to go.
In this case it means that every time I want to exchange something I have to find/rent a hdv deck or camera. But that is not ideal either because I had to do color correction on a fcp hdv project, so preferred to have a similar timeline with trimmed clips from fcp (so I wouldn’t have problems colorcorrecting transitions).
Here’s the misery:
final cut needed a plugin to do AAF export, the AAF didn’t contain any media, I did trimmed media export with fcp’s mediamanager and it gave me in some cases the wrong clips (doesn’t read hdv-timecode well), and the clips that were the right portions didn’t open in Vegas (or VLC), or even in the PC version of Quicktime itself, only in Womble. They opened in Vegas only after I converted the stream in Womble to Program stream. Than they did play in Vegas, but very badly. It should be just an mpeg2 file?

It seems to me outrageous that after all these years media and projects still can’t be exchanged properly between NLE’s and platforms.

Found a thread with the same problem and no solution either, on the Sony forum: https://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=482066

[Arthur Bueno]

I have quicktime player pro 7.1

[Arthur Bueno]

you linked to the wrong video, there are no titles at all, just some drummer going crazy