[Gary Brown]

Perhaps a masked copy (pan/Crop) of your starfield media (moving or static) that is croped to fit just the window, it is on it’s own track for positioning and then reduce to 36 to 45 % opacity. It worked well for me but I may not be envisioning your setup precisely.
GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

Many would look down their nose at my LCD monitor (I am fiscally challenged!) But I use a second video card (SLi but it doesn’t have to be) and feed my LCD HDTV. It is a Viewsonic 19 inch and easily supports 720p (native pixel count is 1280 x 768) and Vegas scales 1080 footage to match. It has an HDMI port, among othrs but this DVI solution is working well for me.

GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

I follow a similar process. Once finished (or while waiting for the ‘approval’) I use the ‘save as’ menu and select ‘copy project media’ to an external drive. I make subfolders for project specific files that may not be included in the previous process. I even save backups of my contracts, email correspondence, disk ISO, whatever, drives are cheap. When the drive is full, I start another. I also burn two copies of the disk and put them in a file folder in the file cabinetwith hard copies of the paperwork.

GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

My dual core AMD 4400 worked hard but struggled on AVCHD files, but improved makedly when I started using Cineform as a transcode/capture utility. It took a little more hard drive space but the smoothness of playback was worth it. The difference is less noticable on my quad core Q6600 machine until I start to stack up the tracks. Then Cineform again shows itself to be worth the purchase.

GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

I too found that three drives were the solution. But I have kicked it up a notch to have my media drive(s) exist as a RAID of two or more drives. My rationale was that I am pulling two or more files from the media drive to playback from the timeline. Faster file delivery means that the only bottleneck is the CPU and that is dependant on what I have done to the footage. When rendering to my third drive as an output file, it becomes a single stream and a single drive is more than fast enough to keep up.

GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

If your system cannot run an SD 29.97 DV file in realtime I would suspect that it isn’t the fault of Vegas. DV is a native file format in Windows, can you play the same clip in Media Player? Does it stutter there as well? I can drop a DV clip on the timeline and tap play and presto, full bore playback, at full screen resolution. I got similar performance with a single DV clip on systems as slow as 1Ghz AMD Durons, and a single Gig of memory. Video cards don’t matter much to Vegas (one of the reasons it is so stable)The machine I currently use at the Schools are basic dual core 2.2Ghz intel chips with two gig of memory. No big deal. They are however also burdened with being networked into the School District’s administartive network and even when the anti-virus, network polling, and other login junk kicks in, the playback rate only drops to 29.95 fps. As with any timeline more layers challenge the ‘realtime’ playback to a lessor or greater extent.

Again … just my opinion.

GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

I am cheap and work on machines that are home made. These currently are based on the Intel Q6600 and an SLi MB and dual video card configuration. My last system had an HD rendertest (from the VASST website) of 120 seconds, stock, no tweeks. The record seemed to be 88 seconds (I think) with a dual quad core system close to what you have spec’d. It seemed that that last 20% of render time costs 150 – 200% of the machines I’ve been building. These machines are based on the XFX 680i SLi MB, with 2 gig of SLi certified DDR2 Memory, dual SLi nVidia 256 GT7300 graphic cards, three monitors (2 are 19″ LCD monitors 1280×1024, and the third is a 22″ LCD HDTV (1280 x 768) with a DVI in, among many other inputs))They are running XPPro and Vegas Pro 8. I use the onboard 5.1 audio into a cheap but good sounding 6 pc speaker system. I spent $1675 for this system and exept for some possibly legitimate arguments about accurate color representation for certain high end markets, I got great value for the money. Plus any single monitor 3D or compositing app. can use the SLi video mode to gain twice the apparent video memory and dual video processor response. It would look to me like the better deal for you would be to get two cheaper systems for similar money. That way you can multitask more readily as one machine would probably be available when the other is tied up with a render.

IMHO

GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

Stay in Vegas. The Pan/Crop tool and the mask function in it covers all that I’ve seen PPro do, and much of what can be be done in AE. The Vegas ProType Titler or any Pro level CG plugin can equal or surpass the PPro titler. If you must use the titler from PPro it could be a simple overlay on your final compatible file.

IMHO

GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

I agree, thank you Chris that was a mouthful and well chewed! I would like to add the three apps I cannot live without: IzotopeRX for the audio tracks, there is nothing I’ve found like it. (https://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/iZotopeRX-main.html)Check out the samples for a hint of the potential., Photoshop, nuf said, and E-On Software’s Vue d’Esprit (https://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_6_esprit/)for generating remarkably realistic animated clouds, water and other cool 3D effects with render options from web sized goodies to IMAX!
IMHO
GB-)

“Better, Faster, Cheaper … Pick Two!”

Gary R. Brown, SCVE
Video Systems Engineer
Portsmouth Public Schools
Portsmouth, Virginia
23704-2135

[Gary Brown]

I had the Vegas 8 crash happening at 68% with rising memory useage during an HD render test I built and was using for a new quad core. It was not really Vegas that caused the issue, it was a 2ed party codec within Quicktime that was to blame. I converted two of four HD MOV files to Cineform AVIs and Viola fast clean and COMPLETE render & print!!

FYI: I regularly render 3 hour plus school board meetings and other LONG form projects as one project (some include nested projects to boot) without issue.

GB-)