Matt Crowley
Forum Replies Created
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It might be different in other versions, but in Movie Studio HD 10, two single clicks on a file in detailed view allows you to rename the file, but a double-click puts it on the timeline. Are you sure you’re doing a double click?
Note that there’s an option in Preferences that makes a double-click load a file into the trimmer, if you prefer to use the trimmer before putting clips on the timeline.
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This is about normal for video editing, unfortunately – especially if you are editing HD video on a modest PC. What are your system specs (processor type/speed etc) and what type of video are you editing?
Transitions and effects can have a big impact on preview performance too. There is an immense amount of number crunching and data shuffling going on, so even the latest greatest multi-core PC can be brought to its knees with a complex project.
There are several tricks to make things go smoother though. You can use intermediate video formats like Cineform (where you convert your video to an easy-to-process format without noticeable quality loss), use proxy editing (where you work on a low-quality copy of your footage then switch to the originals to render the final output), or use pre-rendering to create temporary snippets of output video that Vegas can use instead of ploughing through all the processing during preview.
Vegas has a dynamic preview cache that it stores complete preview frames in, ready for the next time you preview that bit of the project. If you preview the same section again and again, the preview will become smoother. You can also force Vegas to pre-render short sections (especially transitions) by making a time selection and pressing Shift+B. See the Vegas help on “previewing your project” for more details.
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My Panasonic SD60 (AVCHD on SDHC cards) gives video clips sequential number file names (00001, 00002…) so it sounds similar – the numbering doesn’t indicate date, only which order the clips were shot in. What’s worse, if I change card, wipe the card or delete some files, the numbering starts back at 0 or the “gaps” in the sequence get filled in!
I haven’t yet tried the supplied import/edit software, but I think it may give options for renaming files as they are imported so that they have properly dated file names. It’s probably worth experimenting with your camera’s supplied software to see if it can rename your files on import or as a batch operation.
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With Movie Studio HD 10 (maybe also earlier and Pro versions), the Dynamic RAM Preview acts as a sort of cache for rendered preview frames, and these cached frames are used the next time you preview that part of your project (unless you make edits that affect those frames).
Try repeatedly previewing (playing) a section of project with transitions/effects that cause playback to stutter. I find that after previewing a couple of times the playback gets smoother, as more and more frames are cached. You’ll also see CPU usage drop as more and more pre-rendered frames are used. You can of course force the pre-rendering of all selected frames with “Build Dynamic RAM Preview” (Shift+B) which effectively does the same thing.
If you turn off dynamic RAM preview, you do not get this automatic caching. I haven’t found any effect on render times and I have 512MB preview cache. That seems to be enough for about 40secs of 1920×1080 50i video at preview/quarter quality.
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Not sure about the 4-thread limit, or whether “rendering” refers only to the composition of effects or the whole decode-composite-encode chain when rendering a project…
As for memory, as far as I know Vegas Movie Studio is only available as a 32-bit app so it can’t use more than 4GB anyway. Rendering doesn’t necessarily need lots of RAM. 2GB is Sony’s recommendation for HD editing but of course more won’t hurt… I have 2GB on a dual-core system and on small HD projects VMS-HD 10 uses up to about 1GB with RAM preview set to 512MB.
The “Dynamic RAM Preview” setting refers only to the max amount of memory allocated to temporarily storing rendered frames to speed up previewing when editing. This is why previews get smoother if you play the same section several times. You can also force rendering of a time selection (Shift+B) to allow a smooth preview.
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In the Vegas Explorer panel, you can sort by name, date, type and size just like in Windows Explorer. Just click the column heading for the attribute you want to sort by (Name/Size/Type/Modified).
How are you importing/copying clips? The video files on Flash/HDD cameras are generally serially numbered, and capture software tends to give clips a name based on capture date/time. Of course, the numbering can get confused if the disk/cards are formatted etc…
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A dark grey or near-black object would theoretically allow white-balance to be set (because there’s no hue to it), but the camera will have a harder job forming a decent noise-free picture on a dark object. Matt bright white would be best, particularly if the available light is dim, or a light neutral grey.
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You’ve got a window docked (and squashed horizontally) between the Media Generators on the left and the Preview on the right.
At the top-left of the preview panel is a small X (to close the panel) and a row of dots (aka the docking handle) below that. Now look at the narrow strip between the Preview and Media Generators panels, and drag the row of dots on that narrow strip downwards away from it’s current position and you should see a window pop out – that’s probably your FX/Media Generator controls window.
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It’s quite possible that some previous editing on the videos has messed up the interlacing – perhaps the original footage was interlaced and it has been transcoded/rendered as progressive without proper deinterlacing. I’ve seen this on some Quicktime clips, but it’s probably not Quicktime’s fault.
If you can see obvious combing (horizontal lines and jagged verticals) when you play back the affected videos in any media player, they’re probably badly deinterlaced already. Try using GSpot or MediaInfo to check the video properties of the affected files.
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Yeah, Vegas Pro doesn’t currently appear to support GPU assisted rendering. I guess the next major release will since Movie Studio already has it. CUDA is just nVidia’s version of GPU-assisted number-crunching, which is useful for computationally intensive tasks like physics and medical sciences simulations, and of course video encoding/decoding. ATi uses a different support framework for GPU computation which isn’t compatible with CUDA and doesn’t work in Movie Studio.
I realised after I’d posted about CUDA that my GPU probably isn’t doing anything in VMS HD 10 anyway because it’s not a Geforce 9 series card, hence the similar render times (ie all my renders are CPU-only)…