Building Peaks is HACKING ME OFF
 

The length of time Vegas is taking to build peaks is just plain crazy.

I'm sitting with a new i7 Processor with 6Gb of RAM and using eSATA, and it's taking forever to build the peaks for even small projects.

Has anybody come up with an explanation as to why the most recent releases of Vegas have become so painfully slow in this respect.

Never used to be like this.

I agree that peak-building and timeline performance is poorer with Vegas 8 than it was with 7.

This is, I believe, one of those instances where hard drive speed can influence the Vegas experience.

I use a 300MB Velociraptor for projects I'm working on, and the peak-building is much quicker when using that drive.

This peak-building issue demonstrates why I feel fast drives are advantageous when editing video. I strongly feel that the overall handling of Vegas is much improved when using a faster drive. Performance on the timeline is without a doubt much better. Rendering, etc., is not affected, of course, but the overall experience is much more pleasant.

Even the fastest processor cannot overcome sluggish hard drive performance, unfortunately.

I hope you can find a configuration with what you have that will speed things up for you. Otherwise, you might try getting a dedicated fast drive to put current video projects on.

Even though I have a 2GHz Core 2 Duo system that I could use for editing, the drive performance of a single SATA drive for OS & data, kills me ability to multi-cam edit. So I have "regressed" back to using my 3GHz P4HT system because it now has a 500GB RAID0 for OS / video data. The striped RAID really does help projects open up faster and vegas deals much better with reading multiple DV streams simultaneously when doign multi-cam edits.

Should I be fortunate enough to still be in this business this summer, I may build a dual Opteron system and finally have a dedicated internal drive for OS and a raid for video data. But that is miles and miles away from my current situation.

Actually Jason with the Velociraptors you don't need raid any longer. I used to run raid 0 but a single Velociraptor is better than two of the old raptors run in Raid 0. Less overhead on the system, performance overall is better and almost no heat. $229 at newegg.

are those drives the 10K RPM drives?

Yes Jason. Newegg.com - VelociRaptor

I used to run RAID 0 for both OS and video drives. I find that for me it is truly overkill now. I still have a RAID controller (it's actually an e-SATA controller with built in RAID) but I don't even use it for RAID any longer just as an interface to run e-SATA drives.

Hi,

I found that it totaly depends on the structure of the video files.

While AVI peaks are built up "superfast" , any mpg file (m2ts or hd-mxf) take much longer to demux and build peaks. I brought in a 60 minute m2t (HDV) file and it took awfully long to build up the peaks - it seems not to depend that much on a faster harddrive (I have eSata etc.).

What I do now is to build peaks in a second instance of vegas, especially when I work with several tapes.

A) I work with tape 1 (and cancel building peaks)
B) in the background peaks are built with tape2 (bring down task manager priority for this vegas instance)

Ok, this is heavy work for the harddrive, sometimes I even split these tapes on 2 harddrives for easier work.

Regards

ULI

Yesterday was my first experience with working on an HDV project. When I was ready to work on the multi-cam edit, I starting droping the mt2 files in.....to fast apparantly.....Vegas crashed. My first time working with HDV started off bad.

I've dropped a project's worth of files (~100 clips) from explorer into the project media and had to wait for several minutes for vegas to do anything. Why isn't peak building spawned off in a dedicated thread? The business where it paralyzes Vegas until the peaks are built is a completely stupid behavior that should be a relatively easy fix.

You can of course carry on working while its building peaks, at least that is what I have found. Just don't save. That will stop everything until peaks have been built.

Ron Evans