Sony Vegas 9 and AVCHD Editing
 

The people using this app, do you need a mother of a graphics card? Does the app work fine with a moderate graphics card?

My rig has an i7 CPU, fast hard drives and 3gb memory. I'm getting freeze crashes regularly, the memory's tests fine so I suspect the 9600GT graphics card being faulty.

I'll replace it, just wanting to know if you folks think I really should buy a proper games card.

cheers Billy

Vegas doesn't use the graphics card at all other than to do basic displaying. So a hot graphics card doesn't do anything. If you use other applications outside of Vegas, or plugins like Magic Bullet that can leverage the graphics card, then get a nice one. I got the NVidia Quadro FX4800 in my new editing machine, but it's ... pricey. :)

-P

William, try this if you're using the 32 bit version of Vegas. It harnesses the power of certain NVidia graphics cards for better preview.

DIVIDE FRAME: Software solutions for the broadcast industry

With an i7 you wouldn't have any problem editing AVCHD in real time with Vegas. You don't need anything more than you already got. I am assuming you use more than 2 GBs of RAM though.

Eugenia might be right, I don't know.

I have an i7 set at 3.3Ghz with 12 gigs of ram and I couldn't get one line of AVCHC to play properly in Vegas. The video files were on on a raid 0 hard drive configuration. Admittedly I was using multicam, but the other lines of video were HD, not avchd.

Your experience may differ Eugenia, but my short run with AVCHD on an i7 wasn't fun.

There's 3gb of ram with an MSI EX58 board. The computer runs fast as anything for hours, then crash freezes, where only hitting reset gets it to respond.

I suspect the GT9600 graphics card, as it takes 20 seconds to post, but always has done that for a year or so. That is the only used part in the rig. Includes a 520 watt Corsair power supply. If I change the graphics card for a 3650 ATI card, it should need less power also, in case that's the problem.

There is a LOT more support for Nvidia on PCs. More for ATI on Macs.

I know plenty of people with i7 machines that can't do AVCHD effectively. It's no cure all.

You know what William? I bet it's your power supply. Of course I don't know, I can't know. But I tell you what, I have a 750 watt power supply, and was having random issues. I added a second power supply (550 watts) and the issues were gone. (Yes I have a large case).

550 watts might be enough on paper for your PC, but the intermittent issue sounds like a power supply issue to me. Freezes and crashes are common with inadequate PSU. Of course there are other causes, but its happened to me.

If you have a spot for another PSU throw in a second 500w unit and see what happens. Run only the hard drives and DVD burner, floppy, etc on it.

I don't know how many hard drives you have, burners, etc, and I don't know if you're underpowered, but you have the symptoms.

My issues with Vegas and AVCHD footage in version 9 has been fixed with the purchase of Neoscene,No more sluggish playback issues, I can edit multi cam videos easily in Vegas without the frustration of waiting for my footage to catch up and sync after switching between the camera files as well as adding any transitions or corrections...My i7 core setup has never performed better....

It's a Corsair 520watt job. I could replace it with a 650watt unit, which is appreciably higher.

The rig has 2 sata hard disks, a GT9600 graphics card and a blu-ray burner. So there's not loads of kit, but yes, I am thinking seriously that I've put an inadequate psu in there.

William, the below PSU calculator is a handy tool. Some people would tell you the newegg calculator is designed to get you to buy a bigger supply. That may, or may not be true, I don't know. I do know that each external drive you run and each add-in card you run adds to the power requirement of your rig.

For example, I run 10 internal drives, three of them are 10k drives. I also run 3 external drives. Plus external and internal burners. These things all add up.

You want more, not less power, than required. Better to have too much than too little, as you need plenty of headroom. My old Dell had a completely inadequate PSU and it took me a long time to realize the PSU was the cause of lots of strange behaviours that couldn't be explained otherwise. After you reinstall windows mulitple times and replace video cards several times you finally catch on. Anyway, a good PSU will last you and can move with you into your next build.


Newegg - Power Supply Calculator

Newegg quotes me a 520watt unit - just what I've got! I'll upgrade anyhow to 650watt and see if it helps.

cheers.

Good to Know
 

Thanks for the post. I was also thinking about these issues.

Greg

Edmonton DJ

Vegas doesn't use the graphics card; the CPU is much more important. This is why Vegas is such an attractive option for me when editing on a laptop.

I do have a powerful video card, yes (a 9800GTX+) but I mainly use it for Badaboom encoding for archival purposes. (I.e., I'm done with the project, I don't want it taking up tons of space on my hard drive, but I don't want to throw my raw footage away - say, 8mbps of h.264 is good enough.)

I'm actually pretty pleased with how Vegas allows you to lower the quality on the timeline so that I just edit in "preview quality," preview stills as "best" and render in "best quality."