Playback is Lagging in Sony Vegas Pro 9.0!!!
 

Hi All,

I have recently purchased Sony Vegas Pro 9 and have been having trouble with playback within the program. When I playback clips the video constantly jumps and never plays the footage smoothly the way I though it would, this happens in the trimmer window and in the preview window.
I have tried to solve the issue my defragmenting my computer and using disk cleanup and also installing the newest drivers for my video card but none of which have had any positive effects.

My system specifications are:

Dell Vostro 220
32-bit Windows 7
4GB Ram
Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @ 2.93 GHz
500 GB Harddrive
ATI Radeon HD 4350 ( I think it is 512 MB)

The footage I am editing is has the following specs. - HD 1920 X 1080, 25 fps , AVC.

Has anyone else had this issue? if so how have you fixed it?

Hi Chase

Quite normal!! AVCHD footage on the timeline will lag and the DuoCore tries to catch up. You can set your Vegas preview to a lower quality and it will help.

I run XP still with a 2.00GHZ DuoCore processor and just 3GB ram and mine will play short clips without any issues...give it a 20 minute clip and it will die!!!

I take the easy way out and transcode all my HD footage to AVI first and then it's lightning fast!!! I'm rendering to SD anyway so the quality drop is not noticed!!

You will need at least a Quad Core processor if you want smooth preview and remember that any transition will eat the processor alive!! Cut your clip to around 2 minutes and it will be reasonably smooth..then add another 2 min clip with a cross fade and see how it stumbles!!!!

Chris

H264 7 AVCHD and Vegas
 

Hi,
I've been shooting family coverage with the Sanyo Xacti which records 720p H.264 to SDHC.
I'm able to edit this at full framerate in "Preview" quality settings on a HP z400 with the 64bit vegas and 64-bit windows7.

It will max out your (and any other) system so download TuneUp utilities and run all the optimizations.

Try getting external E-SATA RAID disks to offload internal buses/transport and add transfer rate, and slam as much RAM as you can fit into the machine. Can you overclock your system? increase cooling and add 20% overclocking.

/m

Keep in mind the Sanyo Xacti footage is already highly compressed when recorded, and therefore will require less processor power when playing back.

I had so much trouble with V9 preview on my iMac (XP Pro) that I gave up and went back to V8. Works great... SD, HDV, and 1080. Wish I hadn't spent the money for the V9 upgrade.

Thankyou
 

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all your responses I am slowly getting somewhere.
I have the preview set to draft quality and that has helped it marginally.
The clips I am editing are only about 5-15 seconds in length but all up the timeline will be about 5 minutes.
Chris, when you transcode all of you footage to AVI is the quality drop noticable if you are buring to CD or publishing to the web?
Thanks Magnus for refering me to the tuneup utility it seems like a great program I have downloaded the trial version which has seemed to pick up on many errors within the registry. Unfortunately I am unable to overclock as Dell make it really hard ( probably should have built my own). becuase I am not running a 64 bit version of windows I can only really make use of 3 Gb of RAM it would be pointless to get more as I would have to upgrade from 32 bit to 64 bit to make use of it.

That said, how do you guys edit your HD footage? Are there any other programs such as Premiere that will do a better job at previewing the files smoother?

Just download Version 8 and try it before you spend any money on another program. If it does, then I'm pretty sure your V9 serial number would work on V8.

Chase - download a trial of Cineform NeoScene, then transcode some clips and see if that resolves your issues. The file sizes will increase but your CPU will thank you.

I still don't get why people insist on editing native AVCHD files on underpowered machines. Even though I still shoot HDV m2t's, I transcode to AVID DNxHD and they play back wonderfully in Vegas Pro 9.0e. I can run 6 streams of DNxHD clips on the timeline encoded to 110mbps 10bit color 720p with full best setting and get full frame rate playback. That's with no effects, cc, etc, but it shows what's possible on slightly older hardware. I do a batch encode of my m2t's with Mpeg Stram clip and use the Mpeg-2 plugin for QT to read my m2t clips. I've found this to perform better than Cineform.

The added benefit of encoding to 10 bit gives me breathing space similar to Cineform for color grading. In addition I get the benefit of cross platform compatibility for no cost.

Thanks for the link to Cineform, I downloaded the program and converted the footage I was using, it worked really well I am able to put the clips straight into vegas without any problems I have put 20 minutes of footage in whith some tansitions and its previewing perfectly.
The only problem is the drop in footage quality was quite bad, it is not as sharp and it seems to have lost a lot of detail, is that common when converting from AVCHD to AVI? I thought it would keep the quality as the file size more than tripled. If I render it back out into AVCHD will the quality return.
Thanks for your responses they have really helped and I am finally getting somewhere and sorry for the dumb questions I am only really starting so this has been a great deal of help and a invaluable learning tool.

Thankyou