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-   -   Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly? (https://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-happens-vegas/520220-help-getting-video-preview-play-smoothly.html)

Robert Benda November 22nd, 2013 09:57 AM

Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
Are there settings with Windows 7 or Sony Vegas I can change to get Vegas running smoother? Mostly it's the preview window that can't keep up, even on the lowest preview settings. It's worst when working on the ceremony when I have three camera feeds in the timeline stacked, but isn't good even when it's 10 minutes of linear footage.

Can I assign resources to Vegas or the graphics card to help? Or do I have to upgrade to a 7200 RPM HD or SSD fix this? Will I get better performance from an external SSD than the 5400 RPM internal if I use USB 3.0?

Specs:
AMD A6-4400M (2.7 GHz) Dual-Core
Radeon HD 7520 G
16 GB RAM (15.5 usable)
500 GB 5400 RPM drive
Windows 7 64 bit

Graham Bernard November 22nd, 2013 10:18 AM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
It's "Bite the Bullet" time. I'd say you've reached the very edge of that setup and nothing will make VP12 rock and roll better than a beefier PC.

OK, let's go the other way : When and with what do you get to slick Previewing?

G

Jeff Harper November 22nd, 2013 12:43 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
Poor preview can, of course, result from underpowered pc, but your slow external drive could also cause issues with playback. I even notice a difference in performance between different internal drives. My 2TB drives are not good to edit multicam from, preview becomes jumpy or whatever you call it. When I edit from my 15K SAS drives it's much much better.

To narrow down the issue, place some video source files on your C drive, then edit as usual. If your performance improves, then you know you at least need a faster scratch drive (drive that you edit from).

Jeff Harper November 22nd, 2013 12:45 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
BTW, SSD drives are not the optimal choice to use as scratch drive. SSDs are more suited as OS drives and other uses. For large files such as video files the SSDs are not the way to go.

Robert Benda November 22nd, 2013 12:52 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
Thanks. I do edit from my internal drive (the 5400 RPM), but was wondering if a 7200rpm external drive using USB 3.0 would be faster than the internal 5400rpm.

I'm doing a decrapify right now to see if I can improve performance.

Jeff Harper November 22nd, 2013 01:43 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
I must have misread your post I didn't realize that your internal drive is 5400 rpm. 5400 rpm is much too slow to edit hi definition videoyou can pick up a 10 K velociraptor for very little money try that you'll be surprised how much better your performancewill be.

Chris Medico November 22nd, 2013 02:04 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper (Post 1821762)
BTW, SSD drives are not the optimal choice to use as scratch drive. SSDs are more suited as OS drives and other uses. For large files such as video files the SSDs are not the way to go.

I'm curious why you would say they aren't a good choice for large media files.

I'm using Samsung 840PRO SSDs in place of a RAID0 setup on my Avid system now. Using multiple streams of 220mb DNxHD is not a challenge for the single SSD.

Robert Benda November 22nd, 2013 02:10 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
I used some software to get rid of a LOT of stuff off the laptop AND, inadvertantly deleted the Sony Vegas EXE file. As I reinstalled, I discovered I was running 32bit instead of 64bit. That has now changed and...

It's much better, but not perfect. In good quality, my preview window cleanly displays a new frame every second or so, which is much more workable. This is during the ceremony where there are multiple videos on the timeline. During the first part, where only one video was there, it ran smoothly.

I think next is upgrading the internal hard drive to a 7200 RPM, where a 500GB is very affordable. Hopefully very soon since I have six or so weddings to edit from this year.

I'll save the SSD for the desktop we plan on building next year and I'll do a 250GB, which would be too small to run this laptop.

Chris Medico November 22nd, 2013 02:16 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
Since you have Win7 you should open up resource monitor. From there you'll be able to better see where the bottleneck is.

A quick overview of it here - How to Use the Resource Monitor in Windows 7 - For Dummies

Robert Benda November 22nd, 2013 02:55 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
Thanks for the reminder of Resource Manager. My remaining issue is with the CPU. The second I starting playing the preview, it spiked to 100% usage. Guess I'm waiting til the new desktop to fix the rest.

Jeff Harper November 22nd, 2013 09:07 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
Before purchasing my enterprise class SAS drives I researched the subject of SAS vs SSD drives for video pretty hard. The consensus at that time on the tech sites was that for video editing, 15K rpm SAS drives were a more suitable fit for handling video edting.

On the other hand, I did a quick look around this evening and can find nothing now to verify my earlier research. I have found many that are against SSD drives for video editing, but nothing to substantiate why. At the time of my earlier research I based my decision based on articles by storage media gurus, not on forum chatter.

Anyway, from what I'm reading many people are editing on SSD scratch drives, so it seems to be working for many people, so I might have given bad advice based on the current state of SSDs.

Nicholas de Kock December 2nd, 2013 07:20 PM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
I recently upgraded my station & I've noted some interesting things about the preview speed. When I edit my C100 footage in Vegas with GPU acceleration off at Best (Full) I get very smooth playback however it's CPU intensive, my CPU runs at 70% while editing to process the highly compressed C100 footage. This leads me to conclude that video preview speeds is linked to the format being edited & your CPU speed.

My Upgrade:
GA-Z87X-UD3H Motherboard
Intel i7-4770 CPU
Corsair 32Gb 1600 Vengeance RAM
2x 250Gb Samsung 840 EVO SSD in RAID0 (OS)

I run my OS on SSD's & my video files are on normal drives, I would like to get faster drives for editing on eventually & a new graphics card (ATI R9 920x looks promising). I'm getting insane read/write speeds of + 800Mb/s with two Samsung 840 EVO in RAID0.

Ian Stark December 5th, 2013 11:08 AM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
I've just taken the plunge and ordered a Crucial M500 960GB SSD to replace a 10k RPM Velociraptor (on SATA III/6GBPS).

Together with the i7-980 3.33 GHz hexacore CPU and 24GB of fairly fast RAM it should be a fairly video friendly machine. I also have a 3GB Nvidia GTX580 but I am looking to replace that as soon as someone can definitively point me to a stable high performance graphics card as I think the card is a major source of Vegas crashes (with acceleration on).

In addition to Vegas I also run Cinema4D and Cakewalk Sonar and I've finally updated my oldish Adobe suite to a CC subscription (primarily for After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop). It's only Vegas that I am concerned about, performance wise, though, and I'm hoping that the SSD will give me a noticeable improvement when working on complex, multi-track, multiple format projects (my video is AVCHD from a Panasonic AF-101, but I frequently have to use other formats from third parties - mov in particular causes me a headache!)

So, that's my background. Here's my question - and it's probably aimed at Jeff, but anyone else feel free to chip in!

I know you mentioned that you might have been wrong about SSDs not being good as scratch disks, but can you recall what the reasoning behind that was? I'd like to do a little more research myself but I'm not really a hardware expert (and I think you are!)

At the moment I have 2 x 2GB drives (7200RPM in RAID 0+1) for media and projects but this seems to be the primary bottleneck for previewing performance (not too worried about render speed). As such I am tempted to look into using SSDs to replace them. I'm happy to throw some decent money at getting an improved preview performance, but I want to make sure that I'm going in the right direction.

Anyone else here running an all-SSD system with Vegas? Are you noticing significant improvement in performance, in particular previewing?

Ian Stark December 5th, 2013 11:11 AM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
I meant to add - should I still be considering one SSD for projects and one for media or is the performance gain so great I would only need one?

Ian Stark December 5th, 2013 11:39 AM

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 
And here's an interesting article, albeit a little Adobe heavy: Creating a perfect video editing disk configuration


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