Stuttering Preview playback
 

Hello, all.

I'm having a playback problem in vegas 6 in which any clip that I've added moderate effects to will playback very choppy when previewing. For instance, if I mask out a certian portion of an image, then add feathering to that mask, playback is almost non existant for that portion of video. Even worse, I'm adding this mask to a still image, not even a video. I haven't always had this problem. I also recently defragmented all my drives.

Here's my setup.

Intel Celeron 2.4 ghz.
1 gb ram.
40 gig capture drive.
160 gig storage and programs drive.
Windows xp home service pack 2

In this case, the stills being edited are located on the capture drive. Could this be a factor?

It's just not timely to render every effect I create in order to see how it will look.

Thanks for your help!

That's just the way it goes. Processing of the images slows down the playback frame rate. Not much you can do short of buying a bleeding-edge computer.

Try playing back the heavily-processed parts of your project with a lower preview setting--"draft" will play back almost anything in close to true frame rate. Yes, it's blocky and stuff, but you can definitely see what the effects look like.

no, that's not common.
Running an antivirus? Background stuff running? The XP Home vs Pro suggests you might have some background stuff operating.
On that Celeron, you should EASILY see full framerate playback from DV with a mask or color correction.
Set preview to Preview/Auto

Can you provide more info as to the file type?

yes sir,

most of the pictures are near 1 mb, each. Not sure that would have anything to do with it.

as for background programs... i try very hard to not have anything running that need not be, and I'm not much for anti-viral programs/spyware... what have you.

Everything in the process tree looks quite normal.

Oh, and when I play from the timeline, I can hear a drive in the cpu really working hard. Think of a floppy drive, only less audible.

preview is/has been set to preview - auto

ALSO: - There are certain times when effects or plug-ins lock themselves onto an event. For instance, I don't like how the light rays effect looks on a particular event, but when I attempt to either reconfigure the light rays, or remove/replace them, they remain. No change occurs. This has happened twice, now, each time being after I've saved the project and returned to it later. Have you ever seen this before?

now we're learning what's in your project...what kind of photos/images are they? If they are .tif images, you'll always have stuttering. They should be png or tga.
Additionally, anything larger than 2k pixels in any direction is a waste, since Vegas will resolve it to smaller than 2k no matter what.
the CPU doesn't have a drive in it. The CPU is your processor. You could mean that your tower/enclosure has a drive making noise, and that's likely a bad thing.
Are the pix on the same drive as your OS? That's another bad sign/problem. Your computer is trying to run Windows, Vegas, image transfer, and translation (if they're .tif) all at the same time from the same drive. Bad practice. Put video and pix on a second/separate drive.

The images are jpeg.

The images are only 1 mb a piece because that is the size at which my scanner is saving the file.

Yes, I meant the tower has a drive (i felt awkward typing "cpu", but couldn't think of the right word.

The images are on the secondary drive used for capture. Vegas and the OS are on the same drive.

Thank you for all your help.

Ryan

File size doesn't matter, image size matters, although at 1MB they should be smaller than 2K.
If your output is DV, then have your images not larger than 1440 x XXX in size.
However, you still should not be stuttering. Even my crummy K37 laptop will let me mask/overlay jpgs with no issue, it's much slower than yours.
what is running in background? Look in your system display.

vegas 6
ybrwicon (browser icon)
sqlservr.exe (SYSTEM - 28, 032K)
mim.exe
mmdiag.exe
wdfmgr.exe
svchost.exe
smagent
viewmgr
jusched
hkcmd
explorer
spoolsv
svchost
eeventmanager
svchost
ycommon
svchost
svchost
ipodservice
lsass
services
winlogon
csrss
notepad
smss
system
system idle process

I'm having a very similar problem. Whenever I put any kind of any effect on a track...even just moving words around or whatever, it will stutter pretty bad. I have Vegas 6, and it is set to Preview (auto). I have AMD Athlon 64 3200+ running at 2.01GHZ, 1GB of DDR400 RAM, and ATi Radeon x800GTO 256MB video card. Doesn't seem any reason to me why it stutters so much. If I want to see it run perfectly in the preview window, I have to lower it to Draft (auto). Rediculous. Any ideas?