External Monitor overdriving CPU with MB
 

Well, I am a newbie here, but it appears this is the BEST place for bouncing ideas to solve issues. Here is my issue: I just added an external monitor to my Vegas 7.0d...a 26" LCD Widescreen. I thought this would come in handy when editing and what I have found is this: When I try to preview while my Magic bullet effects are engaged, My screen hangs just a second and causes the picture to skip many frames at a time..OVERLY stuccado. It looks as if I have no memory at all. When I go to task manager I find that My CPU is driving at 90% usage. If I bypass Magic bullet it drops to around 40 percent. I have a 3.0GHZ pentium in a Dell dimension 8400 but only 1gb of memory. I just ordered 2gb more. Does anyone think this will help my problem? I can get it to work when I drop the preview to draft mode but it looks horrible. If I go above preview auto, it hangs, even without bullet engaged. I really would like to see better quality for editing purposes. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. I failed to mention that I am using a 1394 firewire card to a handheld samsung mini dv camera to convert the dv to analog, then out of the camera to the LCD TV.

No. Magic Bullet is just horrendously slow.

External monitor picture not very good
 

Well, the external monitor picture isn't nearly as good as the computer monitor even without magic bullet. It stills has that hang to it, not nearly as bad, but it cannot compete with the original monitor. What is the best way to hook up the external? I have the output from the Firewire card to a samsung mini dv camcorder and output from that to the tv. I cannot figure out why the external monitor quality is just not there. EVEN in DVD Architect I have the same problem..check this out: DVD Architect runs at about 40% CPU when previewing your work on "Best" mode. The picture is great. But when you click preview on external monitor, while the file is being played, the cpu usage doubles to 80%. No doubt this is where the hang up begins, but why would the CPU usage double by simply previewing on an external monitor? I am still looking for the best solution. Won't the CPU usage decline with more Ram? Thanks.

Most likely when you are converting a firewire output to your camcorder it is digital but then it would have to convert to analog in order to see it on a external monitor..so that is the bottleneck. Not to mention it is also figuring out in the timeline your MB effects and is taxing your CPU. Try using dynamic ram preview (Shift+B) and view it that way. Also make sure all your background programs are off.

John:

What kind of system are you running, video card in particular. In HDV editing, Sony Vegas preview is a bit clunky, in my opinion, unless you have a pretty good video card. I have a 32 in LCD hooked up to the DVI out on my dual output ATI X700 PCI express card, with 256 K memory on board. It is choppy in the high resolution previews with just plain Vegas filters and transitions.

If its any consolation, Premieres preview has similar issues too. What you see, is not what you get.

My card is a Radeon X300 ATI with HDMI, I just switched my second monitor to run from this output. It works well as long as I do not engage magic bullet or some of the sony effects. I am still praying that adding 2gb of memory will help.