Vegas Video Preview Performance - 32-bit vs 64-bit
 

I know there have been lots of questions/posts on here regarding the performance advantages of the 64-bit Vegas Pro 8.1 software versus the 32-bit Vegas Pro 8.0c, however, the majority of what people are referring to when talking about performance are rendering times.

I'd like to hear some feedback out there on what people are seeing in regards to playback performance in the video preview window. Frankly, this has always been something that I felt was lacking and more frustrating than rendering times for me. I shoot and edit in HDV (.m2t files) and preview my material with the auto setting at 50% resolution which, for me, is ideal size on my 22" 1680x1050 secondary windows display monitor. What's frustrating is after adding some color correction, transitions, etc, while moving across the preview, the frame rate can drop below 29.97fps, sometimes significantly where it effects my editing experience.

Very little seems to be discussed here on why Vegas handles HDV material on the timeline relatively poorly when it comes to playback. I'm using a 3.0Ghz Core 2 Duo processor. I know a Quad Core would benefit rendering times, but what about preview rate? Which is better, 64-bit Vegas on Vista 64-bit or a Quad Core processor? Both?

Looking forward to your feedback,

Jon

Jon -
You've hit the proverbial nail on the head IMO...

I find that I have to run my preview window at the lowest end of the resolutions offered to get a usable editing experience (with AVCHD, HDV wasn't nearly as bad). I can't complain, as the lower settings do work fine for me, plenty good to edit and get things the way I want them. I don't typically add a lot of CC or effects, & I accept that those do slow things down a bit...

BUT, I'm confused as to why the preview window goes to crap (ghosting, trails, totally unusable due to motion artifacts) at higher resolutions/playback rates... with nothing other than the raw footage... especially when my rendered results play back smooth as butter on Windows media player or VLC, no ghosting, no artifacts, PERFECT in real time, and simply stunning.

I guess the aggrivation comes from knowing that my end results will look so good, yet while I'm editing, I've got to settle for less than the best preview to work from!!

I have a quad core, 4gb, RAID0 rig and had the same problem. I put my windows swap file on a seperate, slow, IDE hard disk and performance is perfect.

Dont forget any plugins will slow it down so use the button on the preview to turn off plugins in the preview. A life saver for me.

guys this has been spoken of
 

quite often in this forum, basically for Vegas to have any chance of improving this, with the preview aspect of the program at least, it needs to offload onto the gpu not the cpu to improve, so unless the next build does this, it'll never improve.
It defeats me as to why they chose this path, when for at least 7 years now graphic card manufacturers are constantly improving mpeg acceleration through their cards and putting so much ram now on graphic cards, I mean if we don't utilise the gpu, are we even utilising the ram on the graphics card to pre-render? That's why everybody on this forum says not to waste your money on a good graphics card as it won't help. Sony please wake up in this area!
Imagine how fast Sony would fly, in many aspects its already so much faster than other NLE's and would leave them for dead if it followed in many of their footsteps, and started using this powerful, and these days cheap resource. I mean heck, I just bought a 512mb ATI Radeon 3450 PCIe graphics card for $50 Aust.
And the reason I only bought this model mind you is I knew i'd be wasting my money with Sony Vegas on anything more as it won't be used, but even at this price point, it includes 1080p hardware support and HDCP.
I need my preview window to be at the highest setting as I often have my cut in and out points based on if the subjects in focus, as I shoot a lot of fast action type material. That's why the lower preview settings are all but useless for me. Often I need to use them to check audio though, as the system chugs down so much at the highest settings that the transition speeds suffer and I need to hear and see how they go.
Anyway I don't think I'll harp on about this subject anymore, some people use their 2.4Ghz P4 happily with Vegas, I have my 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo laptop with 2gb Ram and my quadcore with 4gb of ram and the aformetioned graphics card and still aren't happy with preview speeds etc.

Common Sony make this program what it deserves to be (You know you want to)

Regards

Adam

Yeah, I have no idea why they aren't utilizing the GPU more for the preview. For me, editing in anything less than 50% of full frame is worthless on my 22" monitor. I can't be squinting while I'm editing my work. It's in the edit process where I need to be able to see my changes most accurately. If I put in a cross-fade or whatever I want to see how that's going to look which helps me determine what type of fade to use and how long it should run.

Danny, As far as moving the windows swap file onto a seperate hard drive, I'll do that for sure. When you say playback is perfect though, what type of material are you previewing? Is this HDV at half resolution, full resolution? Are you putting down effects onto these events? I'd like to know more..

Also, there must be somebody out there who could give me some type of glimpse into the differences of performance on 64-bit Vegas+OS versus 32-bit yes? It *seems* like the CPU be it a quad or a core 2 duo makes little difference in playback performance, but I'd still like to get some feedback on this.

Jon

I too would like to know how Vegas is working with windows 64-bit.
Is it worth the upgrade?

I'm using a AMD Phenom 9600 Quad Core 2.31Ghz 4Gig ram and a Nvidia Geforce 8600Gt.

I have to have the preview window set at preview auto.
Every time I want to see what it will look like I have to change it to full and look at it paused.
Such a pain.

Please Sony get with the times.

I can't add much to what has already been said, but I completely agree that some changes need to be made. I start shooting in HD soon (I do not now) and really dread the issues involved.

I have notice no improvement in the preview experience with 64 bit windows, unfortunately, Jon.

I'm hoping this is because you're only editing in SD (DV I presume). I've seen some posts suggest playback performance might be improved, but still nothing definitive...

Sorry Jon, you were asking about 64 bit Vegas, not windows....

To answer your question, my experience with 64 bit was poor and I haven't run it since the first day or two it came out. I had black frame issues, and got no preview on my broadcast monitor with it. And without support for Magic Bullet and Ultimate s, it was useless to me.

I reinstalled windows today on my new workstation, and put 64 bit Vegas on first to see what would happen, same thing.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

OK, that's an interesting solution - you're saying that moving the windows swap file off the main "C" drive improved preview performance? I've got several drives, and keep the source files off on separate drives thatn the OS and Vegas... but I'm open to trying something different. I can get preview/full to work fine, but not much beyond that, would like to get a little better preview performance...

Yes, when I'm refering to 64-bit, I'm of course making the assumption that we're talking about Vegas 64-bit 8.1 running on Vista 64-bit. I realize there are a few out there who have Vista 64-bit who are sticking with 8.0c 32-bit Vegas.

I'm in the middle of setting up a new workstation myself. I have 8 gigs of RAM, purchase Vista Ultimate which includes the 64-bit OS, etc. I only however have a 3.0Ghz Core 2 Duo processor - not a quad which is so popular around here.

It seems that whenever I read performance issues with Vegas between 32-bit and 64-bit - everybody almost always refers to rendering speeds. It appears to me than unless you have an extremely complex render going on and you have 8Gb of RAM, render times don't seem to differe significantly under either OS. I'm trying to find more definitive answers on whether 64-bit is going to give me superior playback performance which, as I mentioned earlier, I'm personally more concerned about anyway.

I've done some research into the Vista scratch disk and moving that to it's own logical disk drive seperate from the Windows source drive. Though this seems to be the common recommendation in the video editing world. I wonder what kind of significance this has on an 8Gb machine considering there probably isn't going to be a whole lot of swap file accessing going on in the first place. I'm also a little skeptical because if a change this insigificant would have such a dramatic difference on playback performance, you'd think it would be a more prominant on Sony's website as a "must do" and sold as a solution to anybody complaining about poor playback performance.

Not that I'm denying the benefit, I'm just skeptical...

Jon

It's not necessarily an either/or situation... I'm using both on my laptop, though I could see removing Vegas 8.0c once 8.1 has proven itself. Looked good at first, but it seems to have recently forgotten how to open M2TS files... bad news. I'm probably going to put a 64-bit OS on my Quad machine as a result of Vegas going x64, too... well, that and the little bit of extra memory it'll net me.

The OS shouldn't be a major factor... though once you move to a Quad core, HDD performance can often be the limiting factor, even in rendering AVC in HD. So in so much as the OS influenced HDD performance, it's worthy of noting in any comparison. The 64-bit factor is a bit like that, too... it should help, but it's significance is questionable, especially until you A/B against 8.0c doing the same render on the same hardware.

I agree... I don't believe the swap file is significant on a large memory machine, in particular when render is the only thing it's doing. I didn't use all memory on my Quad machine doing renders when I had 2GB, much less with 4GB (well, 3.6GB) today. Data paging is the only use of the swap files... code segments, just about insignificantly small, page from their own binaries, usually on the C: drive.

The original theory here is that, if you're getting code and data paging at the same time, that can have the C: drive thrashing, which will at least temporarily slow things down (there shouldn't be any code paging once the render is set up .. the inner loop of any reasonable rendering algorithm should be designed to run entirely from cache, L1 cache if possible... when it doesn't, that's when you see Dual and Quad CPUs stop scaling as they do today on these renders). I think there are any number of video folks who learned this as a rule back in the 80s or 90s, and maintain it today. I don't believe it's significant at all.

What can be significant, as mentioned, is your HDD speed, largely because on Dual and Quad machines, the CPUs are so frickin' fast, the HDD can be the weakest link. This is also prone to happen when you have multiple layers with large still photos... I had a wedding video with multiple photos collages and stills mixed with video for some of the main sequences (stills essentially playing the B-camera role, from the days before I had multiple HD camcorders), all stills at 6 and 8 MPixels, JPEGs and PSDs. So that's a ton of data already, and on my fastest machine at the time, what happened was so much of the disc access was eaten up in seek times, the render slowed below the "CPU as bottleneck" level... and given the render itself ran about 24 hours normally, this just made it insane. Moving the photos to a second drive and ensuring the output went to the CPUs pegged at 100%, which is the best indication you cannot render any faster.