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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Hi Ian. My previous research re:SSD drives told me (at least as I remember it) that video files and the nature of the "transactions" that occur when they are being accessed for editing are better off residing on a disc drive, not SSD. SSDs were said to not be as suitable for fast accessing of large files, or something like that. It may have to do with sequential and random access speeds and how they factor in for different types of tasks.

It's necessary to keep in mind I research the crap out of things, possibly for months, prior to weighing things out and making a purchase. After the purchase, I will often forget everything I learned previously and will have to go back and relearn it again later. I have pretty much forgotten all details of my previous research, but I still have some vague concepts floating around in my brain.

About two years ago, more or less, I purchased my SAS drives with understanding of the above ideas.

From what I have learned since looking up this topic more recently, SSDs seem fine, but I have not found expert confirmation, only anecdotal statements by people who are happy with them.

I see the article you reference from Adobe actually recommends an SSD for OS, and then disc drive for video files, but it does not say why. Is it because of cost? They don't say.

I have what are among the fastest disc drives around, Seagate Cheetah 15K drives. Sadly, my preview performance is only marginally better than when I ran 300GB Velociraptors in RAID 0. It is certainly better, but not nearly as much as I had expected. My bottleneck seems to be not the HDs as much as the CPU.

I see a hard disc drive not so much as something that speeds up preview as much as as a purchase to prevent bottlenecks. I purchase the fastest drives I can afford not to speed things up, but instead to not slow them down. With decent drives we can feel reasonably confident that if preview is sluggish, we do not have to wonder if our hard drive if fast enough.

This approach allows us to focus on the CPU aspect and overclocking.

So in the end, Ian, I do not know the answer to the question, except to recommend that you buy the fastest drives you can afford and see what happens.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Thanks Jeff. One of the things I have read in several places is that the life of an SSD is reduced when used in that fashion (as a scratch drive) because of the increased number of reads and writes. I'm not convinced, but neither can I disprove it! I will indeed have a go and see how I get on. I think I'll buy one more to start with, then build if required. Don't hold your breath for feedback though. This is a Christmas holidays task - too busy with rent-paying stuff right now :-)

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Get a SSD with a 3-5 year warranty if it fails before then you just have it replaced.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Ian, I've looked around and with the low cost of SSDs, my next purchase will be an SSD drive. I want to lose the heat that comes with disc drives, and obviously the speed is very very very good.

SSDs are what is happening. Disc drives days are undoubtedly numbered. In five years disc drives will be hard to find, IMO. In ten years they will be a distant memory.

In two years since my previous research things have changed a lot.

Because of the common occurrence of drive failures, I will use disc drives for backup, and use SSDs for video and OS.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

And as you were typing, I'm installing my first SSD ;-). I'll let you know how I get on.

As I mentioned earlier, I will experiment with SSDs as scratch drives when I have a bit of free time over Christmas. This is just a system drive I'm installing. Fingers crossed!

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Good luck! Keep up posted. My first drive will be for video, since that is where the bottleneck occurs in editing. I look foward to replacing my OS drive as well, I may do both at once, but the priority for me is my video drive.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Well, Ian, I take back everything I've said about SSDs not being "as good" for video. I was clearly very behind in my understanding of them, and how far they've come in two years.

I really appreciate this thread and am so happy to say I was mistaken.

I've ordered one drive for OS and one for video.

I am happy that I have SATA 3 ports so I can get full benefits of the speed the drives have to offer. Luckily my MOBO came with SATA 3 cables and I've gotten them out and they are waiting for the drives.

I am particularly happy because I can lose my expensive SAS controller and not worry about the heat it generates. My 15K drives also generate heat. I'll sell the old drives and hopefully come out ahead financially.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Hi Jeff,

Well, I have now installed the SSD (not without some headaches, though*) and I have to say the performance is blistering! I started off with just one SSD for OS and apps but the difference is astonishing. My Windows Experience Index (for what it's worth) is 7.8, up from 5.9 (with the primary hard disk transfer rate being the lowest subscore).

Vegas loads in about five seconds. I can preview my complex projects at good/full mode (and full screen) without stuttering (unless I am using a heavy plugin like MB Looks). Less complex projects easily preview at best/full. Like you I plan to add a second SSD for media. I'm not sure whether a third for the actual projects is really necessary or whether I can keep those on a regular drive.

I now have to be more disciplined in terms of backing up and archiving, given the greater potential (so I understand) for SSDs to fail. I'm doing a daily system incremental backup now and will also backup active project materials every day.

Which drive did you go for in the end, Jeff? I chose the Crucial M500 960GB - seemed to be the best price/performance ratio. Not necessarily the fastest of the drives out there but the differences were tiny and I'm not convinced anyone would be able to tell.

It's all very exciting anyway!

* the problems I mentioned were mainly due to the original system drive having some bad sectors in important places! Not enough to prevent Windows from booting up and operating normally, but enough to not allow me to clone the drive or create a system image. I did a fair amount of research into the issue and it seems that there is every chance the drive was very close to failure, so perhaps fate played its hand when I decided to install the SSD! It has meant I've had to install everything from scratch, including Windows, but that's probably not a bad thing. I'm getting a few odd BIOS issues every now and then, with the BIOS forgetting the RAID settings for the media and project drives, resulting in me seeing four useless 1 GB drives instead of 2 x 2GB drives. It's easily fixed by going into the BIOS and changing the settings back to RAID, but it's annoying and I can't work out why it's happening.

Anyway, long and short is I'm enjoying a wonderful boost in performance. S'pose I should go 4k now and be back to square one ;-)

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Ian, thanks for the details about your adventure. Your SSD is a proven performer and a very good choice.

SanDisk Extreme II 128GB and the 240GB are what I went with. Traditionally my video drive is for editing only, never for storage, so I will continue using my large disc drives for pending projects and archived projects.

I liked the SanDisk because of the speed/cost/warranty. The Crucial was slightly higher in areas, but overall the $60 savings per 240GB drive and the 5 year warranty of the SanDisc won me over.

I had a bottleneck with my SAS drive, I've been running on 4 lanes (PCI 2) instead of 8 because of my controlller's limitations. Rather than upgrade my controller this seemed a really superior option. Very excited about this purchase.

Thanks for your input which helped me very much!

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Must say I have a love affair with the speed that SSD offer, only wish I had 64Gb of ram now. Be aware that SSD's do have a set read & write limit & can fail like any other drive. A friend of mine has lost two SSD's already, a solid back-up strategy is always a good idea.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Excellent point about the MTBF, Nicholas. They do have a finite life expectancy, and this concerns me. The enterprise class drives are very expensive, not within most budgets. I regret not looking harder at the business class drives since they are supposed to more reliable.

Backing up is essential as you say. I don't mind if I lose an OS drive so much because I save my project/work to three HDDs every many times a day. On occasion I have been known to be lazy and not save as often, but with these drives I will be more disciplined.

In my case I look hard at warranties and I try and stick with 5 years when possible. Drives with 5 year warranties tend to work out well for me.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Well, the SSD drives are installed and I'm impressed with transfer speeds, but only mildly. The SSDs do not slow down though as the drive fills, which is nice.

Vegas opens at about same speed as before, even though I"m using SSD for c drive and for the video. Rather disappointing.

I think the issue might be my old drives were pretty fast, and I expected too much. I've always run RAID 0 and or used the fastest drives I could afford. Possibly for someone coming from 7200rpm drives the SSDs would instantly seem amazing. And they are, but the difference seem negligible in my case.

I am only getting a 8 on the windows experience index for drives, so it might mean they are not configured correctly. I am running in AHCI mode, I'm using a MOBO with SATA III connnectors and cables, so not sure what is left to check.

The drives are fantastic and I do love them, highly recommended.

I do love the cool and silent operation. For the money you cannot beat them. When I sell my old SAS drives I will come out ahead for sure, so all is well that ends well. My boot time will decrease without there being a controller to boot up, so that is a nice positive.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Stupid me. I checked my older SAS drive specs just now. They actually have 150mbps higher transfer rates than my new SSD drives, so that explains why I'm not super blown away. I had just assumed that SSDs would be faster. The advantages of the SSDs are enough I'll stick with them, however.

For the new year I will resolve to be less impulsive!

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Congrats Jeff! At least in part - your old drives must have been fantastically fast! I'm coming from a 10k rpm system drive and two 7200 storage drives and the difference is phenomenal (I still have the 7200's, in RAID 0+1 and I hope to see even better performance when I replace those in due course).

My system seems to have settled down now (touch wood). I'm not getting any POST issues now (eg the BIOS losing its RAID settings). Not sure what I've done to earn that, but I'm not complaining.

I'm ranking this as the best thing I've ever done to improve performance on an existing system - far better than a faster GPU or more RAM.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Yes, my old drives are still, as far as I know, the fastest platter discs available to consumers. 15k 6GB, with 600mbps transfer speed. Blazingly fast.

However they are running off of my outdated PCI 2 controller and that is a bottleneck. If I were to upgrade my controller they would probably destroy the SSDs. But there is the issue of how things slow down as the platter drives fill.

A PCI 3 controller is going to cost me at least $500 or more, which is what really caused me to consider the SSDs.

I am glad your issues are resolved!

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Jeff are you saying your SAS drives had transfer rates of 600mbps? I'm getting the following speeds on two Samsung 840 EVO 250Gb SSD's in RAID0.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Yes, Cheetah 15K.7 SAS drives have a transfer rate of 600 Mbps. They're very fast drives.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Jeff that's insane for a disk drive, where you running them in RAID? I'm not seeing those numbers on single drives from online benchmarks. Seagate Cheetah only seems to be delivering between 170 to 200mbps as a single drive but goes to 600mbps in RAID10.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

I'm on my phone Nicholas so I can't send you a link right now go to the Seagate website. Far as I remember their spec'd at six hundred megabytes per second. if you're interested look up to 15 K .7 SAS drives.

maybe I miss read it

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Nicholas, look here and see if I am mistaken, maybe I am. Look the SAS #s, NOT the Fibre Channel #s.

Seagate Cheetah 15K | Seagate

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Try Samsung Magician and Samsung Rapid with the samsung EVO drives, Pro or none pro...

They will have read/write speed of 1100mb.. No need for raid

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Nicholas, the specs I linked to above lists a transfer rate of 600mbps, but I see a sustained data rate of 125mbps.

I can tell you one thing, regardless of the numbers, what I'm seeing is little to no difference between the Cheetahs and the SSDs for video. They seem to respond the same. Mind you I say SEEM to, so I could be completely wrong.

I just know that Vegas projects load up about the exact same time both drives. My Sandisk Extreme 2 is not the fastest, but they are not slow either.

I have read that the biggest advantage for SSDs are in small read write operations, not in things such as video, where the advantages are not as great. Again, I don't really know what I'm talking about, this is just what I've read.

I'm happy with the SSDs, but either they are not configured correctly or they are not as fast as I expected.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Wish I could Kim but because my drives are in RAID0 Samsung Magician doesn't pick them up as SSD drives. Could have gotten one 500Gb but opted for two 250's instead (same price). Jeff I did a test transcode from SSD to SSD & HDD to HDD, with my current system SSD was only +/- 20% faster on transcodes. Not bad as far as percentages go but I rarely do SSD to SSD as I only use my SSD's for OS.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Well, I removed my SSD RAID controller and it has shaved minutes off of my boot time. Shutdown has gone from three or four minutes to 3 seconds.

I was so tired of using RAID controllers they add so much time to boot up. I feel free! I also moved my drives to another onboard controller and gained some speed. Very nice.

Re: Help Getting Video Preview to play smoothly?
 

Your right.. you cant have rapid mode on when in raid..

But just so you know. Rapid mode is faster then raid0..