Vegas has become laggy - help needed

[Richard Tetik]

Hi guys,

I'm desperate for some help here. I've been using Sony Vegas Pro 12 for about 2 years now without any issues, but recently I'm really struggling to edit vision as all pre-rendered preview vision is very laggy and stuttery. I used to be able to edit and preview at 1080p resolution, but now even when I drop the preview resolution to draft it makes little difference to how laggy the preview is. Only once the film is rendered, it plays smoothly as expected.

I updated my system 6 months ago and here are my full specs:
Windows 7 Home 64 bit version
Intel i5 3570k 3.4ghz running at 4.0ghz
Powercolor Radeon 7970 3GB Graphics card
16GB GSkill Ram
Samsung 250GB SSD

I'd really appreciate some help as short of formatting my computer I'm not sure what to do.

Thanks,
Richard

[Leslie Wand]

you are matching tl properties to source material?

have you checked tracks are at 100% opacity, there's no fx on tracks, etc.,

[Chris Hewitt]

Have you tried just defragging your drives? Simple solution but makes a world of difference.
If your edit drive has too much on it, just transfer it all onto another drive then back again.
Other than that, if your edit pc is connected to the internet, scan for any malware etc and eliminate the possible causes..... corrupt memory, bad drive sectors.

[Jeff Harper]

Backup the files, do a full format of the video drive, then move footage back on and see what happens. Make sure your drive is not more than 40 or 50% full. Disc drives will slow down to a crawl as they fill up.

The first thing I look at in your situation is the drive the video files are located on. Once you eliminate that issue, you can start looking at your C drive at the status of your OS.

[Richard Tetik]

Ok, thanks, that sounds like a good idea. The drive the video files are stored and used on is a standard 1TB HDD which is about 50% full. I have been using this drive for about 4 years without formatting it. What I usually do is edit my video files on this drive and then once the film is complete I will move the files to an archive external drive.

So what I'll do is back up the drive, format it completely and move all the files back onto it and see if that fixes the issue.

How would I check for corrupt memory? I hope that's not the case as the memory is quite new.

[Jon Shohet]

Media drives don't usually require defragmenting. Personally I wouldn't bother unless I've exhausted more likely reasons, but it certainly it won't hurt to do it. Most good defragmenters allow you do an analysis so you can check for fragmentation and then decide.

If anything, it's more important to check if your system drive is running out of space (and if so erase as much as possible, hard drive speed decrease the more it's full) or needs defragmenting.
EDIT: just noticed your system drive is an SSD. Sorry. I guess there's no point defragmenting, although checking for free space should still be relevant.

[Richard Tetik]

Yes, system drive is 250GB SSD which is only 100GB used and its practically new. The 1TB HDD is about 4 years old.

What could be some of the more likely reasons? Is there any settings in Vegas that I should check?

[Jon Shohet]

From my time in this forum I know that Jeff is a real Vegas veteran so I trust his instincts. It's just that media drives are far less likely to get heavily fragmented than system drives, and you said your media drive is 50% full so that in itself shouldn't affect performance so drastically.

You could always create a test project on a different drive, this way you can see if that's the problem without shifting hundreds of Gigabytes back and forth.
Hope you work it out.

[Jo Ouwejan]

Besides that, it is not wise to defragment a solid state drive, as the life time of such drives will suffer from that.

[Jeff Harper]

Actually Jon, your method of moving the files to another drive and testing it is a good idea also, but you still have to move the video files to the second drive. I've done the same thing many times, so I am in full agreement with you. Either way, your idea might would be quicker. I have never been accused of always choosing the easy way!

The main idea is we want to isloate the problem and I think by finding if the video drive is the culprit Richard will be on his way, no matter how he chooses to do it!

Thanks for reminding me there are always alternative ways to do things!

[Seth Bloombaum]

Jeff is indeed very experienced in optimizing Vegas' performance. Though modest he has learned much from the many hard knocks he has endured.

There are also some outlier possibilities that can drastically affect timeline preview:
* Has your PC become slaved to a botnet, using up system resources?
* Has your Vegas installation become corrupted in some way? Before going too wild with other investigation, it's always a good idea to just reinstall Vegas. Addons & extensions may need to be reinstalled afterwards.
* Have you recently installed a "codec pack", that might be substituting its own codecs for Vegas?
* Is there other audio/video software or hardware you've recently installed that might be conflicting with Vegas' codecs?
* Is your drive corrupt, or in a process of breakdown? Usually a drive speed test will tell the story.
* Has your temp / prerender files locations been inadvertently reset to some place you don't want it?
* I think RAM was mentioned up the thread a bit... in addition to corrupted RAM, which can be tested, there's also the RAM settings in Vegas. Sometimes mysterious, but the setting for the amount of RAM Vegas can use for RAM preview render (ctrl-b) can drastically affect performance and stability.

[Richard Tetik]

Thanks for the help guys. I'm just waiting for the client to be happy with this edit then I'll start moving files, checking drives etc. I'll let you know how / if I find a solution.

cheers,
Richard

[Jeff Harper]

Good luck, looking forward to hearing the outcome!

[Robert Benda]

Is the hard drive the files are on an external? If so, make sure you didn't accidentally plug into a USB 2.0 only port. My computer has USB 3, and for some strange reason, one USB 2.