Thread: Sony Vegas 8, Preview window

Hello, I am new to this forum but i read alot here.

I'm having some problems with the Vegas 8.0 Preview window. When i add multiple clips to the time line, and some transitions the application is starting to stutter alot. It's so slow i cannot even watch the preview normally. This starts at, lets say 3 or 4 clips. I cannot edit properly this way, the only way i can preview my project properly is by rendering the file each time i want to see it. This takes a very long time.

Also when i look at my CPU power it says its 100% and thats causing the trouble i guess. But cmon, 3 clips? I have a quite Ok computer for this i guess. Its a Athlon 3200+ (2,0 GHZ). 2GB DDR RAM, and 512MB videocard (X1800 PRO). Does anyone know what causes Vegas to be so slow? Where does he eat all the resources? The preview window is not on full quality, its draft - full or Preview - full.

Also i have my virtual mem set at 2048 (should be enough?). I've tried the tricks on this site ; Eugenia’s Rants and Thoughts » Blog Archive » Sony Vegas Tips & Tricks but it doesnt really work. The first tip there is about resizing and such but my video's are XviD compressed and 1024/576. If i'm gonna resize this its very ugly.

Can anyone help me out here?

Relax - all that you decsribe is perfectly normal with any editing package.

Trust me it could be worse - my first editng pc was a XP1700 with vegas 4.0 - I well remember my tiny preview window and endless renders.

If you check out the pc specs of regular posters you are likely to see many dual cores and a few quad core systems. Video editing takes power and almost any editor on any system will regualrly find themselves wanting more power. Everytime i upgrade I am all smiles for a month then I start planning the next upgrade.

I see you are editing on highly compressed footage. For techincal reasons editing anything like xvid / divx / wmv will be much slower than less compressed footage such as DV.

At the risk of repeating hints the following can help.

IMPORTANT - always set the properties of the project to the same as the media you are editing for max editing performance.

Motion blur - Use will make renders up to 10 times longer and make the timeline very unresponsive - turn off untill final renders if used.

Use 2 or more drives - Haveing the media on a seperate drive (not too full and regularly defragged) is helpfull.

Run a lean well maintained system - Just have the bare minimum of stuff running.

Hope that helps or at least puts your mind at rest.

Same problem with a pretty healthy system. My question is, will a sata raid help and if so significantly or minimally?
Specs: WinXP, ASUS P5N32-sli-se, C2D E6850, gforce 8800gts,2Gig ddr2-800,dedicated HD for video.

No - raid will make very little difference.

I court controvesy here but imho HDV is almost an uneditable foramt unless you have 8 cores - certainly for adventurous editing with tonnes of fx it is painfully slow.

Perssonally, if I had to edit HDV I would convert all my video to SD, edit that, then replace the sd media for hdv for the final render ONLY.

OK,thanks for the response, don't want to keep pouring money into this, very frustrating though.

Originally Posted by bill1200

....don't want to keep pouring money into this.....

Once you start, it never stops... Mark said as much above. This business should be renamed 'Video - you'll be poor forever'