I have a Q6600 at 3.0ghz, 4GB of DDR2 1000 and 4 more on the wasy ($60 at newegg.com :D )
And a 4870x2 (Well for gaming) but still the fastest single video card on the market... even cheap $20 (3450 ATI) cards can playback full HD off a Blu-ray or HD-DVD...
and then 1 Dell 3007WFP and 2 24" Soyos although 1 isn't really used for editing right now.

Regardless, I still never get a full 29.97 playback playing at "Good-Full" and de-interlacing on the fly... the window is set to a full 1920 x 1080 window inside of the 1920 x 1200 space of the Soyo monitor

Playing-back in another program like VLC or whatever it's perfect, it's not like the computer can't handle it, but something in Vegas (I'm thinking a setting or another issue) is slowing it down.

Just wondering if there are any tweaks or anything I can try to improve playback so I can get atleast a solid 29.97fps... running Vegas 8.0a should I try upgrading? I haven't bothered because it's always been stable... Also Vista 64bit Ultimate...

Vegas makes no demands on your graphics card.
It relies only on the processor/ ram etc.
Changing your graphics card won't make any difference, i've been down that road.

Paul.

Vegas was originally written as a software only solution for editing DV. When HDV came along, Vegas couldn't keep up, so, the sony programmers patched the code to work with HDV.

Vegas is/was a terrific app in its day. Unfortunately, without GPU acceleration, it's not able to playback full frame, hi-Q HDV.

Ummm.... more to the question the original poster asked, best preview performance comes from matching the project properties to the media properties.

You mention 1920x1080, if you're dealing with 1080i HDV source material try one of the preset project properties for HDV at 1440x1080. I get full frame rate at best-full on a Core2 Duo laptop (8.0b), you should be easily getting full frame rate with your quad.

As I start dropping in efx, I'll be switching between preview-full (best pix) and preview-auto (best fps), depending on what I'm doing at the moment.

I use Vegas only and am a huge fan. What Bill says is correct, unfortunately. I have learned, as Seth mentioned, to adjust the preview window settings to accomodate Vegas, but it is unfortunate that we must do so. It is the price we pay for the many benefits it offers.

Vegas makes no demands on your graphics card.
It relies only on the processor/ ram etc.
Changing your graphics card won't make any difference, i've been down that road.

Paul.

Oh I know :)

The bugs are annoying too

Set your Dynamic ram Preview to 0 and I get ~40% utilization across all 4 cores rendering a .m2t 1080p...

Set it to 1mb or 1024mb... I get 100% utilization ... silly...

I found that turning off "Animate video in Trimmer" seemed to improve it a little bit...

So, does anyone know what the ideal ram preview setting is for the 32 bit version of Vegas?

BTW, I've tried 0 to 1024 and didn't see much difference...