Is this normal? Vegas + Cineform + Powerful PC

[Martin Guitar]

I'm using Vegas 9c running on a Core i7 920 with 6gb ram, a velociraptor 300Gb for os, 3x 500Gb Green WD 7200 in RAID 0 for work drives and another green 500GB for temp files and whatnot...Running Windows 7 x64. Videocard is a GTX 295.

I convert all my 5D footage using Cineform Neo HD (high settings) and import in Vegas. The issue i have is that i can't get anything to play smoothly in the preview window (i'm using the secondary monitor for the preview window).

If i have 1 video on the timeline it's okay... if 2 overlap it's over. The audio keeps going but the video really stutters badly. I want realtime 1080p with preview quality set to FULL. It's always bumping me down to HALF when i start playing. When i uncheck "Adjust size and quality for optimal playback" it's better but nowhere near smooth playback.

Are my performances normal for that type of workflow / system or is there some configuration issues i might want to check?

[Roger Shealy]

Something must be wrong. I use 7D footage on a Dual Core AMD 6400+ with Vegas 9 + NeoScene on High. On 1 - 2 tracks it previews at 29.97fps and with 3 tracks previews at around 25fps (still acceptably smooth).

[Brian Luce]

I don't know if it's normal, but there are people out there reporting crashes and issues with Vegas 9c + Cineform.

[Gerald Webb]

I was going to start another thread but i guess ill chime in here.
In regards to cineform I dont know, maybe MXF would play easier, but , on my OC'd I7 920, 12 gb ram, 150gb system drive with 2 x 640gb wd green drives ( what a mouthful )
my last multi cam shoot (5 x 1080i MXF files) kept crashing Vegas, and the PC on some occasions, while doing multi cam edits. I ended up just proxy ing everything just to get it done.
but,
yesterday I had a chat with really helpful tech guy who suggested raid.....
Last night I cleaned off my 2 640 green drives and made them raid 0, dropped the whole project on the new raid drive, and .......... multi cam in decent quality with instant cuts, no lag like it had b4, plays the cross fades AND, I only noticed a couple of mins in that Id already C corrected it as well. This is awesum.

Now the question, The tech guy also suggested raiding the OS drive/s
("3 x 150gb Raptors in Raid 0 should shrink the undies". His words, not mine. Nice to see the passion though.)
Does anyone here do this, or know anything about it?
is it easy? The data drives can just be done in Disk manager, would you have to do the system drives through Bios, or Windows install?
Raid, its a whole new world of speed.

really sorry if this is hijacking the thread, can a Mod move this if needed.

[Roger Shealy]

Pre NeoScene I had a lot of crashes in Vegas and found some relief. Look at post #21:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-hap...-memory-2.html

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Gerald Webb

I was going to start another thread but i guess ill chime in here.
In regards to cineform I dont know, maybe MXF would play easier, but , on my OC'd I7 920, 12 gb ram, 150gb system drive with 2 x 640gb wd green drives ( what a mouthful )
my last multi cam shoot (5 x 1080i MXF files) kept crashing Vegas, and the PC on some occasions, while doing multi cam edits. I ended up just proxy ing everything just to get it done.
but,
yesterday I had a chat with really helpful tech guy who suggested raid.....
Last night I cleaned off my 2 640 green drives and made them raid 0, dropped the whole project on the new raid drive, and .......... multi cam in decent quality with instant cuts, no lag like it had b4, plays the cross fades AND, I only noticed a couple of mins in that Id already C corrected it as well. This is awesum.

Now the question, The tech guy also suggested raiding the OS drive/s
("3 x 150gb Raptors in Raid 0 should shrink the undies". His words, not mine. Nice to see the passion though.)
Does anyone here do this, or know anything about it?
is it easy? The data drives can just be done in Disk manager, would you have to do the system drives through Bios, or Windows install?
Raid, its a whole new world of speed.

really sorry if this is hijacking the thread, can a Mod move this if needed.

The green drives are NOT recommended for video work. Beyond that, RAID seems to be an answer many people throw out, but the fact is, it's totally unnecessary for most of the work folks are doing. Yes, those folks here working with multiple streams of 200+ Mbps video would see benefit, but the fact is, your video stream plays back just fine off the compact flash card in the camera which is about 1/10 the speed of a good hard drive. You should be able to play back 5-10 streams with ease on a modern hard drive without RAID. Assuming you keep your disks clean...

Format your data drives regularly. And this should not be a problem.

[Martin Guitar]

Thanks for the replies.

When i check the system resource graphs, my CPU is around 35-40%, disks are not going over 10mbps, RAM is fine and yet the previews are super choppy. That's with 1 timeline only and some clips have a level plugin on them.

Some clips play better than others, seems like when there's more bit information (lot's of movement and colors on screen) the clips stutter bad. The stutter has a rhythm to it like it stutters every 15 frames.

Could it be a GPU (video card) issue since disk access and RAM are okay?

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Martin Guitar

Thanks for the replies.

When i check the system resource graphs, my CPU is around 35-40%, disks are not going over 10mbps, RAM is fine and yet the previews are super choppy. That's with 1 timeline only and some clips have a level plugin on them.

Some clips play better than others, seems like when there's more bit information (lot's of movement and colors on screen) the clips stutter bad. The stutter has a rhythm to it like it stutters every 15 frames.

Could it be a GPU (video card) issue since disk access and RAM are okay?

Right,

Your CPU is resting comfortably, your disks are nearly asleep, and you've got plenty RAM. But this is Vegas. It doesn't use the GPU. So the bottleneck is the application... not the system. So do this... Do a RAM render of say 10 seconds of the timeline (highlight 10 seconds and press SHIFT-B. And play that back. Does it still stutter? You've eliminated the drives at this point. Also do a SHIFT-M, and let it build a suitable MXF file, and see if THAT stutters. That will use the drive, but it's an easy-to-play format for Vegas.

Let us know your results.

[Martin Guitar]

Thanks Perrone, will check that out.

[Gerald Webb]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

The green drives are NOT recommended for video work. Beyond that, RAID seems to be an answer many people throw out, but the fact is, it's totally unnecessary for most of the work folks are doing. Yes, those folks here working with multiple streams of 200+ Mbps video would see benefit, but the fact is, your video stream plays back just fine off the compact flash card in the camera which is about 1/10 the speed of a good hard drive. You should be able to play back 5-10 streams with ease on a modern hard drive without RAID. Assuming you keep your disks clean...

Format your data drives regularly. And this should not be a problem.

Thanks for your input as always Perrone, Yes I have heard about the green drives being average for video, the 'going to sleep feature' I presume, can you recommend 1 tb drives that are?
I saw an ad at MSY (our Newegg down under ) for designated AV 1tb drives, would they be better than say a Seagate 7200 barracuda ?
So you are saying that rather than the raid making the difference in my above post, it was probably the fact it was a fresh formatted hard drive that improved the performance?
If so, would it be wise to configure a system like-
150gb Raptor for system drive
300gb Raptor formatted after every project to just have the source files on,
300gb Raptor for stock footage, often used titles , inserts etc
lots of tb's (green ?) for archive etc where speed is not an issue.

[Perrone Ford]

Gerald,

I've always understood the Barracuda series to be good drives, and I see no reason to leave that line.

While it would certainly only be speculation on my part (but an educated guess), I would be willing to bet cash on the fact your improved performance was due to having newly formatted drives and not the RAID. This is especially true if you are not in the habit of doing fragmentation regularly on your drives, or you don't format them regularly.

The drive layout you listed looks logical and sound. But I don't like hard drives for archival purposes. There's plenty of threads on that subject, so I'll leave it at that for now.

[Martin Guitar]

Dynamic ram preview are stuttering as well.

I'm going to try different video drivers...

~ Update: i tried an older video driver and it is still choppy.

[Jim Snow]

Martin, Are you using Video filters? If so, they can really impact preview performance. One of the worst for this is Magic Bullet Looks. But any filter will impact preview performance to some degree - some more than others.