New Computer - Vegas issues - Advice needed

[Robert James]

Hi all,

As posted in another part of the forum I recently purchased a new computer for HD video editing. I work with Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platnium 10 HD. I figured with a marginally powerful computer set-up my Vegas would run without a hitch but, alas, I just discovered that was not so.

A bit more info:
* I use Windows Pro 64-bit
*I use a Canon t2i

When I tried to drag movie clips into the timeline it said I needed Quicktime. I went to the website and downloaded that and then the clips moved in just fine.

The problem occurred during fading one clip into another. In my preview window a few things happened:

*I set the preview to BEST FULL and when it moved into the fade and the second clip it automatically turned back to Preview Half
*When it hit the fade part the preview became choppy a bit

I figured with my new set up the preview would work seamlessly.

Here is my set-up:
*Intel Core i7 Quad-Core Socket LGA1366, 3.06Ghz, 4.8GT/s FSB, 8MB L3 Cache, 45nm
*Antec Three Hundred Gaming Case ATX 3/0/6 2xUSB Audio No PS
*Samsung SH-S223C/BEBE SATA Black 22x DVD-Writer OEM
*Western Digital Caviar Black (WD1002FAEX) 1000GB (1TB) SATA3 7200RPM 64MB Cache OEM
*Asus P6x58D-E Socket 1366 Intel x58 + ICH10R Chipset CrossfireX / 3-way SLI Triple-Channel DDR3 2000(o.c.)/1600/1333/1066Mhz 3x PCI-Express 2.0 x16 Dual GigaLAN 8-CH HD Audio 2x SATA 6Gb/s + 6x SATA 3.0Gb.s 2x USB 3.0 ATX
*Asus VE228H, 21.5" LED Widescreen monitor 1920x1080, 5ms (GtG), 10,000,000:1 (ASCR) w/speakers, VGA, DVI-D, HDMI
*Corsair Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 High Performance 750W Power Supply
*G.SKILL Ripjaws Series DDR 1600MHz (PC3-12800) 12GB (3X4GB) Triple Channel Kit
*Microsoft Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
*EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1024MB (01G-P3-1370-TR) nVidia GeForce GTX 460 Chipset (720Mhz) 1024MB (3600 Mhz) GDDR5 Dual Dual-Link DVI/Mini HDMI PCI-Express 2.0 Graphic Card

Any ideas?

[Jeff Harper]

uncheck "Adjust size and quality" when you right click on the preview window area. Also, don't expect Best full to work seamlessly, though it might. You might need to run in Preview Auto mode.

Glad you got your new machine.

[Jeff Harper]

Unless I missed something I only see one hard drive listed. I do hope you have a separate drive for your video footage. You should never run footage from you C drive, you know that, right? Maybe a quickie test or something but not a real project. Just checking.

You can, of course, but whoa, it will really tax your HD big time, and can only slow you down.

[Robert James]

You are right. I could only afford one hard drive this time but I DO have an external. Should I run video off of that?

Also of note, in Preview Full it also was hitchy on the fade into one clip to another.

[Leslie Wand]

robert, cut back somewhere and GET A 2nd HD!!!!

[Randall Leong]

Robert,

If you were really that cash-strapped to not be able to afford even two hard drives (let alone three or more), you should not have gone for this setup at this time. And the reason why your new system is so slow is that you are using just a single SATA hard drive. SATA is only a half-duplex interface, which means that data can only travel in one direction at a time. And since video editing requires simultaneous reads and writes, this means that data to be written must wait for data that has been read to pass through before it can proceed. That severely slows down editing, rendering and encoding performance.

And if your particular external hard drive has only a USB 2.0 interface, you might as well not do any video editing at all until you can afford additional internal, external eSATA or external USB 3.0 hard drives. This is because the USB 2.0 High-Speed interface is limited in maximum practical transfer speed to only 31.6 MB/s total for all ports combined. And in the case of a USB 2.0-only external hard drive, the drive kit's controller is the limiting factor (31.6 MB/s maximum) even if it is connected to a USB 3.0 port.

If I were in your situation, I would have chosen a weaker Nvidia GPU (e.g. a GTS 450 instead of a full-blown GTX 460 1GB) but added an extra internal SATA hard drive. And remember, it's pound-foolish to go for a CPU- and GPU-heavy system that's wimpy on the disk subsystem.

[Stanley Szpala]

And the reason why your new system is so slow is that you are using just a single SATA hard drive. SATA is only a half-duplex interface, which means that data can only travel in one direction at a time. And since video editing requires simultaneous reads and writes, this means that data to be written must wait for data that has been read to pass through before it can proceed. That severely slows down editing, rendering and encoding performance.

could you explain the logic, are we supposed to read (the source video files) from one drive and render to another? thx.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Stanley Szpala

could you explain the logic, are we supposed to read (the source video files) from one drive and render to another? thx.

Generally speaking, yes. The source video drive should be separate from the OS/Programs drive.

[Jeff Harper]

A first step: buy another Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

then put your video on it. then you might render to your external drive. You want your orginal video located on your fastest drive, because if your video is on a slow drive it can/will affect your performance in Vegas, especially your preview.

You can try working off of your external, but if it's slow, it likely will give you reduced performance as pointed out. You might try using your external to render to., but not as a source file for your raw video.

THERE IS NO GUARANTEE your preview will playback perfectly even with separate HD, but at least you'll eliminate one problem.

My PC CPU is running as fast or faster than yours and it still does not play back AVCHD perfectly.

Your next option if things are too slow (after you add another hard drive) is to do one of two things:

a. Add another hard drive same as the new one you are about to buy and run it in RAID 0. Raid 0 takes two or more HDs to work, and they should be same type, size drive. If you are going to do that the Western digital Blacks are the wrong type of drive, get someting else, it's complicated and I won't bore you with the details.

b. OR buy a software program and use proxies to edit.

AVCHD is no picnic and can get complicated to edit. What is your final destination for your video? Standard def 16:9 DVD? Or bluray?

If your video is going to end up on a SD DVD, you can use a program to convert your raw footage first to high quality avi files. That way it will be resized properly, will edit easily and will give you superior results when you produce your DVD. Cineform is go-to program for this purpose

[Robert James]

Thanks all,

A bit more background:
When the preview plays it isn't choppy or anything and looks fine. It is only when it hits a transition or an effect (ie: a Magic Bullet look) when it gets a little hitchy. Indeed, my external is a USB 2 Western Digital 1 TB My Book and, after a test, it was also hitchy.

For the moment, my output is on DVD.

A few questions:
1) So, we are not saying a second Hard Drive will actually eliminate the problem but could possibly help matters?
2) Would 500TB be sufficient, do you think? I don't plan, then, on saving anything onto the second HD save for videos used for a show. How much Full HD (High Def) is that?
3) Does the 32MB Cache or 64MB matter? The hard drive quoted above is 32MB and the one I have now is 64MB with the 64 being more expensive.

[Jeff Harper]

On hard drives, forget cache, it's a non issue. There are experts that argue 32 is actually better, I have no idea and don't care.

Get the size that you will not have to fill up over 50%. If a 500Gb drive works for your situation, get a 500GB. After a drive starts getting beyond 50% full it will slow to a crawl. If you have very small projects, a small drive will work as long as you don't fill it up. at some point you'll need a drive to store old projects. You won't want to store them on your new drive. Get a large drive for archiving, unless you don't need to save things.

Magic bullet is the same on everyone's computer, you didn't know that?

You want to use a separate drive for your video because if it is located on your OS drive your drive will worked to death. It will eventually kill your drive. Just don't do it. It is one of the basics of editing.

If your external drive works just the same, use it if you see no difference. I wouldn't want to edit of a USB drive, but that is just me. External USB drives tend to go to sleep, or hibernate, or whatever, and they are just a pain in the rear sometimes giving you Vegas issue. Maybe yours won't.

If you move a project to an external drive, delete the original afterwards so the original footage is not referenced by Vegas.

You still need a second drive. For backup. Don't be foolish. If your hard drive dies, you will lose everything. Hard drives DO die. You save your project twice, once to each hard drive. You store your video on two hard drives.

If your work is unimportant, and you can stand to lose it all, you can ignore the backup advice.

Now you know everything you need to know. Go forth and do great things.

[Adam Stanislav]

Originally Posted by Robert James

2) Would 500TB be sufficient, do you think?

Is that a typo or has someone actually started making such a huge disk? In my system I have several 1 TB drives and one 2 TB drive. And they are getting pretty full. I am assuming you really meant 500 GB, which is too small these days. Hitachi makes nice 1 TB and even 2 TB drives for not much more than a 500 GB drive.

[Robert James]

Originally Posted by Adam Stanislav

Is that a typo or has someone actually started making such a huge disk? In my system I have several 1 TB drives and one 2 TB drive. And they are getting pretty full. I am assuming you really meant 500 GB, which is too small these days. Hitachi makes nice 1 TB and even 2 TB drives for not much more than a 500 GB drive.

Adam, folks like you at this forum have been a great help (and a great dent in my wallet :p). Thank you.

Yes, the above is a typeo. I meant 500GB.

From what I gather, one 500GB drive can hold up to 21ish hours of HD video. Of course, I could be wayyyy off base there.

Mainly, I like to burn and deleat backing up my files onto DVDs. Of course, I now realize how much that could be considering one 16gb card would be 4 dvds of info. Oy!

I really have entered a whole new world here, haven't it?

I think my plan now is this. I am getting back about $50 in mail-in rebates for my computer purchase. When those come in I will parlay the money into at least one backup internal drive, be it a 500gb but more then likely a 1tb extra. I will then edit off the second drive, render to external and store on at least two of those.

It should be go poor, go forth and do great things.

:p

[Jeff Harper]

One hour of video is normally 13.5 GB. 10 hours 135 GB. 20 hours 270 GB.

[Robert James]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

One hour of video is normally 13.5 GB. 10 hours 135 GB. 20 hours 270 GB.

Okay, that's even better.

A few things I don't understand when it comes to drives now that you have cleared up the CACHE thing.

SATA: does it make a huge difference between Sata II and III?

Is 7200RPM the best way to go?