Wondering where the bottle kneck is on my system?

[Mike Feggans]

Ive been a Vegas user for about 3 years and just recently added Magic Bullet Looks. I love it, but when I add the effect, the sound and video never sync up and is jittery. This happens when I add a New Blue effect as well. I thought this was a RAM issue, so I upgraded from 8 GB to 32 GB. Yet, I still get the same effect.


All of the footage is from my 7D. No conversion.

Here is my setup


Intel Core i7-2600K unlocked 4.6
ASUS P8P67 Pro B3 Motherboard
windows 7 64 bit
corsair dominator 32gb ram ddr3
nvidia card 1gb geforce 5 series ( i know, old)
A couple of standard segate 5400rpm hard drives


Do you think I need a faster HD or a more capable video card? It only doesnt this when I add effects.

[Jeff Harper]

Is the issue present in rendered files, or just on the timeline during playback? On the timeline MB Looks is well-known to slow things to a crawl. Rendering is also slowed down significantly.

Other than that I cannot imagine what is going on. RAM upgrade will not affect MB, and even with your very nice overclock it will still slow down, as MB is just a CPU hog, it's pretty bad that way.

[Mike Kujbida]

Which version of Vegas?
Newer versions are supposed to handle 7D footage much better.

[Mike Feggans]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Is the issue present in rendered files, or just on the timeline during playback? On the timeline MB Looks is well-known to slow things to a crawl. Rendering is also slowed down significantly.

Other than that I cannot imagine what is going on. RAM upgrade will not affect MB, and even with your very nice overclock it will still slow down, as MB is just a CPU hog, it's pretty bad that way.

Yea Jeff, it only happens on the timeline. I mean it does add alot of time to the render process, but that ok. I just didnt know MB would be that much of a resource hog that I could not get a smooth playback. I dont what type of system it takes to get smooth playback buts it def something I cant afford. Maybe a 8 core i7? lol

O and its version 10. Ive been hesitant to upgrade to go to 11 since 10 has been(well relative to vegas) so stable for me

[Ron Windeyer]

FWIW, I have a similar "issue". I shoot 1920x1080 50P with my TM900; process with Vegas 11 on a laptop (2 Gb I7, 8 Gb RAM, 1 Gb video card but can share video memory up to 5 Gb).

Preview runs quite well, BUT - try adding an animated title. Whoa!! It really doesn't run properly at all!

When rendering (to mp4) that section takes a loooong time, but the result is perfect.

As you say, maybe an 8-core I7 would be the answer :)

[Don Bloom]

what do you have the preview setting set to? If set to BEST>FULL reduce that to something less. Otherwise the preview will hiccup all over on that setting.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Your hard drive is the possible bottleneck, as you suspected. Try connecting an eSATA external solid state drive and you should see the difference.

Are you using a laptop?

Some programs use hard drives for caching or buffering, and unfortunately adding plug-ins just compounds the problem. Hope this helps.

[Jeff Harper]

Sareesh, sadly, hard drive speed does not help MB or other effects, only CPU speed, and possibly some GP Units, but I believe the cards that help MB looks, if any are high end workstation cards. The OP can/should check the Red Giant website and double check this.

I run the newest Cheetah SAS 15K drives in Raid 0; upon installing these drive months ago, I learned that the same things that affected my timeline preview before, still slow my system down today, unfortunately.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Thanks for clarifying, Jeff. I could be wrong again, but what about the motherboard? A consumer board could also possibly cause the bottleneck.

[Jeff Harper]

Well Shareesh, I'm no expert, but based on my limited experience and from reading a multitude of posts like Mike's in the past, his situation is perfectly normal. MB looks causes the kind of slowdown on the timeline and with rendering for pretty much everyone. Many intense effects, such as NewBlue Watercolors, or other similar effects, will cause the same thing, to a lesser or greater degree.

Someone above mentioned the titler causing issues also. I personally use the legacy version of Vegas Titler so I can avoid the issues described. But if you want or need the features of the newer titler, then I dont know what to say, as I just don't have any experience using it.

[Mike Feggans]

(Just realized I spelled neck wrong on the title. lol)

I went into Adobe Premiere CS 5.5 last night after posting this to try and see if I got similiar results. I used the exact same seetings ( Full 1080/24 FPS) that I used in Vegas, added the same 45 second clip onto the timeline and added the same exact MB look.

Instant playback. No stutter whatsoever. Very smooth

I was guessing that Premiere was going to be worse, but it wasnt.Weird

I do have to say that doing the same test on After Effects was far worse that Vegas. But maybe MB just isnt optimized on Vegas the way it is on Premiere. IDK.

It was interesting to see the differences .

[Mike Feggans]

Originally Posted by Sareesh Sudhakaran

Thanks for clarifying, Jeff. I could be wrong again, but what about the motherboard? A consumer board could also possibly cause the bottleneck.

Here is my MB. While maybe not the best ever, its def. better than the stuff I used to get from Dell before I built my own rig. lol

ASUS P8P67 Deluxe B3 Intel P67 Motherboard - ATX, Socket H2 (LGA 1155), Intel P67 Express, 2200MHz DDR3 (O.C.), Dual Gigabit LAN, 8-CH Audio, SATA 6.0 Gb/s, USB 3.0, SLI/CrossFireX, Bluetooth at TigerDirect.com

[Jeff Harper]

Mike, Premiere and Edius both have better playback than Vegas, which kills me because the programs are so much crazier in the workflow. I've only played with Premier a little, but I just hated it. Not knocking Premier in any way, but from my very limited exposure to it, I just hated the differences. It took more steps to do so many basic things, it was irritating as all heck to me. The learning curve and available plugins for Edius are quite different also, from what I understand.

[Jeff Harper]

Really doubt your system is the issue. If you had dual processors, maybe that would do it with Vegas.

Let me throw this out there: Anyone using a late-model dual processor setup with MB Looks and Vegas? Please share your experience.

I'm wondering if a dual processor would help playback with four lines of 1080 24p footage such as I edit.

[Mike Feggans]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Mike, Premiere and Edius both have better playback than Vegas, which kills me because the programs are so much crazier in the workflow. I've only played with Premier a little, but I just hated it. Not knocking Premier in any way, but from my very limited exposure to it, I just hated the differences. It took more steps to do so many basic things, it was irritating as all heck to me. The learning curve and available plugins for Edius are quite different also, from what I understand.

I feel the same exact way. When it comes to workflow speed, everything seems to take 2-3 times longer. Esp the multicam. I hate multicam in Premiere

I will say this tho, for some reason ( i knows its on my end most likely) my fonts always look crisper when rendered in Premiere than Vegas . IDK