Vista and Vegas

[Brian Luce]

Any opinions on whether Vista will offer anything to improve Vegas?

Here's one bit of general info:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/...=NLT_PM&nlid=8

[Randy Boose]

I'm sorry but I get a page cannot be found when I click your link. Which article were you referring too?

[John Miller]

Vista is something of a double-edged sword for multimedia apps not specifically written for Vista.

The Good Edge

Vista uses a new display driver model and changes the way that the desktop is actually written to the graphics hardware. One of the benefits of this is that existing applications that display video in a window (for example) see a performance improvement. That means less jittery playback, for example.

The Bad Edge

Audio. Vista uses an entirely new audio layer. Existing applications that rely on DirectSound will show a performance degradation. Pre-Vista, DirectSound permits access to the audio hardware in a very direct way (hence the name) that permits low latency performance etc. With Vista, DirectSound is emulated (for backwards compatibility). By default, video applications that use DirectShow also use DirectSound for the audio side of things (for example, when previewing a video with the audio enabled). In the course of developing one of our applications, we have found that playback of a video under Vista using the "default DirectSound device" for audio causes the video to play slower than normal speed and for the audio to be very choppy. Selecting a different audio driver model (for exactly the same hardware) dramatically improves things. This is fine for a Vista-aware application but not for others that use the operating system's default choice. For more advanced audio models - like ASIO - there is no change in Vista.

[Alex Amira]

I've been running on Vegas 7C on Vista Enterprise for about 2 weeks now.

Here is what I found so far:

-During movie rendering it will slow down to almost a crawl several times (I was making a 43 minute DVD mepg NTSC). The same file with XP and 7C flies.

-Architect 4 had some major issues and had to be reinstalled twice. It kept saying I did not have admin rights whenever I would try to burn a DVD. I believe it has something to do with the new Vista security and the User Account Control system.

-Vista is a resource hog. I have a decent ammount of RAM (1GB) but even without the Aero turned on (for which one of the requirements are a minimum of 1GB) it was still using an excesive ammount.

-I could not really see any benefit of running Vegas 7c on Vista. I know that they say that it has a lot of things that will make Video better but I did not notice them in actual video production.

-Maybe when if Vegas was taking advantage of DX10 you would see some improvement. Then of course you still could not take advantage of it since Nvidia still does not have a Vista driver for it's top dog 8800. As it stands right now hte only version is a non public beta.

-I think the User Account Control is very annoying and I turned mine off with a quickness.

[John Miller]

Originally Posted by Alex Amira

I know that they say that it has a lot of things that will make Video better but I did not notice them in actual video production.

That's right - the "video improvements" are to do with how programs interact with the graphics card, not video in the sense of cameras, editing etc., which is really (just) heavy number crunching!