Should this happen, dropped frames in preview

speedyrazor wrote on 7/15/2002, 1:36 AM
I have just put together a new system comprising of:

Vegas Video 3c
Gigabyte 7DXR+
512 PC2100 ram
AMD 2000XP
40 gig maxtor 5400, patitioned, 10 gig system, 30 gig for audio
80 gig maxtor 7200, on the ata 133 (raid) channel
ATI Radeon 7500 AGP (Dual Head)
windows XP
Belkin Firewire card (PCI)
Sony DSR 11

My problem is that when I have captured some video, from my DSR11, and put this video on the time line and try to play it back, viewing on an external monitor, it says it is playing back at 25 fps but the picture is still jumping every couple of seconds and obviously skipping frames. I have setup all the prefferences correctly, PAL DV, 25 fps, lower field first, etc. my question is , is this normal, should I be getting full 25 fps all the time with no dropping or lowering frame rate. I have just turned off ACPI, and reinstalled al devices, and things got a little better but the prievew is still a litle jerky , is this normal ?
Is there somebody with a Gigabyte 7DXR+ who could tell me their exact configuration, bios as well, I am just a bit worried that when I bring a client in on a edit he, or she, is not going to be very impressed, viewing their video on a monitor which keeps skipping frames.
Print to tape works perfectly, but not preview, please help, many thanks in advance.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 7/15/2002, 8:28 AM
Its amusing to me how many seem to needlessly worry about preview quality. Hint: ITS ONLY A PREVIEW!

Yes it is normal to have the preview play back at less then full speed even on a "fast" PC and otherwise appear a little jerky. Have you enabled the Status Bar by right clicking in the area near the bottom of the Preview Window? If you do, you'll see real time updates of the current playback frame rate. By dropping the preview quality down, you can speed up the preview speed with some loss of quality.

Summersond wrote on 7/15/2002, 1:03 PM
To add to Billyboy's comments, the smaller the preview picture, the less jerky it will be. (Just have the client set closesr to you... <g>).

dave
SonyDennis wrote on 7/15/2002, 1:46 PM
This system should play cuts-only DV with no FX and no track motion on external monitor *flawlessly*. It's no more bandwidth than capture or print-to-tape. Perhaps there is some process or other software interrupting the machine, which is causing these glitches?

If you tell Vegas to "Selectively Prerender Video" (Tools menu, or Shift+M), does it have any work to do? If it create some pre-rendered sections (little green bars in the marker ruler), then it wasn't cuts-only footage, which would also exlain any stutters in the external monitor playback. If that was the case, the prerendered section should playback at full rate on external monitor.

///d@
DougHamm wrote on 7/15/2002, 2:04 PM
If your external monitor is connected through a firewire passthrough of some sort, and you're getting what could best be described as a 'hiccup' every few seconds where the video seems to almost jump back a frame in time, then it's something I've seen from the get-go with my AMD system. The same peripherals in my old 500MHz PIII had smoother playback via firewire than my 1800+ AMD based on a VIA KT266A mainboard. I've got the problem under control, for the most part, by careful order of the PCI cards and unofficial patches from the VIA guru, George Breese (http://www.networking.tzo.com/net/software/). It's most likely caused by PCI device contention on the mainboard; your firewire card is getting interrupted by other data like sound going to your sound card.

If I render and then play back from the capture utility or print to tape via the timeline, it's very, very rare to have a hiccup (at least that's a bonus!).

Hope that helps!
BillyBoy wrote on 7/15/2002, 6:50 PM
Just curious... does anyone use the prerender feature extensively and if so why? It just seems a huge distraction to me, but that's just me. Rendering in my view should be the LAST step. Period. If you constantly fiddle with prerenders to see how this 30 seconds looks, then fiddle with another 40 seconds in my opinion you're loosing your focus which should be on editing until you're done with editing. I mean TOTALLY done.

Am I out in left field all myself on this issue or do others agree? I'm willing to change my methods, but you're going to have to sell me I'm doing it wrong. :-)

Just my two cents. :-)
salad wrote on 7/15/2002, 8:00 PM
Thanks DougHamm for that link
See the "Audio Operation Timed Out" thread.

BillyBoy, I couldn't help but to LOL when I read your earlier reply: "IT'S ONLY A PREVIEW". I actually had to borrow the quote.........that's great!
You should start a new thread with that.
I have yet to use a prerender feature other than in Premiere(we won't go there!).
For me, the prerender feature would be for.............troubleshooting. "I'm glad it's there if I need it" kinda thing.

Thanx
Cheesehole wrote on 7/15/2002, 8:08 PM
I use it when the framerate drops down below 3fps. I usually pre-render a few second's worth to see how the timing works. more often I just loop the playback on a few seconds worth and let the dynamic RAM preview take care of the pre-rendering, but if I want the render to be semi-permanent, pre-rendering seems to be the only option.