Did you guys tried the "dynamic RAM" preview option? Or did you try to prerender the most "demanding" part of your projects?
You simply select a part of your clip on the timeline ("put it in blue", so to say)then you go in "tools" and select "build dynamic RAM preview" or "selectively prerender video".
That sould work fine. The RAM thing is much quicker and you should have enough memory with your machines...
ALSO, just a setting : you can go in "options", then "preferences..." then on the "video" tab (the second one on the top of the box) and there you have the possibility to assign the maximum memory your system can deliver by entering the max. value available...
Cheers! Hope it'll help!

Keep in mind guys, the video you see in the preview is only a sampling of what your processor can generate in realtime. If you want to see your transitions correctly, you might selectively prerender just during the transitions. Drag your mouse along the top timeline bar only during the transition segment, and then right click and pick "selectively prerender". A few seconds of processing, and now when you're viewing through that area, Vegas will pick up that prerendered segment, and play smoothly.

You'd have to rerun it if you change something in the transition, but this way you'll get a much better flavor for how the video will look when you really render the final product.

Hi,

Just wanted to thank you all for the input.... I'll try all suggestions :-)

db

check your preview screen
if you have it on best quality--it will work harder and not show the transitions very well--let alone many fx and pan/crop etc
i use "draft" to see transitions
when i really want to get a handle on something i prerender
but draft is usually good enough for me
good luck
sb

as suggested DRAFT mode will give you the biggest speed boost. also try sizing your preview down to 1/4 size.

check the resolution of your images. if they are really big (larger than 1600x1200) you will be taxing your system and using a lot of RAM.

you can open Task Manager (if under Win2k/XP) and watch your Physical Memory Available number under the performance tab. you should have at least 64,000 free.

All of the above are good tips.

One thing I didn't see mentioned was the resolution of the photos. Unless you're doing some tight zooming, there is no reason to use more resolution than your video. In other words, less than 1000 pixels tall or wide. If you're bringing in 3000x2000 pixel images, it's going to slow it down a lot scaling them down to video sizes.

///d@

I second what SonicDennis just said. I have a 3.3Mega-Pixel camera. When I first started working with Vegas, I would simply take all of my pictures and drag them onto the timeline, add transitions, music bed, etc. The preview results results were a little disapointing and the render times were high. Then I realized that the resolution on my pictures was something like 1600 x 1200. Way higher than necessary since the final output was going to be rendered to MPEG and authored onto a DVD. Since then, I resize all of my files down to 800 x 600 - a quarter of the original size and everything works MUCH better. By the way, to resize all of files, I use Irfanview (www.irfanview.com). Its a generic image viewer that gives you some batch capabilities. Simply select all of the files, tell it to resize them, and click the button. Within a couple of seconds, all of the files are resized.

Thanks to all for some great advice.... so glad this forum is here.... !!!

:-)

db

Windows XP has a particular add-in Powertoy that lets you resize one or a group of photos in batch, right within the Explorer GUI. It's quite intuitive.

-Doug

Yo Dsanders,
The Web claims there's no such place as www.irfanview.com

Ernie

Try again. It's there (as of 2 minutes ago).

Which brings me to another question. Is it better to go GIF with the pictures or JPG? Will I see any difference in some way?

dsanders $ earthriser: thanks for the "irfanview" tip! I still run Win2K and this is gonna be reaaaaaaaly usefull, even justto send pictures on the net. I take **a lot** of pictures when I go on a trip and this should cure my "I'll send you the pictures when I'm back" problem...

General advice:

- always use .jpg for photographs
- always use .gif for "line art" images

JPEG's compression works by smoothing out edges slightly, but retains a full color palatte. This makes it work well for continous tone images such as photographs. Sharp high-contrast lines may be fuzzy though.

GIF's compression works by eliminating colors, but retains sharp detail. This makes it work very well in situations where there are flat colors and sharp edges. Soft tones and gentle gradations will often show banding unless dithering is used, and dithering reduces resolution and often looks fuzzy.

GIF is really only useful for web work (since it is understood by all browsers)

There are other lossless compression formats that are better for this work, as standard GIF is only 8 bit color, whereas you can do full 24bit color in tiff or targa (and even include an additional 8bit alpha channel too)

GIFs may be a little smaller in file size (than tif or tga), but that's because you typically had to throw away image detail before making it. So while they losslessly compress what you give them, you've often had to lose the detail BEFORE saving as a GIF.

Outside of WWW - GIF is a pretty horrible format.

- vin