Confirmed, Repeatable Frame-Rate Issue in V6

GmElliott wrote on 6/22/2005, 5:46 PM
Finished my last project in Vegas 5 and officially made the switch to Vegas 6 about a 3 weeks ago. During this time I've noticed my preview window's frame-rate fluttering under 29.97fps on footage that has no effects/changes on it. I didn't think too much of it and figured it might be something working in the background on my computer, temporarily slowing it down.

Tonight I'm doing my first multi-cam edit in Vegas 6 and I have 3 video tracks synced up and PIP'd. In Vegas 5 I'd usually set the preview window to "DRAFT-FULL" and still get full 29.87 frame-rate. However, tonight it seemed like it wasn't going over 8fps! After some time toying with it I found that if I switch my view setting to Best-full, Good-auto, or anything other than the setting it was currently at and immediatly switch it back to my normal Draft-Full I would get full 29.97 frame-rate. ...for a few seconds that is. About 5-10 seconds after playing the frame rate slowly and stadily plummets untill it bottoms out around 3 fps.

Again I tested it and switched the quality setting and then right back- and AGAIN it snapped back to 29.97 and slowly plummeted down again.

I decided to test Vegas 5 out- just to make sure it wasn't the drive the footage wasy playing from. I cut and pasted all the tracks into a Vegas 5 timeline...played it back...and it's plays back fine at 29.97fps steady. No problems.

Is this a known issue for Vegas 6? I spoke to Edward Troxel about this and he feels it may be a caching issue. What has changed in Vegas 6 that is causing this? Are there any known fixes for it?
Any input/help will greatly be appreciated.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 6/22/2005, 5:58 PM
Again I tested it and switched the quality setting and then right back- and AGAIN it snapped back to 29.97 and slowly plummeted down again.

I've had this happen, but what you are probably seeing is the result of having just played the same segment of video. The second time you play it, some of it is cached in RAM memory, so it plays faster (more smoothly) the second time. This is especially noticeable when working with stills, although if your project is simply a two-camera shoot, that doesn't apply.

You might try changing the Dynamic RAM Preview settings in the Option menu.
GmElliott wrote on 6/22/2005, 7:01 PM
I wish it was that simple. I tried looping a small section of video and it never played any better regardless of how many times it played. Besides my Vegas 5 can play it back without having to render it at all.
Plus Vegas 6 does this with normal (non-multi track) footage. I often get slow down playing a single clip with no filters or changes.

The same applies- when it happens I have to toggle the "quality" setting in the preview window to something else and switch it back to get the full frame rate back. I don't understand what's happening but I was hoping, beings it's repeatable, and very specific that Sony might be able to address it.
GmElliott wrote on 6/22/2005, 7:59 PM
The plot thickens. I rendered an AVI off the timeline with 1 text track above it in Vegas 6 out to WMV 700KB. Took 15 minutes.!

Tried the same exact clip and text track (copied and pasted it from the Vegas 6 timeline) rendered it out using the same exact settings.
Took 8 minutes.

Why is Vegas 6 twice as slow as Vegas 5? My Dynamic Ram preview is set to 700megs (I have 1 gig of ram). Max threads left at default of "4". I'm running a P4 3.0gz, on XP Home.

Please help- because, as of right now Vegas 6 is useless to me.
GmElliott wrote on 6/22/2005, 8:22 PM
Another update:

Found out with my Vegas 6 if I have a plain DV-AVI playing continuously on the timeline and don't touch it- it'll maintain 29.97, as it should. However if I add an FX filter it'll slowly dwindle down till it bottoms out at 4 frames per second. It takes about 4-5 minutes to go down that low but I can watch it slowly decend. 29.97, 28.3, 27.5, 26...and so on.

I tried the same thing in Vegas 5 and even if the effect hinders the frame-rate it'll sustain at it's lower frame rate. Vegas 6 seems to slowly grind to a halt the longer it's played.

Lastly I set the Dynamic Ram preview to "0" and it seemed to sustain a framerate just like Vegas 5 would.

What is this indicative of?
farss wrote on 6/22/2005, 8:26 PM
Don't know if I can help much other than to say on my monster V6 certainly seems to run faster than V5. But that's a very expensive box, it's almost certain that V6 uses more CPU bandwidth than V5 and that might explain what you're having happen.
From what I know some of the built in features on mobos rely on the CPU to do some of the work (SATA RAID being one of them). If V6 is gobbling up more of the CPU then there's less cycles left for the CPU to handle disk I/O. That really sounds like what you've got happening, things run OK for a few seconds until the cache is empty and then the disk sub system cannot keep up because Vegas is using up too much of the CPUs time.
One way to check my theory is to look at CPU utilization doing the same thing in V5 and V6, might get a clue from that.
Bob.
farss wrote on 6/22/2005, 8:29 PM
Well if Vegas is always trying to render to RAM in V6 that'd explain it, there's no advantage to doing that normally if you're previewing without looping on an FX.
Bob.
GmElliott wrote on 6/23/2005, 5:54 AM
From what I know some of the built in features on mobos rely on the CPU to do some of the work (SATA RAID being one of them). If V6 is gobbling up more of the CPU then there's less cycles left for the CPU to handle disk I/O

Oh man- please don't tell me that. I don't have the time & money it requires to upgrade right now. Besides I am well above the requirements Sony lists to run Vegas 6.
StormCrow wrote on 6/23/2005, 6:06 AM
Glen you mention that you have the "threads" in Vegas 6 set to 4. On my system which is basically the same motherboard as you and the same processor (except mines OC'ed to a 3.6GHz) I have the threads set to 1. I was told many were getting faster renders with that setting. Have you tried that at all? Might be worth a shot. I have had a few quirks with Vegas 6 but have not really yet seen any dropped frame rates (although now I will be looking for it).

I also have my RAM preview set at 16MB
JJKizak wrote on 6/23/2005, 6:07 AM
There is an issue going with the ram setting if set to high V6.0b hangs or crashes, obviusly something to do with memory usage. I had to set mine to 16 megs then everything cleared up.

JJK
GmElliott wrote on 6/23/2005, 7:55 AM
You guys might be on to something because- I tried, just for kicks, adding 1meg to see if anything other than "0" would have the same effect. 1meg seemed to work just as smooth as 800 megs. So maybe I'll be safe with something low like 16 megs...

Is this just with 6.0b? I mean I just started using V6 full time- but in the short spirts I messed with Vegas 6 (a) when I first installed it- it seemed to work fine with 800 megs assigned.

It most definitly seems like a ram usage problem. Anyone know if Sony can/or HAS confirmed this yet- and how soon before a 6.0c. *crossing fingers*
johnmeyer wrote on 6/23/2005, 8:13 AM
Make sure you send Sony a bug report, and refer to this thread in that report. I am not sure whether they always read every post in these forums, but I am quite sure that they read the bug reports.
GmElliott wrote on 6/23/2005, 10:30 AM
What's the address to specifically send a bug report.
johnmeyer wrote on 6/23/2005, 10:45 AM
What's the address to specifically send a bug report?

It's right on top of the page you are looking at right now. Scroll up to the top of this page and click on

Support -> Email Support

and follow the directions. Takes just a few minutes, and it will get this information into their internal system so it will be dealt with.

GmElliott wrote on 6/23/2005, 7:01 PM
Thanks for all the input. I finally got feedback from Sony via a friend of mine (who is "close" to Sony).

Apparently my Dynamic Ram Preview was set too high. I lowered it to 16 megs and all the problems went away. I've even experimented and bumped it up to 100 megs (to get more time out of my ram renders, if need be).

This tells us a few things:

1) Dynamic Ram Preview does NOT only affect ram renders. It affects playback and regular rendering as well.

2) Something under the hood has changed by way of ram/caching since Vegas 5. Vegas 5 always ran fine at 700-800megs in the Dynamic Ram preview.

I'm fine though- I only do short ram renders (maybe only 8 seconds or so max) so I'm quite pleased with the results so far. I'll keep you updated if anything goes aray in the future.

Thanks all for the prompt replies and insight.
fldave wrote on 6/23/2005, 9:03 PM
Strange, I get different results...

I am doing short HDV uncompressed loops, 5 to 11 seconds in length. I was only getting about 5-7 seconds max until I read this thread. Running 1440x1080 uncompressed avi.

Before tweaking: Dynamic Ram 16MB, Threads 4.

After tweaking: Dynamic Ram 600MB, Threads 1.

I set the loop region, then play. At "Best Auto", the first few passes at the loop are like before, about 5 to 7 fps, but the 3rd or 4th time through, it rockets off to 29.97 fps uncompressed HDV. Much better than before, now with a larger Dynamic Ram setting.

I have a P4 640 Hyperthread processor (3.2ghz, 2MB L2 cache) with 1 gig ddr2 memory. WD Raptor SATA hard drive. Pretty new machine.

I use "Best Auto" preview because I'm really detail oriented. Sometimes Best Full,

Thoughts?
GmElliott wrote on 6/24/2005, 4:46 AM
What version of Vegas are you running?
fldave wrote on 6/24/2005, 8:02 AM
6.0b

I took the advice of several previous threads to lower Dynamic Ram, and I set it to 16. I've been working with that setting for about 4-6 weeks.

It makes sense to me that the higher ram (600) speeds up my very short loops, not sure about the longer clips that others use. I dropped it back to 16 last night, and I never got better than 8 fps.

So I am pleased with the higher setting, remember, I'm doing uncompressed HDV.

Oh, and by the way, the Raptor hard drive is my C:\ drive. My main project video drive is EIDE 160 GB, 8MB cache. No fancy mirrored RAID.
jasman wrote on 8/7/2005, 4:46 PM
I stumbled upon this thread researching my problem which seems to be related or perhaps the same.

I was having trouble getting consistant full motion playback of a simple AVI file out the firewire to a Canopus DVI converter.
3.2G P4, 1.75Gig RAM. Sometimes it worked great, other times very poorly. Shift B RAM preview worked fine to deliver full motion on complex renders, usually but not always.

I experimented with different dynamic RAM allocation amounts. My results are that it doesn't matter how much (1G) or little (0) I set it for.
The bug is still there ocasionally. It also happens in V5. When it occurs, system usage is > 90%. When things work fine, usage is <5%. Also, and this may be another clue, I have to hit the blue "preview on external monitor" button several times to get firewire output. Also tried running several instances of V6 and that doesn't seem to matter either.

Any thoughts?
Cheesehole wrote on 9/14/2005, 12:07 AM
Hi I just ran into this problem... When I'm in draft mode, my preview framerate starts at 16fps and steadily drops down to 7fps over the course of about a minute. Flipping to "Best" and then back to "Draft" resets it back to 16fps.

I have 2GB RAM and I had it set to 700MB in Options | Preferences | Video. Setting it to 16MB made the problem go away, as others report. This sucks because I often use the RAM preview.

But I think I discovered something new. I set dynamic RAM back to 700MB abd started with 1 Rendering thread. The frame rate drops over time, but it takes a long time. Then I tried 2 rendering threads, then 4. The frame rate drops FASTER depending on how many threads are enabled. I'm guessing 4 threads makes it drop 4 times faster than 1.

Has this problem been addressed somehow?
Grazie wrote on 9/14/2005, 1:44 AM
Cheesey?

"Has this problem been addressed somehow?"

For me this IS a workflow issue that I wuold like Vegas 6 to get a grip on.

Here, having 2gb RAM and ONLY using 16mb seems a bit daft . . yeah? Or maybe I have the wrong end of the stick. Maybe Media MAnager is "hogging" the bulk of the RAM - I dunno.

Chienworks is hosting a "chat" about V6 workflow improves. Maybe bring it up there? Spot will be there too. See the thread here

Grazie

JJKizak wrote on 9/14/2005, 5:28 AM
With the older versions of Vegas it was my understanding that Vegas used as much ram as it needed no matter where the dynamic ram was set. Doesn't seem to be the case in V6.

JJK
Grazie wrote on 9/14/2005, 5:44 AM
Do we want it back? - G
mscheidell wrote on 9/14/2005, 8:33 AM
I have a dual 3.2 Xeon with 6gb dual channel ram, 2 x SCSI (non-raid) hard drives dedicated to video\audio with a SATA drive as my system hd. I'm running XP x64 which allows Vegas excess to 4gb of RAM.

If I set the ram preview to the max available (4gb) the frame rate playback for Best (auto) in down in the 6 to 7 frame rate. Using Preview (auto) I can obtain a fairly consistent 29.97 even with the ram preview set at 16mb. This is with Cineform's HDV intermediate and a few jpeg stills on the timeline.

The most interesting effect of changing increasing the ram preview is it's adverse effect on rendering time. With the 16mb setting a 5:48 timeline takes 10:11 to render to mpeg2. At 4gb the same render takes 18:22.

As a side note your number of threads should not be any greater than the number of processors in your system. So if you have a dual processor system with hyperthreading then 4 is the max number of threads. If you have a single processor with HT then 2 is the max.
Cheesehole wrote on 9/14/2005, 1:25 PM
>With the older versions of Vegas it was my understanding that Vegas used as much ram as it needed no matter where the dynamic ram was set. Doesn't seem to be the case in V6.

The problem I have is specifically with the Dynamic RAM preview setting - the RAM that's dedicated to caching rendered frames. Yes the app will take as much RAM as it needs for editing, but preview RAM is supposed to be reserved for a specific task. It seems like - as the number of rendered frames builds up in the RAM cache, the preview frame rate goes down, at least in Draft mode. But the rendering thread setting affects it... It's like a process leak or something.

From a workflow perspective, this is what I want to accomplish:

A) Play the timeline in Draft mode at as high of a framerate as possible to locate the good spots.
B) Create dynamic RAM previews in Best mode so I can see clips at full quality full framerate utilizing as much RAM as possible.

This "bug" or "leak" or whatever you want to call it interferes with this workflow. I have to keep going into the preferences and switching between lots of RAM and no RAM.

FYI - I'm compositing two video tracks using Channel Mixer and Color Curves. Also I have Pixelan filters applied but disabled.

To do this right I'd have to experiment for a long time. I'm not sure if one of the filters is causing the problem, or what other preferences might have an effect.