Vegas Movie Studio 6.0 - very slow

shprena wrote on 6/1/2006, 10:03 AM
I just got Vegas Movie Studio 6.0 and started making a photo slide show. It is a pretty powerful tool - much better than what I had with Nero 6. Howerver, I noticed that when I minimize Vegas for any reason (for example to go to another program). It takes a long time to get back into Vegas. It freezes up for at least 5 minutes. It's really annoying. Has anyone experienced the same problem? If you have, do you know what I can do to get rid of it? Thanks

Comments

soaringrocks wrote on 6/1/2006, 10:56 AM
I don't know what the problem is... I CAN tell you that I can minimize and return and Vegas Movie Studio comes back within several seconds.

When you do a context switch open the Windows Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DELETE --> Task Manager) and take a look at what's going on on what processes are using CPU cycles and how has your memory been allocated.

Some things to check.
- If you are creating movies with a lot of pictures you could be using a ton of RAM and forcing the system to swap memory to disk extensively.
- Other applications, drivers, or adware/spyware/viruses may be bogging your system down.
- I had a virus checker once that would do a full system scan during a context switch and that brought my system to a near freeze condition until it was done (this showed up when I looked at Task Manager.)

My guess is that something on your system or the the size of your project is huge (depending on your project, Vegas may need a LOT of RAM)

Good luck.
Chienworks wrote on 6/1/2006, 10:58 AM
Are you using lots of large images? Vegas seems to take time refreshing the display in the project media pool whenever it gets focus. Resizing the images closer to the video framesize will speed things up a bit.
hal9001 wrote on 6/1/2006, 1:12 PM
It sounds like low memory to me. The program will be using the page file when you minimise it and when you bring it back it will have to put other stuff to the page file and retrieve at the same time. (Phew long sentence).

I have 1Gb of memory and don't have such issues. However, if I run lots of programs, then this happens.
Tim L wrote on 6/1/2006, 1:56 PM
I'm not anywhere near a computer with VMS at the moment, but there is a setting somewhere in the options, I think, that helps with this. The setting is something like "release resources when losing focus", or some such thing. (Gee, could I be any less precise?)

Look for a checkbox in the options that says something about "losing focus".

This is largely guesswork on my part, but I think by default VMS will surrender all the memory resources it is using for thumbnails, etc., on the timeline whenever you "leave" VMS and go to some other application. Then, when you return to VMS, it has to re-allocate and rebuild those items. Changing the option setting lets it keep all that when you leave and return. (let me emphasize again that this is a lot of guessing on my part...)

Also, as other people have mentioned, you may find a much more satisfying editing experience if you resize your photos to something closer to DV resolution before bringing them into VMS. They will load and play much more smoothly while editing.

I hope this exceedingly vague post helps in some way...

Tim L
Tim L wrote on 6/1/2006, 8:12 PM
Okay, so I wasn't even close in the above post. Here is the correct info:

At the top of the VMS window, click on "Options", then "Preferences". A Preferences window pops up.

On the "General" tab, the 12th item down says "Close media files when not the active application". If this is checked, VMS will close all media files (photos, video clips, etc.) each time you change to a different application. The intent here is that you might be switching over to a photo editing program, for example, and this assures that the photo program and open and edit and save the photo. When you switch back to VMS, it has to re-open all those media files.

If you uncheck this box, VMS will keep those files open when you switch over to another application. When you come back to VMS, it avoids having to re-open everything. The drawback is that if you DO switch over to a photo editing program, you may have a conflict of some kind. (But I haven't tried that.) I have mine unchecked, to avoid the kind of slowdown problem you described.

Again, however, resizing your photos can help speed photo management while editing, and can also produce better final results -- and shorter render times -- while panning or zooming on photos.

Tim L
shprena wrote on 6/2/2006, 12:18 PM
Thanks for answering so quickly. I ruled out some of the solutions that were posted (I have plenty of space and RAM on my computer). Yours, however, seems feasible. It makes sense that it would freeze up trying to rebuild all the photos (it acts the same way when I open a project - though not as slow). I'll try to uncheck that box and see what happens. I think my photos are a bit too big also (anywhere from 1 to 4 mb each). I'm just afraid that I will make them too small which will cause in poor resolution on the screen.
Tim L wrote on 6/3/2006, 11:11 PM
Assuming you are doing std definition DV or DVD resolution (i.e. not HDV high def video), the resolution of the NTSC (US) video format is equivalent to a 655x480 pixel digital photo. You can scale your photos to something approximately that size (or a little bigger) before you bring them into VMS, and not worry about any loss of resolution.

If you are going to zoom in on the photo in VMS, then try to figure roughly how big to scale the picture so that you have 655x480 in the zoomed in part. For example, if you were going to zoom from showing the full picture to zoom in on just half of it, then you would want approx 1310x960 to start with, so that when you zoom in you still have 655x480.

Tim L

(If PAL/European format, your video resolution is 655x576, I think)
shprena wrote on 6/5/2006, 7:14 AM
Tim,

I went home and unchecked the box and it worked. I had no idea the solution would be that easy. Thanks so much for your help.
Dumpsterlad wrote on 6/6/2006, 2:52 PM
Someone posted the name of a software program that could batch convert the resolution of foto files, and I've been unable to find that again.
IanG wrote on 6/6/2006, 3:08 PM
I've used this one - http://www.imageresizer.com/, but try putting "batch resize jpg" into Google - you'll get a lot of hits!

Ian G.
JeffD wrote on 6/6/2006, 4:47 PM
> Someone posted the name of a
> software program that could
> batch convert the resolution of
> foto files, and I've been unable
> to find that again.

IRFANVIEW!

www.irfanview.com

One of the most amazing graphics program around --made all the more amazing because it is free.

I just batch process 260 hi-res JPEGS for use on a Web site using Irfanview. Highly recommended.
bjrohner wrote on 6/8/2006, 5:49 AM
Any Adobe Photoshop software can do it. Under file, then automate or batch.
Will batch resize, convert , enhance ect.

Bob