Thanks OldSmoke for your feedback ..

Please allow me to disagree with describing my configuration as acceptable!! Although it is not the most powerful portable workstation, it is definitely still one of the most powerful 15.6" workstation laptop in today's standard.

Putting all that aside, and to clear few things; I have been using Vegas for over 18 years now, since it was called Sonic Foundry Vegas Audio. So, I am experienced Vegas Pro user, and I know many things about it ;)

Now back to the main subject, my system has a dedicated nVidia Quadro K2000M, and I can not switch between it and the Intel HD4600. Turning off the Quadro K2000M from Vegas Pro settings did not solve the problem!

Changing the source material format also has no noticeable difference on the playback performance. I even tried two JPG still photos and I still have the same problem!

My project is just a simper one track to test the performance of Vegas Pro. I tried a 30 seconds long MP4 footage, and I tried 2 still images. Project settting is as always set to 32bit. No multicam.

The source materials are as always located in the system SSD drive, and I never even try to render anything .. I am just playing back the one track timeline.

Please note that the same test runs smoothly in my old, and much slower Sony laptop. So obviously, there is a problem with Vegas Pro 13 running in my new Zbook, because everything else runs like a charm on the Zbook 15.

Finally, and to give you a general idea about how fast the Zbook comparing to my Vaio Z; The base score of Windows Experience Index for both are:

Vaio Z: 4.2
Zbook: 7.8

As you can see, the Zbook 15 is superior to the old Vaio Z, yet the latter performs better!!

Any idea why?

Ohh, I forgot to mention that the clip sample is 720P .. it is not even full HD!

RE: " Please note that the same test runs smoothly in my old, and much slower Sony laptop. So obviously, there is a problem with Vegas Pro 13 running in my new Zbook, because everything else runs like a charm on the Zbook 15."


Vegas works fine on an older slower machine, so the problem must be with Vegas?

Do you see what you said there?

A good start might be to look at your resource monitor and see what else is running during playback..

try turning gpu acc. off

The windows index is absolutely useless and doesn't tell you anything about video editing performance. Aside from that, the issue is probably the 32bit project setting. Why are you using it instead of 8bit? Are you doing any green screening and is your source 422 or 444?

Switch to 8bit and things will be smoother, disable resample and you gain even more.

Thanks Stringer .. I will check that.

Thanks relaxvideo .. I already tried that and it did not help!

Thanks OldSmoke .. I have always used 32 bit in the project settings, and I never recall that I faced any performance problems in my older workstations! Anyway, and for testing purpose, I switched to 8 bit, and it did not help either! The footage clip is 4:2:0.

Please note that even using still JPG images dose have the same problem with playback on tha area with translation applied, so it is very clear that the problem is not related to using 32 bit, or to the color sampling of the clip!! It must be something else!!!

Any idea?

Normal. the program only uses one processor and your's is fast enough for the vid you gave it.. maybe the card is not. I have a 10 core workstation Xeon, with the 4200 quadro running uhd vid, and titler pro works better than on my Vaio I-7 which, kinda doesn't work. at 1080 ,, If I try to render hitfilm 3 clips, it plays one thing on the timeline and renders something else. Sony marketing is professional, and I'm sure that the rep said sorry. I'm sure they will be willing to tell you to try Vegas Pro 14, at your own expense. It is nice they put the high profile mp4 codec back in. Now Avid is not cheaper. don't try the avid free trial. It takes the same time to render with the 4200 as with the processor I find.

for quality you do need the 32bit level.. I run 10bit, 4:2:2 but the computer should run fine for what your doing, since the program only uses one of your cores. stuff in the background should be on another core. I have been asking the same question for months but I keep getting an answer about something else. TV division is the same. The reps want to be helpful but I don't think they have any info or a way to get any info that is not on line. Vaio has been 'getting back to me ' for over 5 years....the tv divisions answer is "for your viewing pleasure" when you ask about a control, or starts reading off the internet...Can anybody get hitfilm 3 to render the timeline correct?

have you changed ram preview settings? Also, sometimes an SDD can actually be slower than a traditional HD for storing compressed video. If you can, hook up an external HD to your USB3 port and set that as destination for rendering output.

Thanks OS 613.0 for your reply.

But to be honest with you, I really did not understand your reply, and what you want to say!!!!

Hi jwcarney,

Thanks for your feedback. Yes, I did changed the RAM preview setting, and it did not help!

I am using the fastest SSD on the market, how is it possible that sometimes an SDD can actually be slower than a traditional HD? Can you explain?

Also, and as expected; it has been 7 days, and Sony support did NOT even bother to reply to my support case!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sony support is getting worse and worse every single day!! I am sure, and at this rate, people will stop using Vegas and move to another NLE, and Sony may get out of business!!

Have you installed the latest Nvidia Quadro K2000M driver?
May be: http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-notebook-win8-win7-64bit-311.50-whql-driver.html

Also, you might try reinstalling the Vegas software....only a suggestion but I have found that this works sometimes to fix up problems that are hard to pin down especially if other related software is also installed such as the Vegas Suite. Good luck on this!

SCS tech support is useless as far as I know. You might get an unhelpful response in 4-6 weeks. You could try the paid support but I've never seen any indication that it's any better than the free support. Certainly SCS never pushes it.

Initially you say you get good playback until you hit a transition. This indicates that you're getting poor rendering performance to RAM, which shouldn't be a hard drive problem.

The first thing I'd be looking at is project settings and preview window settings. Most likely there's a default setting in place that's not in place on your older machine. Maybe a deinterlace mode, maybe a preview setting like scaling to fit the preview window.

Maybe some things to test might be rendering the transition to RAM compared to rendering it to disk. How long does it take to do these?

As far as SSD being a bottleneck? You'd think it'd be plenty fast enough but it IS the only drive in your system so it's conceivable that it's got too many write operations happening at once. Seems unlikely though. Sometimes a very high RAM Preview setting will force the OS to write other things to it's page file. That also sounds unlikely given how much RAM you have installed, but you could monitor it to see if the page file is growing, just to eliminate that possibility.

There are also some codecs that seem to work poorly at 25FPS or at 32bit color settings. I doubt that the software environment of these two PCs is identical so maybe there's something different between the two.

Rob

Just a thought: Check your BIOS if CPU hyper threading is enabled.

I still don't understand why the Op thinks this is a Sony Vegas problem, when they say up front that the older, slower machine works fine..

The problem started with a new machine.. There is a clue in there somewhere.

I realize this is not helpful, but waiting for Sony to respond is not going to get you anywhere..

Have you looked at the process manager to see what all is running in the background?

Did this laptop come with a lot of crapware installed?

Stringer,

"I still don't understand why the Op thinks this is a Sony Vegas problem, when they say up front that the older, slower machine works fine.."

Because there is a hardware incompatibility with the newer more powerful computer!

Dan

I think many of the responses to your problems are not very helpful. Clearly there is a hardware compatibility issue at work and the problem is to narrow it down as much as possible.

I have self built AMD system which works well with 128Gb SSD for Win 7 and all programs and separate magnetic HD for data, and for my video project I'm using a 1TB USB RAID1 drive. The speed is good.

However, whenever I ask for GPU acceleration, with a Radeon video card, rendering almost always fails depending on rendering choice of the very same file. Clearly this is an instance of Vegas Pro 13 incompatibiity with the GPU hardware that is claimed to be fully supported. Worse yet, the program claims CUDA availablity when there is no CUDA compatible hardware in my computer.

One thing that I would suggest you do, even if it does not solve your speed problem, is to have a separate HD for your data, even though with most laptops, it will have to have an external connection.

Dan

" Because there is a hardware incompatibility with the newer more powerful computer! "



What do you think Sony can do about that?