Pressing reset

Widetrack wrote on 12/28/2015, 3:46 PM

Hey, guys n gals,

I haven't been here, or done any video, for a while (boring story), but I got the chance to put together a little music vid for the net and need some re-orientation help.

The video is supposed to be made up of a number of cell-phone vids, shot by different people without any particular experience, skill or instruction.

I know. I'm begging for it, but I already agreed.

Anyway, as you'd expect, they're in a number of different formats, and the first difficulty that's come up is that on my system, Vegas 12 plays any vid at 1920x1080 very jerkily.

I'm running 64-bit Win7 with SP1, on a Core2 Duo 6600 @ 2.4 GH. with 4GB RAM and various big external drives. I just downloaded the latest QuickTime, since I remember Vegas used to require it.

Is my system just too slow to handle video in this large format, or is there something I can do to make it work.

Also, the guy wants the song lyrics to pop up in flashy, "fun," ways. Vegas' titler is still very nuts and bolts, AFAIK. Is there an inexpensive way to get some spiffier effects and fonts?

Thanks for any help. It's nice to be back among this great group of cinematic minds.

Tim

Comments

BruceUSA wrote on 12/28/2015, 4:10 PM

You PC is to slow to editing any 1080P footages. Let a lone multiple different formats. Your asking for nightmare to do any editing.

Widetrack wrote on 12/28/2015, 4:14 PM

What would be minimum system specs for editing 1080?

It does alright with anything smaller than 1080.

Steve Grisetti wrote on 12/28/2015, 4:35 PM

You should have no problems editing HD on that computer, widetrack -- but it's a pretty minimal system, so it's not going to handle larger project or mixes of media as well as a more up-to-date system.

Widetrack wrote on 12/28/2015, 5:13 PM

Thanks Steve. But what can I do about the jerky, stop-and-go playback of the 1080 video?

I could render it down, but that would take a lot of time.

And, by "up -to-date," you mean processor speed and maybe RAM, yes?

BruceUSA wrote on 12/28/2015, 5:44 PM

What would be minimum system specs for editing 1080

Minimum system for me would be an old i7 920 quad core with 12gb of rams and a AMD 6970 video card. This, at least will give me smooth playback and acceptable rendering time. Your current system will take you 5-7hrs to just rendering 5 minutes HD video. Don't believe? just try to see it for yourself. I don't even want to talk about video FXs, color correction etc. what not.

john_dennis wrote on 12/28/2015, 5:45 PM

A used Core 2 Quad 6600 would be a drop-in upgrade that would make a world of difference. Since you're running a 64 bit O/S, you would likely get some benefit from adding another 4 GB of memory (also a drop-in). Both actions would be a "throw-away" when you decide to get a new system.

You could try an AMD R9 380(x) video card for about $200-$250 but you probably don't have enough system under it to make much difference. Along with that video card comes a significant power supply requirement which you likely don't have.

I edit 1080-24p 35 mbps video in a MOV wrapper on a Q9450 with 8GB of DDR2, but I always have the option of opening the project on an i7-3770k with 16 GB of ram. Guess which I pick most of the time.

Widetrack wrote on 12/29/2015, 12:44 AM

Thank you all for the helpful replies.

My current video card is a NVIDIA Quadro FX 570, a pretty ballsy (if old) card with two monitor outs, giving resolutions up to 2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz. I'd like to think that's still useful, though I haven't kept up with video cards.

I've heard of the Core 2 Quad upgrade, and will do it (as well as the RAM) if a chip is available. But would this put me even in the same league as any of the Intel i-series chips?

Warper wrote on 12/29/2015, 7:01 AM

Phones, eh? You need to do 1 thing to make your life easier: total recode of video.
Phones tend to use variable fps, and Vegas becomes slower trying to change fps all the time.
Vegas can handle phone video files one by one, so you can encode them all in Vegas into editing format. Take a look at XAVC and MXF templates, get one most close to your final video and make total reencode.
If speed is not good enough for preview/editing, you can make a set of proxy files with lower resolution, and edit them. At final stage you can swap them with full resolution sources and render.

john_dennis wrote on 12/29/2015, 9:16 AM

"[I]But would this put me even in the same league as any of the Intel i-series chips?[/I]"

No, it would nearly double the throughput that you have for a small amount of money and effort. You're really overdue for a fork-lift upgrade.

NickHope wrote on 12/30/2015, 10:36 AM

"...or is there something I can do to make it work."

You could try the tips in the 2nd post of this thread.

Widetrack wrote on 1/3/2016, 7:00 PM

Thanks, Nick. I'm digging into that.