People In The Know About Hd Cams & Computers Look In

[Damon W]

for all my previous vids iv used a standard mini dv cam and sony vegas 7.0, and that was fine, but recently i was thinkin about upgrading to hd cam and sony vegas 8.0

so

i downloaded and installed vegas 8.0

and got sum clips off a frend in hd form, to hav a play

and wehn im editing them, the preveiw screen is really jerky, like misses bits out, so i wondered if it was the new program, i imported sum standard dv clips and the preview screeen was fine, but its when im editing them and trying to preveiw my progress, the little preview screeen is really jerky, why is this? do i need a new graphics card?

i also rendered the hd footage afterwards and was fine, jus cant see what im doin whilst editing it, because the screens so jerky

what do i need to do?

any help appreciatted

[that NBR dude]

Welcome to the world of editing Raw HD on a PC. Unfortunately, theres very little you can do, that doesnt include opening your wallet.

You have several options. The first and easiest is to buy a MAC. I know some people dont like them ect, BUT even the most basic macbook can edit HD without breaking into a sweat.

Another option is to upgrade your RAM, and change whatever OS you may be running to XP. This is the option I took. I downgraded from Vista Home Premium to XP Pro, and purchases 8gb of RAM, and it can now "just" about handle it.

You may also want to look into investing in Adobe Premier Pro CS3. I changed from Vegas 8.0 (had exactly the same problems as you, even after upgrading my PC) and Premier can preview raw HD fine without jumping.

I appreciate none of these things are particuarly cheap options, but thus is the way with HD video.

You may also want to look into what other programs you have running in the background. A simple Ctrl+Alt+Del should give you all the processes you have running. Try and close as much down as you can when editing HD.

Theres not really a lot else you can do, apart from put up with it, and just keep exporting small clips when you want to see how a certain area will come out. If you want any other help, of chat about it ect, Im always on MSN and up for a natter about video editing.

[TRA]

NBRCycles:

i am sorry, but i did not know XP supported more then 4 gb of ram, or even that much, so it seems like you have 4 gb of ram which is not needed at all .

And its still jerky ? my 2gb ram is playing anything smoothly , so id rather think its your graphic card, since HD is alot of images , and its a gpu thing

aslong as youve got 2gb of ram.

damon : ive given you my answer =p

[Mat Tea Why]

I use Vegas 6 and I also struggle to play clips in the preview bit. What I usually do is change the play speed of the project, it makes things slower and reduces lag. If you right click on the triangle you can change it to a certain speed: (I'm not sure if this is the same in Vegas 7 or 8)

Then when I want to preview something in full speed I just render it with really low settings.

[Monty99]

like tra mentioned: Win XP isnt able to handle more RAM than 3,5GB.

i highly recommend at least a dual core CPU for full HD. Our top PC's at school have Vista/Quad Core/4GB and no problem with full HD.

BTW: there is a (free) plugin for Premiere 1.5 which allows you to edit HD clips. i tried to edit some (not full) HD clips on my notebook Win XP/Centrino/1GB and it worked (not well though)

[sUm]

like tra mentioned: Win XP isnt able to handle more RAM than 3,5GB.

This isn't necessarily true. The 32-bit version of XP is limited to under 4GB of RAM usage, but NBRCycles may be using a 64-bit version (which can address MUCH more memory). Either way, I would take a look at your memory usage in the task manager. You'll likely find that you're not using anywhere near all 8GB. That much memory for even a video editing application seems quite excessive.

Damon, if you're using Windows XP, try the following. Start up your editing software and get it to the point where you notice the preview screen being jerky. Now open up the task manager (ctrl+alt+del), go to the Performance tab.

Look at the number called "Physical Memory Total", we'll call this value X.

Now look at "Commit Charge Total", we'll call this value Y. If Y > X, you need more RAM

If X > Y, the problem is likely that your CPU or graphics card just can't handle the beating you're giving them

[1a2bcio8]

To somewhat go against Andy also but in a different sense, I run 2gb ram with XP and I don't really have any troubles. I would ideally like more memory alongside a faster processer to allow a slightly smoother editing process and faster rendering time but these definitely aren't essentials and I cope well with my system as it is.

However, I use raw footage from a tape and I don't know what difference the camera compression of card and hdd based cameras make to a systems requirements - thess are the types of camera you'll probably end up with Damon. Less resources or more though? I'm curious.

[Greetings]

If it's jerky, you need to upgrade your pc. An X2 6000+ will be quick enough for editing, but not quick enough for exporting unless you want to leave it over night. A quad core 2,83ghz Intel is fine for editing, and fairly good for exporting though to be frank, there are no consumer processors that can handle HD exporting times.

On big projects, +4gb RAM is a must. I'm running 4 gigs at the moment and the memory usage often goes over 80% which means that there's too little memory and much of the data which should be stored in RAM, is going on the HDD. This slow things down.

GPU accelerated editing is not supported by Premiere yet, and I doubt it is by Vegas either. Premiere does support some cards which supposedly improves editing but to be honest, that doesn't work at all. What you want is a CUDA enabled card like the new GTX series and a CUDA plugin for your editing software which at a guess should be available within the next year. There are already some MP4 compressors available that make use of CUDA and the speed of compression is about 18x quicker than on a quad core platform.