X2 very slow compared to VS10

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 5:40 am

I recently upgraded to from Video Studio 10 Plus to X2 Pro because I wanted access to the new title effects, intros in the Movie Wizard, and flash animations, but I'm finding it rough going. VS 10 always worked very nicely for me, no problem with viewing my videos in real time as I edited them. But so far X2 wallows like a stuck pig. If I have high quality playback turned on it takes an hour or more to render a 15 mnute video segement and if instant playback is turned on the video plays so choppily that I can't tell what the it looks like. Oddly enough, even after the first rendering it wants to re-render the video nearly ever time I play it, sometimes when I've not even made a change, I've only moved my pointer over to another another part of the segment. These re-renderings can range anywhere from a few minutes to another hour or two.

My machine is an Alienware with an Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3 Ghz processor. I was running 1 gig of ram with VS 10 Plus, but I added a few more in hopes of speeding up X2. It didn't help. It has a NVIDIA GeForce 6800 video board. I'm not a techie as you can probably tell, my husband ordered the machine a few years ago because I liked games that required a lot of processing speed. Until now it has worked well for video and photo editing as well. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Orpioneer

Post by **Ken Berry** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 6:27 am

For what it's worth, I and quite a few others find X2 much faster than earlier versions. But (and there's always a 'but'!

) it depends what sort of video you are editing. The sort of thing you describe sounds exactly as though you are editing (or trying to edit) AVCHD (high def mpeg-4), and with your particular computer set-up, you are at the lower end of what is capable of editing AVCHD even with SmartProxy enabled. And I am afraid a P4 will not be able to play AVCHD smoothly, even if you successfully edit it. (I know -- I have tried on my old P4 3.0 Ghz with HT).

So tell us a bit more about the video you are editing (right click on it inside VS -- either in the timeline or the library window). And also describe your workflow in a bit more detail, please.

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 7:51 am

For some reason when I tried to post my reply the message board kicked me back to the log in and apparently deleted my entire reply. I will try to reconstruct some of it but let me see if this reply function works first.

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 8:09 am

OK, trying again. I should have mentioned before that my videos were not high definition, just regular digital videos shot on a Panasonic camcorder using DV tape. At this point I've got quite a few files that were transferred over (using firewire I believe) to the computer using VS 10 and those video clips are what I am now using in X2. They are DV type I files I believe, but I've copied over the project properties below in case I am not answering this question properly.

NTSC drop frame (29.97 fps)
Microsoft AVI files
24 bits, 720 x 480, 4:3, 29.97 fps
Lower Field First
DV Video Encoder -- type 1
DV Audio -- NTSC, 32.000 kHz, 12 Bit, Stereo

The video I am currently editing in X2 is about 14 minutes long and consists of about 5 video clips to which I've added crossfade transitions, a still title background, a title, Christmas background music from a CD, and one of the flash animations provided in X2. I've also used the color editing to lighten most of the video clips. Nothing too fancy compared to videos I've created in VS 10. However, when I try to review my project by playing it I consistently run into problems. When the preference is set to Instant Playback the video plays so choppily that I can't really see what I have, though the sound plays smoothly. In high quality playback it goes to the rendering bar and I may have an hour or more wait until it's done. Immediatley afterwards it plays fine, but if I make a small change or even just move to a different point on the timeline and hit play in Project, it usually begins the lengthy rendering process all over again. Occasionally it will render quickly, but usually it's just as long as the first rendering. I never had these kinds of problems in VS 10, and I thought I might be able to get around this by creating the project in X2 and doing the fine editing in VS10, but I qickly learned that a project created in X2 will not play in VS10 (though 10 will play in X2).

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 1:55 pm

If you have a color filter applied to your entire 14 minute clip that could possible do it. Video filters seem to be pretty resource intensive. Try removing the color correction filter and see what happens.

If that doesn't work I would start from scratch, with just your video files on the time line. Do they play ok? Then add effects, filters, audio, etc. one by one to see what is slowing things down.

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 8:08 pm

Many thanks, I will give that a try and report back to the forum. It may take me a few days of playing around with it to get a better sense of where the problems begin arising now, because the line seems to have moved as of last night. When I first started using X2, I seemed to be having these problems even when I only had a single unedited clip in the timeline, but now it seems that the problems do not start arising until later in the project development. Perhaps it's because my machine is gradually starting to utilize the additional RAM that was added, which it did not do initially (utilization initially stayed under 1 GB even though it had 3 GB on board, but yesterday utilization had risen as high as 1.87 GB during project play). So let me play with my clips a bit more and pin down where the transition to choppy play is currently occurring.

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 4:48 am

OK, here are my results.

I wasn't able to turn off the color correction in the project I had previously created (when I clicked on the clips in that video it didn't show the color adjustments that had previously been made to them) so I started from scratch with a new project and added the same clips. The project played smoothly until I used the color correction adjustments on a clip---at which point that clip, and only that clip, became very jerky. (This was in Instant Playback mode) When I removed the corrections the clip once again played smoothly. I tried this a couple of times on different clips in the project with the same results. I also tried adding video filters, like mosaic and zoom motion,to various clips in the project and the filters had no negative effects on how the clip played in either the clip or project view. So it looks like the jagged playback in Instant Playback is due to the color adjustment, but I don't understand why, especially since other video filters are not having this effect. I haven't seen anyone else on this forum report a similar problem with X2, and I also looked at some of the many reviews for the program on Amazon and it seemed to be running fine for nearly everyone.

I don't know if it's significant, but I noted that CPU usage while playing the color adjusted clip (in Project mode) was not maxed out---it bounced around between 50 and 75 percent while using only about 800 MB of RAM. As the project transitioned to the subsequent clip on the timeline, which had no color adjustment, the CPU usage dropped so that it was bouncing mostly between 25 and 65 percent while RAM usage quickly climbed to 1.4 GB. I went back and played the clips again and got exactly the same results for the CPU and RAM usage.

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 4:49 am

[Repeated messages deleted by Admin]

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 4:58 am

Sorry for he multiple posts, I was getting a message that there was a bug on the Corel site that was blocking my posts -- I guess it wasn't after all.

GeoffW · Post by **GeoffW** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 5:53 am

I have a very similar spec machine to you and I can't replicate your choppy instant playback in VS-12 when changing brightness or contrast or applying the Color Balance or Hue and Saturation video filters. I can reproduce what sounds like a similar symptom by selecting Auto White Balance (manually picking a color instead of selecting Auto works without problems). Doing this reduces the Instant Playback preview window update rate to about twice a second.

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 1:59 pm

There is a work around you could try. Since you are using DV-AVI clips (won't be any loss of quality), after you apply your color correction to your liking you could then render those clips to a video file (Share>Create Video File). Then start a new project with the pre-rendered, color-adjusted clips, adding the rest of your edits and effects.

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Thu Dec 11, 2008 3:57 am

I am getting [i]some[/i] choppy playback when I use any of the color corrections such as hue or brightness, but the choppiness is usually much worse when I adjust the white balance. In addition to the DV files I tested one of the WMV video clips that comes with X2. The one with the spinning compass. It's only a few seconds long but as soon as I applied the color balance it developed a jerky playback.

The work-around of converting each clip sounds like it would work for my DV files, or I could also apply the color balance as the last step after everything else is done. I'm wondering though if there are any tweaks to my settings that might alleviate the problem, since it sounds like something that shouldn't be happening with this program.

Howell · Post by **Howell** » Thu Dec 11, 2008 10:47 pm

Samsung Q 45 laptop
Intel Centrino 1.66
2 Gig Ram
250 Gig hard drive

I copied a film from tv on to a dvd and then transferred it to my hard drive.

I downloaded a trial version of Videostudio 12 which I then used to create a new video file using "Same as project settings". It then took about 20 minutes to render the file which was approx. 95 minutes long.

Next I did exactly the same but used Videostudio 10 Plus but this time it only took 10 minutes to render the film using this earlier version.

I only did this to try it as I also found in the past that Videostudio 11.5 plus took longer to render than Videostudio 10.5.

Howell

orpioneer · Post by **orpioneer** » Sat Dec 13, 2008 5:50 pm

Thanks for taking a stab at replicating the problem. It does indeed sound like there are some issues with X2 being much more resource intensive than VS10 for the same actions, even when using identical video. I considered my machine to be fairly high end when it came to video processing capabilities, so that's rather discouraging. And I just don't have the time to go out and get a whole new machine any time soon---I shudder at the thought of all the programs, updates, drivers, data files, etc. that would have to be reinstalled and countless program settings tweaked over the last year or two that would return to their defaults...