Video playback is awful in videostudio pro 2020

[rkstudio]

Video playback is torture to work with in videostudio pro 2020. It's so choppy that it's impossible to edit a video. Can someone tell me how I can fix it? I don't even know if I have service pack 3 installed or for that matter, any of the service packs. If that will even make a difference.

[Ken Berry]

You ought to know by now that you haven't provided anywhere near enough information for us to even take a guess at what might be happening. What is the format and properties of the original video in the project? What are you trying to produce in terms of format and properties? What editing have you done, filters applied etc?

[rkstudio]

Oh, sorry. It's MP4. I haven't done any editing at all yet. I'm just trying to make a simple video like I've made many times before. I'm hoping to upload my art turorial video to Vimeo. I plan on uploading it as an MP4, (which for some reason, Vimeo will convert it to a different file type but that's not my concern right now. I just want to start on the video so I can edit it.
However, I just watched a Corel video on youtube about it and it's about enabling Smart Proxy which I didn't realize that it wasn't disabled, so I enabled it, tested, and now it seems to be working. I just did some cutting to test it and it seems to be working perfectly now.

BTW, here are the properties anyway.

[Ken Berry]

Thanks for that. From the properties, I assume you used a smartphone held in portrait mode rather than landscape (2160 x 3840 as opposed to landscape 3840 x 2160). But 4K and decent bitrate. So yes, it should come out OK using SmartProxy.

I'd just keep an eye on the fact that being a smartphone, it appears to be using a variable frame rate (29.822 fps as opposed to standard 29.97/30 fps). That might potentially cause difficulties as VS doesn't seem to like variable framerates. If you get them, you might need to put the video through an external video converter such as Handbrake to produce a clip with similar properties but a standard framerate.

[rkstudio]

Thank you, Ken. Yes, lol, I did use a smartphone and I had the phone mounted landscape but it came out portrait because I forgot to check if the orientation was 9:16 or 16:9. Of course it should have been 16:9. But when I brought it into VS I rotated it right once and changes the ratio to 4:3 and it turned out in landscape format. So that worked out but next time I'm going to try to make sure I remember to film it right in the first place. I didn't know anything about the fps. Thanks for telling me. It doesn't seem like the numbers that you stated are much different from each other but I guess it makes a difference. I'll try Handbrake like you said and see what happens. Thanks again!

[Davidk]

Jerky and jumpy video/audio playback in VS in any mode, but especially edit, is the characteristic of FHD/4K video being used without smart proxy. Specifically, the processor doesn't have enough grunt to manage the huge amount of data per frame, as well as do all the other things OS, program, manage storage etc that it must do. It varies with the version of VS and the cpu/clock speed/RAM combo but bottom line, it cannot keep up smoothly, so it jumps.
The way to fix that is to enable smart proxy in your preference settings. Once done, that smooths it out nicely, but it takes a while for the proxy files to be created, and for an existing project you will probably have to do it manually (click on TL clip, rt-click and choose create proxy file) for each clip. A small "keyboard-like" icon appears in the TL thumbnail when it's done.

[rkstudio]

Ah, that confirms everything I've been learning about it in the last couple days. Except for the first part that I knew nothing about. I didn't realize there were so many potential weak links in the chain. At first I didn't have the smart proxy option ticked. Actually I thought I did from another time that I used the program. But I guess not or it unticked itself somehow. Maybe there are ghosts back there somewhere. lol. So I guess it's a good idea to make sure by looking for that icon in each clip. After I made sure that the option was turned on, the choppyness went away so I'm sure that was the problem. Thank you very much, David.

[Davidk]

Actually I thought I did from another time that I used the program.

If that was a previous version, then installing 2020 changed it to the 2020 defaults.