Playback Stuttering in Preview Window

[Vidiot]

Hello:

I am new to this site and to VideoStudio 9 ( and video editing as well), and am having an issue with playback of clips in the preview window.

I have captured several minutes of analog video through a capture card as MPEG-2 (8000 bps, variable) and am able to play it back in the preview window as I am working on my project. The problem is, the video will frequently stop or "freeze" in the playback window every few seconds causing a stuttering effect which is highly annoying. I called up Windows Task Manager and watched CPU usage as the video was playing back, and it always pegs at or near 100%.

Is this normal? I have a 3Ghz AMD Athlon processor with 2Gb of RAM and a 200Gb SATA (7200 RPM) hard disk running through an NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT video card.

What am I missing here? Is this just a matter of setup, or is there something else going on? Thanks in advance for your time.

[2Dogs]

Hi Vidiot, and welcome!

First of all, at the risk of sounding officious and all that, you should read the announcement at the top of the forum regarding the "Recommended Procedure".

It may well be that your playback problems are limited to the preview window.

You can verify that easily enough by checking a sample output file using some player software, such as WinDVD, Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player etc.

Having said that, your system sounds fairly fast, so perhaps you have some settings that might be affecting things.

From the "file" menu, select "preferences" and see what you have selected for "playback method".

This would ordinarily be set to "Instant Playback" but gives another option of "High Quality Playback". Using this latter setting will force the pc to render the project to generate the project playback, which could certainly result in the effects you describe - even with your fast cpu. You would usually only use the high quality setting if you wanted to preview a short section of the project, for example at a transition.

Do not confuse this setting with final output quality, however! Having "Instant Playback" selected will not result in a lower quality file when you output the project to a file.

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi Vidiot/2Dogs

As far as I am aware using ‘High Quality Playback’ should remove the stuttering, playback should improve in quality.
High quality playback produces temporary files in the preview files folder (file/preferences/preview).
This allows VS to play the project direct from the hard drive.
The drawback is the time taken to create the files, VS goes into a sort of render before playing the project.
The second time you hit play, only the newly edited parts are rendered making the process much quicker.

VS 9 seems worse than older versions, but may be due to the timeline update that VS 9 uses.

Try fitting your project to timeline (button to the right of the ‘+’ sign.)
You could also try playing from story-board view.

Shut down all background processes on your pc(e-mails, anti virus etc)

(I think the playback quality of VS 9 is poor)

All the Best

Trevor

[Ken Berry]

I might also note that your capture rate may be unnecessarily high for analogue capture. I realise you are probably trying to get as high a quality as possible, but the reality is that for most analogue sources, a bitrate of around 4000 kbps is likely to give as good a quality as you are ever going to get with an analogue source, though 6000 might be marginally better (and is what I tend to use for analogue capture).