Dropped frames... and their impact on product

[deco_martini]

Well the Vista Service Pack 1 will address some of those issues....it is in Beta.

I was running most of those patches including some unreleased hotfixes for firewire/etc.

Firewire is not fixed.
Even with superfetch, kernel memory paging, and various other things disabled there is still disk thrashing.
It still had issues with my torture test.

Believe me, I wanted nothing more than for it to work. Lately I've been re-encoding some DV-AVI into x264 while rendering video in a window and having a game running in a window. No dropped frames.

There were a few architectural bugs with Vista including scheduler voodoo. For instance, to get the best interactivity, you had to load windows media player. I'm being serious, google it. It tweaks the kernel/scheduler timer while running.

 

[drbill]

Well the Vista Service Pack 1 will address some of those issues....it is in Beta.

So why did Microsoft have the audacity... again... to release such a buggy product? Of course we've been here before with other early releases. I'm not a Beta tester. I expect a mature product upon release given the financial resources Microsoft has and the relatively little competition it has.

 

[deco_martini]

Bringing this back on topic, you didn't change your USB configuration from the last time you edited video until now did you? USB doesn't handle high bandwidth contention all that well and I noticed you use some USB hard drives.

 

[drbill]

No, there have been no changes in system configuration or software in at least 6 months. Several of the drives are fairly static ones, storing data files for various previous projects, and do not contain data files used in this project.

 

[igotag!]

In regards to all the Vista disk thrashing, the answer is simple: RAID. I render in Vista all the time. Put the operating system on one disk, then render video to 3+ drives in a SATA RAID configuration. Night and Day difference!