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Vegas 10 stability?
Hi, I’m wondering if anyone else is having issues with Vegas 10 64-bit being extremely unstable? It typically does on me 10-15 times a day, in a variety of mostly unpredictable ways (meaning I can’t come up with a specific list of steps that cause it). I’m running the latest version from their website, but all versions of 10 have behaved like this for me.
About 20% of the time I try and render a WMV file, it dies with an unhandled exception.
I’ll be working in the trimmer, then go and click in the main timeline, and it dies with an unhandled exception.
I’ll add media to the timeline, and it dies.
I’ll hit Space to start the timeline playing, and it’ll die.
I’ll go to “Save As” a project for archiving and tell it to copy the media with the project, and it’ll die.
When I restart Vegas, and do the same thing, it’s fine. 30-60 minutes later, it’ll die on me again in some random way.
I have several NewBlueFX packages installed, as well as Raylight Ultra.
I’m working with footage from Canon XF300 and Canon 60D cameras.
I’ve not reported it to Sony yet (beyond allowing the problem reporting window to connect to Sony’s server) as it takes a ton of time to work through issues with them and I’ve had a tight deadline, but I’m about to start sending in bug reports.
Anyone else see this sort of behavior, and even better, have a solution?
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11 Replies
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my 64 bit vegas crashes immediately if I select avi rendering
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“unhandled exception” is almost always a driver issue.
I really can’t remember the last time that Vegas crashed on me. Version 7, I think. And it was self-inflicted.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
James, can you fill in a bit more of your problem for us? Did anything change on your system or is this a new install? What formats are you editing?
————————-Steve, maybe for those unfortunate people here like myself, who findweeks of vegas stability matched by weeks of crashing for no apparent reason, could you clarify your hardware, versions, types of video input and output and general workflow. I say this in all sincerity.
I believe from previous posts you use hdv tape format, do you edit footage fom avchd, canon h.264, canon .mfx, etc? If so do you transcode it all first? It appears from john r. And others that Vegas is pretty stable with hdv.
What is your machine setup? Do you have raid and is it internal or external?
Do you use third party apps like Boris?
These might help us understand why some of us are experiencing instability with our setups and you aren’t.
Alf
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I upgraded to Windows 7 at the same time — Updated the OS, and went from Vegas 9 to Vegas 10 simultaneously. All hardware remained the same, however.
I’m editing in HD, using footage shot on a Canon xf300 and Canon 60D. The current project was shot almost entirely 720/60p, with some 1080p thrown in as well. Some Digital Juice stock footage and a QuickTime clip from Pond5.
My editing system is a Intel Core i7 processor, two 1TB internal RAID0 arrays; an external G-RAID 4 TB RAID0 array; nvidia GeForce 9500GT and an nVida GeForce 210 cards (3 monitors); 16 GB memory; PreSonus Firepod 8-channel external FireWire audio interface.
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[Al Bergstein] “…could you clarify your hardware, versions, types of video input and output and general workflow. I say this in all sincerity.”
Let’s try.
My editing PC is an HP Pavilion, AMD Phenom 9650Q Quad-core processor. 8Gb of RAM. Boot drive is an off-the-shelf 100Gb SATA drive. Display card is a cheap Radeon running two Dell 20-inch monitors and a Plugable USB -> DVI display dongle for the third Dell 20-inch display.My projects all reside on their own 500Gb or 1Tb SATA drive in a USB desktop port. I don’t have any RAID storage but it may be time to build an NAS RAID box since hard-disk drive prices are coming down.
99% of my work is in HDV
I am happy to be the guinea pig and I upgrade my Vegas version as soon as SCS releases them, and I’ve never been sorry. I am using Vegas 10d, BCC7 and NewBlue FX plug-ins.
I usually encode to MPEG2/AC3 for SD DVD distribution, but I also encode to AVCHD for Web distribution.
I don’t have an AVCHD camera, so I don’t normally use AVCHD on the timeline. If you wish to make a 30-second test clip for me, I’ll try to break my installation for you. (Or any other format giving you trouble). See my note about Dropbox at the bottom of this post.
I have edited some footage that was h.264 in a MOV file, but I don’t know the source. I did install the Avid DNxHD CODEC when one client insisted that they could ONLY import h.264 in a MOV file into their Mac. (I suspect that they were using iMovie). The only format that I transcode is DiVX – which is a disaster.
Here’s some general tips:
1) Don’t overclock your PC until it is rock-solid stable. Vegas is a program that pushes your hardware to the wall.
2) Install as much RAM as your motherboard will support.
3) Never, ever install a CODEC pack. You will almost certainly overwrite some of the excellent CODECS provided by Sony.
4) Here’s a program (Prime95) that you can run to stress the hell out of your system:
https://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=205
Prime95 has a feature called “Torture Test” that allows maximum stress testing on the CPU and RAM. There are several options allowing the stress test to focus on the memory, processor, or a balance of both. Usually Prime95 will detect an error within a matter of minutes if your PC is not stable, however many people like to let the system “burn-in” overnight to ensure long-term stability. The benefit of this version is that it is multi-threaded and will automatically manage worker threads to fully stress all cores of your CPU.
5) Run Memtest86 (https://www.memtest86.com/download.html). Even if your computer *appears* to be working, you may not have stressed it hard enough to fail – until you run Vegas, which is very CPU and Memory intensive. Memtest hits every bit in every RAM chip installed in your PC.Every few months I run DriverDetective (https://www.drivershq.com/) to keep my drivers up to date. What a lot of people don’t realize is that programs can and will call subroutines (processes) contained inside a driver. If your video device driver was written before the AVCHD format existed, you should expect problems.
If you want to send a large file, I recommend Dropbox.
Dropbox is one of those handy inventions where the more you use it, the more you come up with reasons to use it. Dropbox is a cloud-based file sharing service that syncs file across all your computers. It works with files (video, graphics, text, anything) of any size, and it syncs automatically whenever a new file appears or a change is detected. Best of all, it’s free for a 2GB account. Just put the file into the public folder in “My Dropbox”, right click on the file, select “dropbox” and “Copy Public Link”. This puts the public link of the file into your clipboard. Send me this link and I’ll get the file.Get your free Dropbox here and we both get an additional 250 MB:
https://db.tt/KCWoOtsHope all this helps.
SteveSteve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
If the stability problems started at the time you upgraded, it is going to be a bit of a problem tracking it down, as there were so many different changes happening at once. A good idea is to make changes to the OS separately from the applications for just that reason.
Are you using the 64 bit version of W7? Or the 32?
If the 64, did you make sure you downloaded the 64 bit version of Vegas??? It’s easy to make that mistake on Sony’s site. I did once, and the 32 bit version was very unstable on the 64 bit version of Windows. By upgrading to 64 bit Vegas, much of my crashes vanished.Is there any instability with other apps you use?
Is the instability happening on projects you started on 9 and now opened in 10? Or brand new 10 projects? Or both?
I also shoot on an xf305 and a 7D (so underlying footage is similar). I’ve had more instability with 7D footage than my xf305. So perhaps thinking about transcoding the 7D footage with Cineform or something like it might be worth exploring. But to be clear, in the last few weeks, I’ve not had instability with my 7D footage, it was happening a while back. Was it a drive problem? I’ve upgraded my RAID since those crashes, and…the 7D footage started crashing less… maybe an unrelated problem.
The QT clips are somewhat suspect, IMHO, and I try to keep QT away from Vegas. Not that I suspect Vegas, but I suspect Apple causing problems. If you can transcode them and see if the problems are reduced, that might be worth doing.
Again, one of the things that seem to help the FCP world, is the fact that they are forced to transcode everything.
Are you doing much in the way of multicamera? There are very problematic things I’ve had happen with multicamera. There seem to be unwritten tricks to using it.
I don’t work much in 60p, and I try to keep stuff either all 720 or 1080. I don’t know if that might contribute or not, but…it seems to help me.
Your hardware is unlikely the problem, unless you can find the problems happening outside of Vegas. Blue screens, for example, are almost always hardware or software drivers.
Alf
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Vegas 10 crashes on me also from time to time when I hit the space bar to play, I am not in front of my studio computer right now to give all the specs, I just bought a new i7 8 core 16 GB ram have an ATI Radeon 4000 series graphics card windows 7 64 bit
Vegas must have crashed on me 10-15 times yesterday, my project was all 1080 P cine form I too am using NEW BLUE effects as well as AFTER FX very little programs are installed on my computer it is strictly for video editing.Steve you mentioned a couple programs
Prime95 Memtest86 DriverDetective
I am not a tech so my question is these programs find your ERRORS, do they fix them ? if not where do you go to have those ERRORS fixed ?
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Thanks Steven, that sort of confirms what I was thinking, which is that we all seem to be running very modern, state of the art systems, and experiencing very different results.
My time spent video editing in the last two years has been plagued by crashes occurring randomly (sometimes not randomly) with Vegas. I’ve also used FCP a lot, did my last production on it (30 hours of video edited to 15 minutes) and never experienced a crash. So it’s easy to see why it flummuxs me so. I really prefer editing on Vegas, so it’s not that I am biased, except in favor of Vegas.
The fact that you have such a stable system, while the only wildcard that seems to point to something much different is the amount of HDV that you edit. I edit no HDV. It sounds like neither does James. I do edit a lot of different formats, unfortunately, because in my neck of the woods, it’s hard to find people with the same cameras. We do the best we can.
I agree with ALL your recommendations as to making sure to stress test your system, etc.
I’ve got a large amount of work today, typing this while I eat my lunch. If I get a chance, I’ll drop you a clip of my AVCHD (and James,I’d also ask you send Steven a clip as well). it might be tomorrow, also. I would recommend making a bunch of copies of the clip, and throwing a lot of them on the timeline.
Anyway, maybe we can discover something odd that can be tracked down…
Alf
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Prime95 and Memtest just break your computer. If Prime95 crashes, it’s likely a thermal issue because the processor and memory run pedal to the metal. If you watch your processor temperatures while it’s running, you should see your processor getting really hot: https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/
Memtest reads and writes every bit in every installed RAM chip on your PC. If it errors out, it will try to tell you which memory stick failed.
Driver Detective looks at every device driver on your PC and compares it’s version to the latest information they have from the hardware manufacturer. If it finds out of date drivers, it offers you a link to download the latest. Be sure to make a Windows Restore Point before you update drivers. This way, if newer drivers makes things worse, you can always go back to what you had previously.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
I am always willing to try new media here. Besides, there’s likely an AVCHD camera on my horizon. It’s getting difficult to find HDV any more and I can’t justify the cost of 10-bit HD.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com
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