Blue Screen of Death when rendering

[Stephen Mann]

Did you watch the GDI count while rendering? But, GDI overrun and Pagefile crashes are the only things I know will cause a BSOD.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Kevin Pearson]

As I type this, I’m running a 7 minute loop render of the complete project using CPU only. Vegas reports an ETA of 3 hours 14 minutes to completion. GDI is currently at 775, and memory used is hovering around 860MB used by Vegas, this gives me shy of 4GB free memory all while using 2 x 4GB video files. This loop has currently been running for 22 minutes.

Fortunately no BSOD yet, but I am surprised about how long it’s expected to take. By comparison, Serif MoviePlus would render the same project in approximately 20 minutes.

Like I mentioned, I seriously doubt GDI is the problem.

Kind regards
Kevin Pearson

EDIT UPDATE:
I cancelled the previous CPU only render because after 45 minutes without a crash, I tried the GPU renders. What I did was within Vegas’ preferences menu I turned off GPU acceleration, restarted, then tried CPU/OpenCL/CUDA renders. All crashed.

Then after my last post I re-enabled GPU acceleration in the main preferences, then tried rendering again. Although now rendering times appear to be much longer before the first BSOD, I haven’t yet come across a BSOD.

Right now I’m using a CUDA render, GDI is at 742 with average of 710MB of RAM used. I made sure that the slave graphics card (the one which my monitor is *not* connected to) is the one GPU used for rendering, and using GPU Temp to monitor load times, currently Vegas is using 50% of the GPU, both in processor and graphics memory usage. But ETA is now 1 hour instead of 3.

If this has prevented the BSODs, then at least I can call it stable and reliable again so if a project will take a long time to render, I can leave it overnight to render the project.

Kind regards
Kevin Pearson

[Kevin Pearson]

Update:

I ran my problem through the community on the Tom’s Hardware website as I was still getting crashes. It wasn’t a Vegas problem. I had made the common mistake of being ignorant with my system drivers despite my years of experience. While it still couldn’t be pinned down to just one problem, I had flashed by BIOS to a more modern version, updated my USB 3 and ethernet drivers, updated ASUS AI+ charger software (which allows faster charging of Apple devices) and removed all Saitek software (as I wasn’t using any Saitek/Mad Catz devices anymore).

These updates appears to have fixed my BSOD error as, just as I type this, I’ve been rendering video for the last 10 hours now. Where I would get a BSOD somewhere within the first hour, I’ve not experienced any since.

So for anyone reading this, don’t assume that installing new software is the cause, it could just be the catalyst that sets off the outdated drivers to cause problems. And no matter how experienced you are in system building and software debugging, always update ALL your drivers.

I thank all those who have taken their time to look into my problem, even if you feel your answer wasn’t helpful. It was as we narrowed it down to being a software problem but not a Sony Vegas problem.

Kind regards
Kevin Pearson

[Stephen Mann]

I am glad that you fixed it and that you let us know of the resolution.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com