Is Vegas just plain unstable?

[Deledi Bingham]

I can only speak from personal experience but I have used Sony Vegas 9 for about 1 year and have never had it crash on me once.

So I don’t think Sony Vegas is unstable as much as something within your computer is unstable or your copy of Vegas might have a problem?

Do you have another computer you can try to install it on and test it with?

[Jeff Schroeder]

I had a similar problem. I re-installed windows 7 three times, along with Vegas 32 & 64. Each time Vegas would work for a while then the while would get less and less until it crashed within seconds of opening it. The final time I wiped out the drive and re-installed Windows 7, I did not connect it to the internet until I had disabled Windows automatic updates, (I also disabled the service). Surprise, Vegas has been up and running 6+ months – not one crash.

When you get tired of trying to figure it out, try this and let me know if it works.

Jeff

http://www.narrowroadmedia.com

[Al Bergstein]

I’ve also had no problems (yet) with Vegas 9.0e on Win7 64 bit. I would also agree that it is likely a problem with your configuration, though it’s distressing that a competing product has no problems (have you stressed it as much as Vegas yet?)

I also wonder about the ‘legacy’ projects you are trying to deal with, or did I read that right? Could it be something with projects built under and older version?

Also I would try to isolate whether the plug in is causing this. Can you run it fine without the plug in installed?

Have you tried Vegas’ tech support?

Best of luck.

Alf

[Danny Hays]

I’m seeing like Alf. I would try it without that third party pluggin and see. I run 9e on W7 64 and never have a problem.

[Dave Haynie]

A hard crash like that certainly indicates something’s seriously wrong. Although Raylight has a good reputation, it’s easy to suggest that could be an issue — can you try a similar render without it, or use RayMaker to create AVIs from your MXF’s. Vegas supports MXF directly, but apparently, only Sony’s flavor.

I have rendered hundreds of hours of video with Vegas 9 in the last year. The only problem I’ve run into recently was a 3rd party video plug-in with a memory leak, which caused Vegas to crash after about an hour of video (12+ hours of realtime… not the fastest processing on the planet, this plug-in)… kind of a problem when processing four hours of raw video. I managed to render in sections, and all was good.

And I even have Windows 7, 64-bit, all up-to-date. I’m generally using the 64-bit version of Vegas, if that makes any difference.

Back in the Vegas 7/8 days, I ran into instability in a very well defined scenario. Basically, I had a very large project: several layers of video in Cineform, multiple 6-8Mpixel digital JPEG stills, lots of compositing going on. When I foolishly rendered from my D: drive back to that same D: drive, I didn’t quite understand why, although at the time I was on a 2-core CPU, the CPU wasn’t busy. Renders took crazy long, and frequently crashed.

The problem here was hard drive thrashing — the HDD was going nuts, seeking all over the place for the various random assets. Why that should make Vegas and/or Windows crashy, rather than just slow, I don’t know. But I had previously run Vegas on other projects for 8 days straight without a crash (that was a high quality NTSC to PAL conversion of a 2 hour film), so I didn’t just blame Vegas. Anyway, to solve this, I ultimately put the Cineform on one HDD, the stills on another, and rendered to yet another drive. Renders now went fast, and didn’t crash.

In retrospect, I was probably also getting low on memory, and it was well documented that older version of Vegas had some issues with large still image files, which has not been an issue in Vegas 9. Anyway, that’s the only real problem I’ve had with Vegas itself. I’ve run into problems once in awhile with Vegas not handling errors in video files all that well, but since leaving tape behind last year, I haven’t seen a single error in a video file.

-Dave

[Joe Ferralli]

Thanks everyone for your input. We’re running system diagnostics on it right now to see if there many be a hardware issue but everything is coming up fine so far. Next step I think we’re going to try Jeff’s suggestion of running Win 7 without any of the updates on a raw system. It’s not that it crashes all the time, it’s just unstable at the wrong times (there’s really never a “right” time I guess). I’m really hoping to get this rectified…next option is going back to Avid MC….and I don’t want to even think about that.
Thanks again.
Joe

[Stephen Mann]

Here’s a program that you can run to stress the hell out of your system:

https://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=205

—————-
From the overclockers site:
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 an overclock 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.
————–

While you may not be overclocking, Vegas is very processor intensive – more than Premiere. If you have a PC on the edge of stability, Prime95 will push your PC hard. If you can run Prime95 for an hour, then your PC is probably not the problem.

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

[Joe Ferralli]

Interesting Stephen. I’ll give that a whirl tonight. I think we did find the problem. Like Jeff suggested, we installed Win 7 without any of the updates and it’s been running stable without any hiccups for a couple of hours now. I actually tried to crash it by putting a bunch of ProRes, P2 MXF and some raw H.264 on the same timeline and no crash. The only goofy thing it did was the audio playback went garbled but after restarting Vegas, all was right again. Wierd. I’ll have to check into the audio drivers (Creative Labs Xtreme), but so far so good.
Thanks again guys.
Joe

[Van Sliger]

I have found that anything you do in this world computer wise, will work better with one computer for the net and one that stays offline.

Vango

Capture the moment.