Low memory error when rendering

[Steve Rhoden]

In your situation i can say its because something on your system is conflicting with Vegas. Happens with a few Vegas users, but for the
life of me, i cannot tell you what it is, there is so many variables.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956
https://filmex-creative-media.blogspot.com/

[Stephen Mann]

Did you do a forum search? It seems that I post this every other week.

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“… but that’s not the case because I have X Gb of RAM so that shouldn’t be the problem.”

Low Memory or Out of Memory does not mean “Not enough RAM”, though adding RAM can sometimes fix a “Low Memory” waning. A “Low Memory” warning usually means that you have exceeded your commit limit. You need either a bigger page file, more physical memory, or both.

One of the biggest sources of confusion over Windows memory usage is the whole concept of virtual memory compared to physical memory. Windows organizes memory, physical and virtual, into pages. Each page is a fixed size (typically 4 KB). To make things more confusing, there’s also a page file (sometimes referred to as a paging file and dynamic RAM). Many Windows users still think of this as a swap file, a bit of disk storage that is only called into play when you absolutely run out of physical RAM. In versions of Windows starting with Vista, that is no longer the case. The most important thing to realize is that physical memory and the page file added together equal the commit limit, which is the total amount of virtual memory that all processes can reserve and commit.

Start the Task Manager, click on the “Processes” tab, then click on “Commit Size” to sort by size. This will show you which processes are memory hogs that you may be able to shut down.

All Windows since XP (and Unix/Linux for that matter) always wants to have page space. Always. Programs (including drivers and codecs) like to and are allowed to pre-allocate as much memory as they want. Even if they are never ever going to actually use it. Sometimes those programs properly deallocate memory, sometimes they don’t (resulting in “memory leak”). Sometimes, programs leave parts of themselves in allocated memory just in case you are going to run that program again. (MS Word, Excel and other Office programs are particularly adept at this). If you have no page file and a program wants to commit some for itself, your PC will crash (AKA, BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death).

Paging file configuration is in the System properties, which you can get to by typing “sysdm.cpl” into the Run dialog, clicking on the Advanced tab, clicking on the Performance Options button, clicking on the Advanced tab, and then clicking on the Change button. I would suggest a value of 1.5X the currently allocated value. The old advice of 2X or 3X your RAM is, well, old advice when a few MB of RAM was normal. The largest paging file that you can select in Windows is 4,095 megabytes (MB).

Also, Windows supports up to 16 paging files, but each must be on a separate volume, so if you have more than one internal disk drive you could try enabling a Paging File on your second hard-disk. DO NOT put a paging file on an external drive because if it’s not present when Windows boots, then Windows will crash.

For more information, see https://support.microsoft.com/kb/237740 and https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2267427

Let me repeat for emphasis: The largest paging file that you can select in Windows is 4,095 megabytes (MB).

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