Low Memory Rendering Problem

[Daniel Hughes]

This is a very frequent question, but nonetheless, here goes!

I’m assuming you’re on Windows XP?
If yes, these changes can be made to your system:

1. Increase your page file(s) capacity and utilise your hard drives.

Start > Control Panel > System > Click on the Advanced tab > In the Performance box, click Settings.

You are now in the place to free up some memory.

2. Select Adjust for best performance and hit Apply. It’ll go all Windows 95, but it’s worth it.

3. Visit the next Advanced tab, and in the bottom Virtual Memory box, click Change.

4. Selecting Custom for your drives, you can now allocate some virtual memory to any of your hard drives. Make your maximum and minimum values the same, and it is generally recommended that you set the values to 1.5x of your computers RAM, so I believe this would be 6000mb in your case, but you can go higher if you like. If your ram peaks it will use this virtual memory.

And these to your Sony Vegas when rendering:

1. In Sony Vegas when you’re about to render, close all the preview windows.

2. If in your version of Vegas you have Dynamic RAM preview, go to [I think it’s] Tools and Preferences and you can reduce the Dynamic RAM Preview to 0.

And now you have to accept these demoralising, but perhaps somewhat inspiring facts:

1. Microsoft Windows XP will only ever allow you a maximum of 2GB per application, so buying more RAM is useless.

2. You must get Windows 7 64 bit.

3. The fate of your videos depend on it

And goodness, I hope you are using XP after all of this.

Daniel Hughes
Amateur Writer, Director,
Director of Photography
United Kingdom

[Davd Keator]

Yes, Vegas 8,9, & 10 must have 2 gigs ram per core available. If not you will see your rendering going to the swap file. This will literally kill your rendering times and at many times drop you to ONE cpu during rendering!

Win 7 x64
8 gigs of Ram
Quadcore cpu
16 gig swap file – but you won’t hit it….
2 hard drives

partition your boot drive to something small like 64 to 120 gigs…
this is great, you get really fast boots and app load speed.

Good luck…

[Miles French]

I am using 64bit Windows 7 and its still not working. Why did the video before render but now its not working? Sometimes it almost finishes and other times its stops right after I press render. I am just confused because nothing changed on my computer from when it worked to now. Thanks for the help anyway.

[Davd Keator]

Well, something changed, I ran into this issue years ago, I think when I first went V8.1…

You are going to need some diagnostic help…

When this happens to me I usually do a fresh install of Windows and go from there, newest drivers and updates for all…

Lets see:

Tell me all your computer specs…

Also in the meantime run resource monitor while rendering to see whats happening…

CPU load.
Disk IO.
Memory – especially the Hard faults per second… & used phsyical memory…

Also do the other vegas tricks as well, set dynamic preview to 0 etc…

Just a thought, how much room do you have on your C drive and your render drive?

Also: what codec are you reading and what is your output settings?

thanx

[Miles French]

Hehe well I’m not sure I understood everything you just said but I got something to work for the most part, at least 99% of the video rendered before vegas shut down. I just turned off all applications and disconnected internet after putting Ram Preview to 0 in vegas and adjusted the windows settings to best performance. My specs in basic, non techy language are Windows 7 64bit 4ram Pentium Processor CPU P16100 (if thats important at all). I guess I will have to do this for every video but its unreliable thats for sure.

[Stephen Mann]

Sigh.

“… 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. 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.

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).

run Perfmon to keep an eye on memory usage. (Start, Run, Perfmon) Watching Committed Bytes important. You want to make sure that the amount of committed bytes never exceeds the commit limit.

Here’s what it looks like:

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

[Miles French]

Thanks so much! You guys are always so helpful!