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Rendering, Memory Problems and fileiosurrogate.exe
I used Sony Vegas 7 and 8 for my college projects and home movies and always had a pleasant experience with both. Last month when a friend asked me if I could edit a short movie he was making, I naturally turned for the new Vegas.
Big mistake.
Editing went fine, our first cut was about 15 minutes long. When I tried rendering it, Vegas gave me a message that I was long on memory. I wasn’t. I used to edit HD footage (the same 1920×1080 quicktime Canon movies I’m using now) on Vegas 8 and Windows XP that had 2gb of RAM with no problem. Now I have a much more powerful machine (core i8 with 6gb of RAM, running Windows 7) and can’t do it properly.
The problem wasn’t my memory, as it seems. Even with Vegas and this new “fileiosurrogate.exe” running, i still had about 4gb of free memory, not to mention 9gb of virtual memory left.
After much research, I found that the main culprit here is this fileiosurrogate.exe. And what is this? Apparently, it’s sony’s way of using movie files on a 64 bit system. My question is… why?
Vegas 8 doesn’t need this and can render a 30 minute 720p movie fine. Cyberlink PowerDirector doesn’t need this and can render a 30 minute 720p movie fine. Hell, even Windows Movie Maker doesn’t need this!
I bought a 64bit program so I could use more RAM. Who came up with the idea of making Vegas depend on a memory innefective 32bits ‘sub-program’? It makes absolutely no sense.
I am so disappointed at Vegas. Now have to render a bunch of 3 minute movies with Vegas (that I paid for) and stitch then together with another program. I can’t imagine the frustration of someone trying to make a full lenght movie on it.
Searching this forum and many others, I can see that many people have this problem, and there is no certain solution. Even when the fixes ‘work’, what people get is a little more time rendering before it runs low on memory again, and that’s it. This is totally unacceptable.
If anyone can help me with anything, i would apreciate it.
A few details:
– I’m using 1920×1080 .mov files. I tried about 5 versions of Quicktime to see if this was part of the problem. It isn’t. I tried messing with the settings (like disable DirectDraw etc) and this isn’t part of the problem either.
– I turned down the Dynamic RAM Preview and the threads to 1. Problem is still there.
– I tried using different hard drives for rendering to. Problem is still there.
– I tried rendering in mainconcept and the sony codec in mp4. They both have the same problem.Is there any real solution in sight?
The closest thing I came from a real explanation is this (on another forum):
“I think I have located the problem, which is the MainConcept decoder that Sony Vegas uses. This item, for some reason, loads up all mp4 files into memory and when it runs out of memory it crashes. The process that runs the decoder library (C:Program FilesSonyVegas Pro 9.0FileIO Plug-Insmcmp4plugmch264dec.dll) has a 2GB memory limit whether you run Vegas 9.0b or Vegas 9.0b 64-bit. It is the same as while the 32-bit Vegas actually loads the dll directly from vegas90.exe the 64-bit version uses a frame proxy system called FileIOSurrogate.exe that is a 32-bit application and it runs out of memory at the 2GB boundary.
There has been some hackig going on the Sony Vegas message board that allows the dll to access memory outside of the 2GB boundary but all that does is prolongs the inevitable. The code will crash, but instead of crashing at 6 minutes (1GB of 1080p30 data times 2) it will crash at 10.5 minutes (the new 3.5GB boundary in 32 bit OS) or it might crash even later in a 64 bit OS if you have more memory. ”
I know it’s just a temporary solution, but if anyone knows how to do this (let the thing use more memory), please tell me how, because I haven’t fin a way to do this yet.
Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long rant. I’m just very frustrated with a program I used to love and recommend to everyone.
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5 Replies
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Hi,
thank you for the details you gave, I have learnt something.
I have the same “low memory” problem with Platinum HD 10.0, and was wondering if you have found a solution to it??
Thanks for your help, I am like you very very frustrated about this.
Frederic -
Hi!
I am doing 1080p video editing with Vegas, and just like you, I’m running into some limitations of the software. Here are some workarounds that can get you to load and render more HD footage in Vegas.
– in the preferences, increase your Dynamic Ram Preview memory (to 1024?) or set it to 0;
– You may try to decrease your rendering threads too, but I’m not sure how it will impact on rendering memory issues.
– uncheck waveforms and frames in the view menu
– better work with several smaller files than one large file… and most important…
***********************************************
– WORK WITH (preferably .EXR) IMAGE SEQUENCES:
***********************************************
… convert all your edited video/segments to EXR image sequences
… you won’t compress your footage as you edit it
… if I’m not mistaken you will be able to load much longer HD files in Vegas and render better. This is good for final rendering, you will have more limitations if you try to mix several video tracks, what I mean here is render several exr segments of your project and put them side to side in your timeline for your final render. I have experienced missing frames with this technique, and I had to render the missing frames in a different segment then comp it all.I am doing a test right now with 30 .exr segments in my 1 track vegas 9.0e session, all at HD 1080 24 p. I have 19 minutes of footage loaded. Each frame is about 5-7 mb, so the whole project is about 150-200 gb, loaded in a single video track. I can scroll through the timeline easily (I forgot show waveforms and frames checked on too…) and now I am rendering the whole project in Hd 1080p mpeg2 highest quality, My memory usage is at 93% (of 6 gb) in my win 7 64 bits system. I’ll tell you in 2 hours if the render succeeded. In any way, this workflow will help you get better quality footage (EXR format is the ILM 32 bit patented format for VFX)and load/render larger files in Vegas. If the render fails, I will have to admit it is better to render large projects outside Vegas, but I will give it this chance before 😉 God speed!
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nah it crashed. 🙁
In order to render this in Vegas, I think I’d have to render segments again from my 30 files and then comp it again… Sad, I guess I will have to switch to another rendering software too.
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Eric, I have no idea if it will help but here are two articles from the Sony Knowledgebase dealing with fileiosurrogate.exe errors.
Vegas Pro 9.0a crashes during startup on my machine (1645)
Vegas Pro 9.0a crashes during startup on my machine (1647)
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Thanks! I went through the threads on the rendering/memory issues on Sony’s website after your post, and tried to re-render my 19 minutes 1080 24p test project.
I set the number of rendering threads to the minimum, 1, and my render still crashes. I’m starting to think that nobody ever rendered a long footage in 1920×1080 in Vegas.
Vegas is awesome for audio production.
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