Trouble with Vegas 7c keyframe lock up, long render time and exit error msg

[Terje A. bergesen]

I am a little curious here. Why have you configured your computer for RAID1, if that is indeed what you have done.

Just a little technical info. ATA and SATA requires a lot of help from the PC and CPU it self when storing data, not like SCSI where the controller and the disk takes care of most of the work, leaving the CPU free to do other stuff. If you are familiar with gaming etc, it is similar to video cards. With a good video card, even a moderately slow PC can do fancy graphics stuff, simply because most of the fancy graphics is done by the card, not the CPU. With a poor GPU, the CPU has to do more of the graphics work. SCSI is like a fast graphics card for writing to disk, (S)ATA is like a slow, cheap one. SATA is a little better if it supports command queueing, but just a little.

Now, if you are using RAID1, you are using mirroring. This means that all data must be written twice to the disks. Given the fact that the controller isn’t all that much help, this probably means that it takes almost twice as long (it could even be more if the PC is under load, like when you are rendering) to write anything to disk. In other words, if you are using RAID1 your rendering is probably going to be slooooooooow.

When you use RAID in video apps, you want to stick with RAID0 or, as an alternative that is a little better than RAID1, RAID5.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Margie Marfi]

Hi Terje,

In 2006 my son had a computer crash so I decided to give him mine. I was upset about that what was suppose to be in his crashed computer, was not there. I felt at that time that the best way to overcome that was to learn more and with the help of a non video editing computer friend, researched and with help built my own. I chose Raid 1 because I had a hard drive loss in 2006 with alot of my video/photography data on it. Not all of the files were backed up to disk. It has worked sporatically, but never long enough to get a backup of my data. In paranoid mode I chose a Raid 1 setup because I had wanted a heads up if a disk was going bad. I did not realize the impact of this in video editing and rendering. I set the 3 minute piece to render all night last night so hopefully it would be done by the time I got up. It was. So if I do an hour long piece it might take only about 80 to 100 hours to render!

I was more up on all of this late summer 2006 but now am reading off of the box and a Belarc Advisor report. The video card I have is an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 XT by XFXforce.

Seems like I need to do rework here. Another piece that I had done recently was about 9 minutes long. Took a little over an hour to render. Burned it to DVD. DVD will play in a player, a friends Apple laptop, but not on my own computer with Windows Media Player. Don’t know why.

Thanks,

Margie

[Terje A. bergesen]

RAID 1 is a bad idea for video editing, it’s performance is abysmal in most situations. You either need to drop in another drive for your video editing or convert away from RAID 0.

You say you use RAID 1 because you lost data due to a computer crash some time back. I am not sure what you accomplish with that, I wouldn’t recommend it at all. RAID is not a substitute for good backup solutions, it is a way to get back up and running fast when something goes wrong. The safety features of RAID is primarily useful for business servers that need to have excellent uptime. A company that uses RAID 1 or RAID 5 will also always take regular full backup of their data and ship it out of the house (hopefully).

I am not sure if you realize this, but your RAID 1 solution has not really made your data that much safer. Sure, it is a little safer from a hard drive crash, but that is the only thing. HD crashes is one important reason people lose data, but not that important. What if a virus wipes your drive? RAID 1 will not help. What if your computer is flooded, RAID 1 will probably not be that helpful since both drives are likely to go at the same time. Fire.

My recommendation to you is to reconfigure your system not to use RAID 1, it gives you a false sense of security and probably prevents you from doing what you really should be doing to safeguard your important data, which is to take regular backups and move them out of your house. You can probably use your DVD burner for this even.

Now, as for Windows Media Player not playing your DVD, that is not a big surprise. WMP hardly ever plays any of the DVDs I throw at it. Try with the DVD software that came with your computer.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Margie Marfi]

Ouch. Shouda, coulda asked here before doing the setup. I know there’s a Raid setup key to hit on boot up. Haven’t looked at what’s in there. My purpose was also to be able to be continuously up and running even if a hd failed … with the pairing of both hds. It takes me a very long time to get all reinstalled on a system and tweaked as it originally was. The Raid 1 that I have setup gives me the capability of staying off and running as long as I do my backups of data. By the way, I took a computer course last fall and the instructor said that he had not made it easy enough to do back ups yet because he wasn’t good about it. Don’t know what you use? But this Raid 1 definately is not good for video editing. Is that why everything locks up when I try to add keyframing in pan/crop?

What do you think of the error msg that I get when closing out of Vegas? Didn’t know if it was a corrupted install? If so, I looked at my S/N for my original disk and the S/N for 7c download upgrade is different! So then don’t know which to use if I have to remove program and just go to dl 7c?

My last computer was built by a PC guy in town. I thought that WMP played my dvds on that one. I’m thinking that he may have added on a codec to WMP 9 that I had on it. That’s why I was concerned that this one wouldn’t play a dvd. My mind’s checklist of what to do when you have a newbuild just keeps growing. Thought I was thinking of alot but still very many things I didn’t. Learning curve. Thank you very much for your help!

Margie

[Terje A. bergesen]

If you want to use your PC for video editing, RAID 1 is not really an option, so you really should find a way to solve that. You don’t need it, and quite frankly, it is probably not going to significantly improve your uptime as much as it slows down your computer.

I store all the data that I create under a single directory. C:\Data. You’d probably chose something else. All my images go there. All my .veg files go there etc. Everything that I do not need to back up, such as loops for Cinescore etc, sound effects, masks I’ve bought etc goes somewhere else. If my HD crashes, I can get this back easily by reinstalling it.

All my captures etc go on my RAID.

Doing a backup basically means copying anything from C:\Data onto a DVD or two. I use dual layer DVDs now, and they take all of that stuff except pictures I take, I have a different backup procedure for those.

As soon as Blu-ray drives come down in price I’ll buy one of those for backup. 25-50G is the sweet-spot for me currently for backups, and I don’t want to mess around with tape backups.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Margie Marfi]

Well. Before I get started again, right now I have the 4 320G SATA HDs in my computer. You mentioned that you have a RAID setup somewhere in your situation. Currently I have the 4 with each of two in RAID 1, so that I have two that are mirrored. What do you feel would be the best utilization of what I have, even if I need to get another HD or remove a HD. I’m also thinking that maybe I don’t want to keep jamming more HDs into the case because of the heat generation. The mobo comes with RAID capability. I didn’t get an additional card. I think I can go to the Asus web site to ask how to reconfigure what I have now. Sure hope that doesn’t mean a loss of all that is on them right now.

Thanks,

Margie

[Terje A. bergesen]

With 4 drives, it depends on how much data you have. I would use one of two configurations, depending.

Config 1:

• HD1 for OS and applications. Including all data such as documents etc (non-video).
• HD2 for video etc that you use in your productions. Stock footage etc. Things that you do not create, but that you purchase or download. Things that do not change, but are part of your productions. Stuff on this drive should be easy to re-install in case of failure, so you don’t really have to back up this disk.
• HD3 and HD4 as RAID0 for captured footage. Store the .veg files etc on HD1.

Config 2:
HD1 for apps and data, including .veg files, stock footage etc. All of that. HD2-4 as RAID0 for video.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Terje A. bergesen]

Oh, btw, this probably means that you have to backup your drives, remove them from the RAID configuration, create the new RAID configuration and then restore the data. Lots of work in other words. I don’t think there is any way around that.

You may be able to do this by copying everything from the secondary RAID to the primary, untangle the secondary raid, copy from the primary to one of the two new drives you will have, untangle the primary RAID, re-install windows… you get my point.

It will be a hazzle.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Margie Marfi]

Thank you Terje,

I had a feeling that is was going into a Big Headache direction! I put an email into tech support at Asus this morning asking how to undo what I have. If they have a simple fix I’ll let you know. The form I had to fill out was asking all the details of my setup that I’m going to have to sort thru files to find. Hope they can advise enough with what I provided. I’ve learned more of what not to do here and I hope others will learn from how I messed up!:)

Margie