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‘V5 v V6 render performance and hang… go figure?’
Hi All ~
Here’s one for those might know some answers. Check this out on V6.0. I have a 16:9 60-second jewellery TVC, around 70 percent graphic based. The rest is live video. The 70% graphics consisted of one track of background JPEG’s at 720 x 576 (PAL here) and above that one track of TGA’a with Alpha key. Now these TGA’s are big at around 2500 x 3000 or thereabouts. The reason they are this size is so that we can pan and zoom across the necklaces and pendants etc using the ‘pan crop’ tool.
The background Jpegs are shots of satin and velvet with a low level gaussian blur to ‘defocus’ them a little. The upper track TGA’s with alpha have media properties ‘reduce interlace flicker’ selected. The live video is on the same tack as the jpegs. Additionally there is a voice over track and a music track.
One would think that V6.0 would eat this for breakfast. Having reached the fifty-second point of the timeline I thought I would do a test render (to different AV drive) as the bulk of the TVC body was cut. Start render, setting set to ‘good’ not best. The dialogue box says around 31 minutes to render?? OK, accept that, a lot of resizing and moving to calculate. Now here’s the rub. V6 hung at around 49% of the render. A rare Vegas crash! Try again, same thing same time same place. Decided to open Task manager and see what is going on the next try. The interesting thing was to watch V6 start to gobble up memory. It kept climbing until it hit 1.6 Gig of memory then hung again (system has 2 Gig of ram). Around fifty percent of the time both the processor windows were running at 99-100 percent. Overall it ranged wildly between 50% to 100%. I gave up on V6 at this point.
As you can’t open a V6 veg file in V5 I did a ‘select all’ copy and paste to V5.0d. 100% Exactly the same time lines. Try a render. The dialogue box says about 16 minutes to render with exactly the same settings. V5.0d started and never broke into a sweat, it never went over 53% processor power. Memory started to climb and stabilised as around 1.3 Gig. Around 16 minutes later the render was finished, not a problem for V5.
The question now is what is going on with V6’s render engine? How come it just eats into ram until it hits the wall and hangs and is so much slower that 5.0d. Sony were touting the rework they had done on V6’s render engine to take full advantage of Intel’s P4’s hyper threading, dual procs etc. Got me stumped. Anyone else had similar problems?
Chris Young
Sydney -
5 Replies
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In Options – Preferences, how much RAM did you assign to Vegas 6? Many are indicating this needs to be left low (the default is 16 meg.) If you lower it, will it render farther?
Another thing you may try is rendering in sections (or doing a pre-render).
Edward Troxel
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I posted on the subject just a few days back
https://www.creativecow.net/forum/read_post.php?postid=111790781681372&forumid=24 -
Ed, Alex ~
In the interests of keeping the initial post a half decent length I failed to mention that I did actually try a pre-render. It failed at the same point and also hogged the memory. I must admit that I haven’t tried reducing the ram figure to 16. In fact I went the other way and increased it from 1 gig to 1.5 gig. Ed, I will try your suggestion of 16 which from memory was the default setting.
As far as rendering in sections, well that would be very disappointing if V6 can’t render a sixty second TVC without falling over. There is something very screwy going on in V6 that isn’t happening in V5. Watching the performance monitor between the two is quite an education. Very different behaviour. It’s very interesting Alex to see that you have had similar problems. I haven’t tried an MPEG 2 render yet but it sounds like a related issue.
Long weekend here but when I get back to work I will file a bug report and send the error log off to Sony because whatever it is it needs rapid attention otherwise V6 is going to get a rep as a lame app. Something I don’t think any of us whish to see.
Having done so many one hour shows all rendered out of V5 with no problems it just came as an unexpected surprise. Will continue to investigate. Thanks for the replies, good food for thought.
Chris Young
Sydney -
Also, Chris, the setting does not have to be 16 mb. My allowable max RAM number is 895 mb. Just backing off by 50 mb made the render work, but a bit slower. Reducing down to any low number made it work normally.
Alex -
Alex ~
First up today following Ed’s suggestion I dropped the ram preview to 16 and had another go. Well, well! This time it completed the render, and in 19 minutes. ‘Good’ me thinks! Set the ram preview back to 1 gig and continued to work on the timeline, setting up pan, crops etc and adding more material. Thirty minutes into the work and bang, V6 hung. I opened Task Manager and sure enough Vegas had consumed 1.6 gig of memory. I clicked okay to the hung app dialogue and V6 disappeared. But NOT in Task Manager. I opened V6 again and sure enough I now had two instances of Vegas running. The only way I could close the crashed instance of Vegas was to ‘end process’ in Task Manager. This is a pain as I need to keep the ram figure up to get any decent length ‘ram previews’ to see just how this job is going to look. Problem is if you do this Vegas just keeps consuming ram til it hangs. Always had V5 set to 1 gig ram and never experienced this problem. Am in the process of trying to find out at what ram settings this high memory consumption kicks in. In the meantime I guess I will just have to keep Task Manager open and ‘save’ and close down when the ram figure goes up. When the job is re-opened ram use is back to normal but slowly builds again as you work. At this point I guess I have to consider it to be a ‘bug’. Why? Because when I duplicate the workflow in V5 on the same job it doesn’t have the same problems.
Another interesting thing has happened with V6 that has never happened in V5. Sometimes when moving media on the timeline or placing it there I have had an ‘exception’ dialogue saying something to the effect of, ‘Unable to create backup veg’. When you check the details button on the dialogue the underlaying message is something like ‘Unable to find all media’. After this happens some of the media in the bins will now have blank icons and when clicked on will not appear in the viewer. Shut down and re-open V6 and all comes back to normal. Another odd one to work through!
Thanks for all the suggestions so far.
Chris Young
Sydney
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