Vegas 6.0b hanging (crashing) all the time

[Donatello]

how about some computer system info ?

how about the RAID ? is it a raid pci card ?
or is it motherboard based ? ..
if motherboard are you using a intel driver for it ?
is the built in raid adaptec ? or other brand ?= you would use a adaptec driver not intel driver = you’ll have problems if using intel driver on adaptec raid .. could be same with other brands of raid .. NOTE: XP will default to intel driver …

did your system come with 2gigs ram ? or did you add memory ?
is the memory exact same ? could a stick be high/low memory mixed together ?

[Seatlanta]

Hi Donatello:
I’ve been using this exact system for more than a year with Vegas 5. It’s been very stable. I recently added one gig of new memory (for a total of 2 gig), but I have removed it and have gone back to my original one gig, just in case the newer memory was an issue. Apparently, it wasn’t. So now, the memory is like it has been for a year, and the hang-ups are still happening.

The RAID controller is on the Gigabyte mainboard, and has been very reliable. It is installed using the Gigabyte drivers and setup CD. By the way, I reformatted every drive (all three) and started fresh. Then I did a clean install of Windows XP. Then I installed my basic drivers (sound, video, etc.). Then I installed Vegas 6.0 on drive C. All my video stuff is on drive D (250 g). Oh yeah, my RAID array is not being used right now because I was trying to eliminate it as a possible culprit.

I have now installed other software, such as Photoshop CS. Everything, other than Vegas, seems to be running fine.

I’d appreciate any suggestions or magic spells. It’s got to be something fairly simple, but right now, I’m out of guesses.

The system specs are listed below.

Thanks.
James (seatlanta)

System
Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (build 2600)
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
3.00 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. 8KNXP 1.x
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. FE 11/18/2003
Drives Memory Modules c,d
658.89 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
419.39 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

MAXTOR 6L080J4 [Hard drive] (80.05 GB) — drive 0, s/n 664221655102, rev A93.0500, SMART Status: Healthy
Maxtor 7Y250P0 [Hard drive] (251.00 GB) — drive 1, s/n Y647WLHE, rev YAR41BW0, SMART Status: Healthy

1024 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot ‘A0’ has 512 MB
Slot ‘A1’ is Empty
Slot ‘A2’ has 512 MB
Slot ‘A3’ is Empty
Local Drive Volumes

c: (NTFS on drive 0) 80.05 GB 68.42 GB free
d: (NTFS on drive 1) 250.99 GB 23.21 GB free
v: (NTFS on drive 2) 327.85 GB 327.75 GB free

[Edward Troxel]

James, I don’t have a ready solution for you but CAN say that I have not experienced those problems over multiple machines.

Did you try with Media Manager turned off?

Edward Troxel

[Seatlanta]

Hi Ed:
No, I have not tried it without Media Manager. But I will do it tomorrow.

I’m thinking this is probably not a Vegas problem if no one else has similar stories. I’m reinstalling drivers one by one, then trying to edit after each new install. Maybe something got corrupted along the way.

Oh, there’s one other thing. This is not exactly the same system I’ve been using for a year (as I had previously said). I had been using Windows 2000 Pro, and I changed to Windows XP when I reformatted the drives. But this shouldn’t cause a problem.

I’ll keep at it, listening to suggestions, and trying everything until it’s fixed. Then I’ll let everyone know what happened.

Thanks.
James (seatlanta)

[Sada]

Lower the amount of preview ram you use—this has been a problem—I wouldn’t go above 600.

[Donatello]

hang in there .we’ll try to come up with suggestions …

” had been using Windows 2000 Pro, and I changed to Windows XP when I reformatted the drives.”

no problem here as you stated clean XP install not a upgrade install..

try jedidv suggestion of unchecking media manager in preference so it does not load in ??

your win2k system worked with V5 … if jedidv suggestion doesn’t work ..i see you upgraded V6 to V6b .. note: on the uninstall you must uninstall sony media manger separate from V6 .. uninstalling V6 does not take out media manager .. if you did not uninstall media manager on the upgrade V6 to V6b try uninstalling both sony media manager and V6 then reinstall V6 .. media manager had changes from build 99 to 115 .. if you have acid 5 pro make sure it build 324 or higher..
before re-installing go to C:program filessony setupV6 and delete the V6 folder ..infact you can delete sony setup folder ..

i do remember my DELL with win2K when i switched to XP i had some problems with it .. DELL then came out with a BIOS update for XP only on that model = if you were using win2k you did not use that XP bios update so now that model has win2k bios and a XP bios updates .. you might see if there is a newer then 2003 bios for your MB ?…

if still crashing ..you might install V5 to see how it works with XP on your system …

let us know how,what happens …

[Chris Young]

Well I am glad to see that I am not the only one experiencing these problems. Have been over on the Sony forum and more and more posts are popping up with render problems in V6b. Check out the thread ‘v6.0b hangs during render’ by GreenMartian. I tried Ed’s suggestion of turning off Media Manager and it made no difference, well not here anyway. This is on a clean install on XP Pro SP2, P4 3.2Gig with 2 Gig ram

As a continuation to my original post where I first mentioned render problems with V6b:

https://www.creativecow.net/forum/read_post.php?postid=111840123246648&forumid=24

Further developments, it may interest some. I have observed the following on comparison renders between V5d and V6b on the same workstation. I posted this over at the Sony forum on the ‘v6.0b hangs during render’ thread.

——————————–

Hmm! Guessed as much… something broken with V6b render engine.

A job I had which kept hanging part way through the render finally finished rendering once I set the ‘preview RAM’ setting back to 16Mb. Previously it was set at 1Gig. Something not right here for sure. Sony advise not to have this setting too high as, quote,

‘If you reserve excessive amounts of RAM for your RAM cache, performance may decrease’.

Now that this job is done and out of the way I thought that I would try some experimentation. Setting preview ram to 64Mb and re-rendering the job I watched ‘mem usage’ in Task Manager go to .907 Gig and it used between 50 and 100% CPU overhead. This is with the process priority set to normal and affinity set to dual processor for V6, which is standard. This particular job took 25.61 minutes to render. Wherever I used Scot Moore’s SMLuminance plugin the processors dropped to around fifty-percent CPU overhead, understandable, as this plug doesn’t support multi threading.

Next I did a ‘select all

[Dr. Dropout]

3 things to try:

1) Many people are apparently under the impression that cranking dynamic ram preview allocation to some huge value will make Vegas render faster or otherwise improve performance. This is not true- all it does is allow Vegas to cache more video frames in ram so that after a creating a dynamic ram preview you can play back a longer section of the timeline at the preview resolution without writing to file. Just because you CAN crank the value to 1.5 GB doesn’t mean you should, and unless you really need to change this to a big value, don’t. Default is 16.

2) Vegas 6 supports multithreaded rendering, both for writing to file and for building dynamic ram previews. If you have a dual, HT or multicore system, Vegas 6 will by default tax your processors much more heavily. If you have a reasonably small ram preview value specificed and still are having trouble rendering, in Options>preferences>video set max # of render threads to 1. This setting will make Vegas 6 tax your processors in a nearly identical manner to Vegas 5 (no multithreadded rendering in other words).

3) If Vegas 6 is hanging on you during editing (not rendering) you might try temporarily disabling the Media Manager and see if this helps stabilize Vegas 6- this component does eat up some system resources, and if you have tons and tons of files open in the library you may be pushing your system too hard.

Lastly, if you have a project that for sure renders on the same machine in Vegas 5 and does not in Vegas 6 after setting dyanmic ram preview to 16, max render threads to 1, media manager off, we’d like to get a copy of the .veg plus media. dr.dropoutATSYMbolsonypictures.com

[Stephen Mann]

I found a problem that I can replicate that stops rendering at 99%.

If I delete media from the timeline but don’t clean up the unused media from the media manager, Vegas will hang at 99% or even 100% during render and just stay there forever.

When I restart Vegas and clean the unused media, it renders just fine.

Steve

[Chris Young]

Dr. D ~

Will try your suggestions. Already tried with the Media Manager ‘off’ as previously mentioned. In our cases to date it made no discernable difference. A question though. Don’t you think the object of having multi threading is to improve the render process? It seems a bit of a retrograde step in V6 if you have to turn it down to a single thread seeing that V6 was touted as being a step forward with multithreading and improved render speeds. Have already tried renders with 16Mb preview ram settings. Whether it’s 1 thread or 4 it is still rendering slower than V5d on projects with a lot of pan and crop settings using 2500 x 3000 32bit alpha keyed TGA stills.

On a ‘normal’ PAL DV based program segment of 19.5 minutes with 720 x 576 (PAL) stills and live video V6b showed a render speed improvement of 2.6% over V5d. It’s ‘hyperthreading’ performance doesn’t match the ‘hype’ that surrounded the V6 launch. Don’t get me wrong though, I think the other improvements in V6 are good leaps forward and it just makes Vegas an even more versatile and powerful tool to have in the arsenal… love it!

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney