Vegas can’t handle big projects

[Mike Kujbida]

The only advice I can give you is to invest in a new computer.
Your dual core machine just doesn’t make it in today’s demanding editing world.
An i7 box can be purchased for less than $1,000 and will give you a huge performance increase.

[Norman Willis]

Mike, what Mike K. says about a Quad Core is true. At a minimum you need to upgrade your processor to a CoreDuo Quad (+/-$300).

Also, what version of Vegas are you running? Is it possible that you can format C: and then reinstall all? It might take some time, but then you will have a clean registry, etceteras.

Also, for an NLE machine, if you don’t do emails on it and you don’t take it online except for updates you might consider skipping the anti-virus. Just don’t download or open stuff you don’t know what it is. But I would definitely try to format C and get all new drivers before I ditched Vegas.

I just finished a 1:48:49 project, and am getting ready to do another one right now, so I know it can be done. Hope that helps!

Norman

[John Rofrano]

I’ve loved Vegas all through the editing process but now that my HD feature length film project is ready to be put together and rendered out…I’m coming to the stark conclusion that this software simply isn’t enough.

Enough for what? You haven’t told us anything about your project or what problems you are having. What version of Vegas are you using? What source media are you using? What are your project properties? What are you rendering properties? What problem are you having exactly?

Before I go out and buy Avid can anyone try to change my mind?

Before you buy Avid, I would make sure that it will actually fix your problem on your PC.

I’m running an Intel Dual Core processor with 4GB RAM, Vista is up-to-date, I don’t store stuff on my operating drive, etc.

As others have pointed out, a DualCore is an absolute minimal configuration for HD. How fast is your processor? You need at least 2.8Ghz for HD. What version of Vista are you using? 32-bit or 64-bit? Vista 32-bit will limit you to 2GB of memory regardless of how much physical memory you have.

Does anyone else have problems when working with large projects?

Define large. Amount of time? Number of clips? Amount of FX? Most of my projects are between 60 and 90 minutes in length and I have no problems at all.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Thomas]

Thanks for the thoughts. It’s good to know that others are working on feature length projects without a problem. Computers are not my strong suit. I had assumed that what I’ve been running was plenty sufficent but I’ll take you’re advice and look into upgrading soon. My editing computer has never been online except for updating purposes so I know there’s no issues there. I might also try re-formatting C drive as you suggest.

I’m really just out of time at this point and I’ve had to settle for rendering my feature film as 2 separate parts…as that’s all Vegas(or my computer) would handle. I’m rendering as I write this. Then I’m going to stick part 1 and 2 into Architect and “link” them together. The only problem with this approach is that there will be a noticeable pause as the finished DVD plays over the connection. What’s worse, some dvd players will flash “Play” on the screen for a second as it plays through the parts. Live and learn I suppose.

[John Rofrano]

Then I’m going to stick part 1 and 2 into Architect and “link” them together. The only problem with this approach is that there will be a noticeable pause as the finished DVD plays over the connection. What’s worse, some dvd players will flash “Play” on the screen for a second as it plays through the parts. Live and learn I suppose.

Vegas Pro will “smart render” MPEG2 DVD video. If you drop both parts into a new Vegas project and render to the same template you originally used to make them, Vegas will simply copy the two files without rendering and splice them together for you. You should see the preview turn black with worlds like “No recompression required”. That’s how you know smart render is working.

If this doesn’t work, take a look a Womble. It will stitch two MPEG2 files together into one.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Thomas]

Thanks for the reply John. I suppose my biggest problem is not knowing what my problem is! After reading these replies though I’m beginning to see that the problem is probably my computer. As I mentioned, computers aren’t my strong point…though I’m learning. To answer your questions:
I’m using Vegas 9.
My processor is only 2.40GHz.
I’ll using Vista 32 bit.
My main problem is the computer just freezing up or giving me an “error, not enough memory” whenever I put more than half the movie into the timeline.
My project is a 2 hour feature film with FX on every clip, audio and video(color correcting, etc). It was shot in HD 1080 and I’m rendering it out to go on a single layer DVD: 29.97fps/VBR 8,000/4,800/2,700,00. My rendering settings are correct as I spent a lot of time reading old threads on this forum.

I really appreciate you guys answering my questions here. I’ve really thrown myself into filmmaking and plan to produce another film soon…but my biggest challenge has been with computers as I just can’t seem to get simple straight answers about them. I will take all your suggestions and upgrade soon! If you all have any specific things that I should look for when I upgrade PLEASE let me know.

[Mike Thomas]

Yes! Thank you John! I didn’t know I could “stitch” my rendered MPEG-2’s together like that. I assumed doing that would re-render everything and reduce the quality. This is exactly the solution I’ve been looking for! Of course after having read all the other replies I will definitely upgrade my system so that I don’t have this problem next time. You’re a life saver. Hopefully my computer will stitch them without freezing up!

[John Rofrano]

Mike, It sounds like your problem is a combination of only having 2GB of memory on Vista 32-bit with HD footage with lots of FX. If the error you are getting is “out of memory” then the next step for you is to go Windows 7 64-bit with an Intel Core i7 940 QuadCore and 8GB of memory. This is really what you need to work comfortably on feature film length projects.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

Vegas will “smart render” many sorts of video that’s unchanged.

I’ve done very large projects in Vegas for years, in both dimensions (eg, 2+ hours long, 40-60 different video layers, etc). If you add enough stuff, you can bring any machine to its knees.

In some cases, there’s a good reason to pre-render some things. For example, I shot a wedding recently that was very light challenged… it was held in a dark nightclub. I have good cameras, but this was really a job for a video DSLR, which I don’t yet have. In any case, a little intelligent de-noising via an appropriate plug-in works wonders… over time. The plug-in (Neat Video) is great, but slows everything down.

I could wait until the edits are done, but I was moving some AVCHD to Cineform (for faster edting) anyway, so I just did the filtering on the raw video. Several days later, it’s all done… and I’m back up and editing very fast (I have a Core 2 Quad at 2.83GHz, 8GB DRAM, and 1 TB HDD dedicated to this job, as well as another 3TB on the PC and another 8 TB in a RAID). The nice thing about Cineform is that is upscales your HDV/AVCHD color to 4:2:2, and even if you need edit in several staged projects, you don’t lose visual quality. One of my 40-50 layer edits just worked better as two projects… no matter the NLE, you can add only so many composite layers before your PC cries “uncle”.

On many of these things, you’re not going to see much difference from NLE to NLE… when you need a faster CPU, you need a faster CPU. Your machine is about as fast as my three-year-old laptop. I COULD edit video on that box, but not unless I had no other choice. And as far as resources go, Vegas itself is pretty compact. You will run out of memory in 2GB if you put in enough layers, HD video tracks, very large still photos (I’ve done lots of “Ken Burns” stuff), etc…. no much you can do about that, with Vegas or any NLE — this takes memory. One 6MPixel photo is going to take 18MB+ of working memory, for example. A single frame of HD is going to take 6MB of working memory, and that’s if you’re only compositing in 8-bits/pixel.

Adobe recommends 12GB for Premiere CS5, with a very recent nVidia card if you want GPU acceleration. While Avid’s minimum for Media Composer is 4GB minimum, with a dual core processor and a nVidia graphics card FX 560 or greater. So you would need hardware upgrades to be happy with either of these anyway.

Another tool for large projects in Vegas is the fact that .veg files look like any other piece of media. So it’s pretty easy to make subprojects and then assemble them in different ways, if you have different edit targets for the same video (eg, web, trailer, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc).

-Dave

[William Mims]

John I always appreciate your expertise. I am looking at this old thread as I consider the same problem of editing a feature length project. Where can I get more information on tips for editing a feature on Vegas 11? In the old film days it was easy to pull a dialogue track and picture track off the shelf and start splicing. Not so easy with a time line that is a mile long with 16 sound tracks. If I use the old method of editing ten minute “reels” and pre-rendering each, what happens when I want to marry them all together? Do I loose quality because once that is done it renders it again? Should I master to Blu-Ray for more GBs space? For the record I hate DV Architect 5.0 (The quality on final DVD’s suck) Is there another product out there?
Here’s what my system is: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7CPU 2.94Ghz, 12.0GB 64-bit O.S. (4TB external HD’s)Running Vista 64
Thanks

Mims