Vegas Platinum 9 hanging and poor performance

[Steve Boreham]

If other Vegas Platinum 9 users don’t have experience of the problem I describe to share, please will you be kind enough to confirm whether adding large amounts (quantity and data volume) to the Project Media list works properly.

After a complete purge and re-installation I still have the same chronic performance problem whereby adding files to Project Media slows exponentially with respect to the actual data volume until eventually – currently at about 20 files or so – it will never reach “building peaks”, let alone actually complete.

Thanks,
Steve

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

are you running antivirus while editnig? This could be a source of the problem
Drives in DMA vs PIO mode? What other hardware is on that bus, if any?
What other applications running in the background?
What is the video source format?

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor

[Steve Boreham]

are you running antivirus while editing?
Symantec Antivirus version 10 runs continually on the PC, as it did when Vegas Platinum 6 was installed, too. Out of interest I just disabled it though and tried to process my test project again, whereupon exactly the same behaviour reported in this thread occurred. Antivirus is therefore innocent on this occasion.

Drives in DMA vs PIO mode?
Ultra DMA Mode 4 to be exact. All drives are Seagate Barracuda with jumpers removed (maximizes performance) and are installed with read/write caching enabled and optimized for performance not hot swapping. They are the same drives, with same configuration, that worked just fine with Vegas Platinum 6 so I think they are innocent here.

What other hardware is on that bus, if any?
None

What other applications running in the background?
A good call, but switching off all non-required processes makes no difference. For the record though, background processes are identical to what were installed and running when I was using Vegas Platinum 6. This includes Memeo automatic backup software, but my Vegas source data, project, and rendered output folders are all (deliberately) unmonitored by Memeo. Checking CPU activity whilst adding files to Project Media shows that the core duo CPU barely gets out of bed. Total memory usage is typically around 0.7-1GB of the 3GB available and the most I have seen whilst using Vegas is a smidge over 2GB.

What is the video source format?
On this occasion, MPEG2 as captured from a Sony DCR-SR100E HDD camcorder. The exact same images were handled in the exact same way by Vegas Platinum 6 without problem.

Thanks for the suggestions though, Doug, and I am of course perfectly happy to follow up other ideas too. Is there anything in Vegas setup I need to double check, perhaps?

The silence on this thread and absence of Google hits tells me that the problem is specific to my installation or usage, but given the blistering way that Vegas Platinum 6 worked and that nothing else has changed, I’m blowed if I can work out what. Hours and hours have been consumed so far!

Many thanks,
Steve

[Jeroen Jansen]

Hello,

I too have some problems with Vegas movie studio 9. I first used the trial version of vergas studio 8. that went ok. so i thought lets by it. and now I have version 9, and problems. I have a DCR190 HDD camera, MPEG2 files. I have about 5 Gb of source files and when I load the project the internal memory usage grows from about 400MB until 1.8 GB, and then it crashes! I contacted Sony via the website and received some instructions concerning deinstall the software, clean the registry, download the latest version and then check again. ….. no luck 🙁

I to noticed very little google hits ….. but there are more and more people having problems. my guess is that there is some sort of memory leak in the ‘mcmpgvdec.dll’. I don.t now about the memory uasage of version 8 or 6, I didn’t watched it when I used version 8.

any body having suggestions?

greetings,
Jeroen Jansen

[Steve Boreham]

Interesting, thanks, jeroen.

Are you using Platinum 9, and if so, which build number please? I am on Build 55.

I haven’t observed the same memory issues as you (sometimes the “hanging” occurs when 1GB or less of my 3GB in total is consumed), but it’s true to say that the disc is thrashed like crazy for ages and ages – with memory usage hardly changing – before eventually everything goes “idle” but control never returns to the User.

What puzzles me is what Vegas is doing when files are highlighted (selected) for adding to Project Media; I would expect that during selecting, nothing happens because the user hasn’t at that point said what they want to do. In practice though, something obviously does happen because of the huge length of time before the Right Mouse Button menu appears if you select enough files. In fact, even selecting just one file results in a pause of a second or two before the Right Mouse Button menu can be used, so something is going on.

[Steve Boreham]

Well, jeroen, it looks like I now have your problem, or one remarkably like it.

In response to Sony Support request I today downloaded the latest version, Platinum 9a Build 85.

1) Opened Vegas Platinum 9a and created a new project
2) Started the Windows Task Manager and selected the Performance tab
3) In Vegas, selected the Project Media tab
4) Pressed the button to choose which media to add
5) Chose my media by Click+ShiftClick, then pressed Open

Remembering that I have three GB memory installed (confirmed addressable by XP), a pretty powerful E6600 Core Duo 2.4Ghz processor, and well organized and maintained HDDs, here is a timeline of what followed:

05 Secs – Memory 570MB & CPU 22%
03 Mins – Memory 630MB & CPU cycling from 1% to 8%
08 Mins – Memory 1.06GB & CPU cycling from 1% to 6%
12 Mins – Memory 1.29GB & CPU cycling from 0% to 5%
22 Mins – Memory 1.87GB & CPU cycling from 0% to 4%
28 Mins – Memory 2.03GB & CPU cycling from 0% to 3%
31 Mins – Memory 2.06GB & CPU cycling from 1% tp 12% with the HDDs thrashing like mad (swapping out I guess but weird since I still have a gig of memory to go)
31 Mins and a few seconds – BANG

“An error has occurred. The System is low on memory ”

Unfortunately control never returned to me and I had to kill the Vegas application.

What is interesting is that at the time of the crash, Vegas HAD just created the last SFK0 and SFK1 file as confirmed by looking in the appropriate folder with Windows Explorer.

Steve

[Steve Boreham]

Reply from Sony Support essentially confirms that with version 9 has come (I presume for technical reasons) a limit to the number of MPEG2 files that can be handled in a project. Version 9a partially improves matters, but a limit still exists and I am blowing it out of the water. Stated workaround is to convert MPEG2 files to AVI with the “HDV 1080-60i Intermediate” template. This utilizes the Cineform HD V2.5 codec and retains all the detail from the original file.

This is hassle I don’t need though so I will revert to version 6 that has functioned perfectly for my purposes and forgo the Dolby 5.1 encoding that triggered my upgrade to version 9.