What I’ve learned about Vegas 6 hanging and crashing

[Liam Kennedy]

How large are those Jpeg images? There are reports of problems with projects with large Jpegs. “Large” in these cases would mean larger than would be typically required for the panning/zooming which may be necessary in the project. In other words… don’t load a 4000×4000 pixel image if all you will be doing is a small pan or zoom.

For my use… I have projects with many jpegs (some 2000×2000 pixels) and never had any problem.

As your problem seems repeatable… I would definitely submit a support incident to Sony (via their web site).. and upload the sample project with supporting files. Then I would get on the phone and activate your 60 days of free live phone support (which you get as a result of the free upgrade). Their live support is excellent.

[Gary Kleiner]

Problems with jpegs were a bug that was fixed, though I seem to remember that being back in Vegas 5.

In any case, you should install the latest version (build 115). Do you have that?

Gary Kleiner

[Strobealific]

My guess is image size as well.

Don’t go any larger than 1440X1080.

Marc Bowyer
StrobeAlific Media

[Bill Mash]

Don’t know if I subscribe to the file size therory as I have done several small projects with 7m pixel jpegs (3072 X 2034 @ 180 DPI) from a Canon G6, no problem. Just tested several slide scans at 2k X 2k @ 2400 DPI with no problem either.

[Strobealific]

Why go with anything that large? You won’t see that quality on an NTSC monitor. HD is 1080. SD is much lower. That’s why I suggest 1440×1080. That is plenty of resolution for HD video.

Vegas doesn’t seem to do well processing LARGE jpegs or other still images.

Marc Bowyer
StrobeAlific Media

[Seatlanta]

I appreciate the suggestions from everyone.

As for the high resolution, I need it for some photos because of the pan-and-zoom I have to do. If I begin with a group photo with 100 people and zoom in on one face, I have to start with a hi-res photo or the closeup view will look terrible.

If I’m not zooming in on one important part of the photo, I could get by with much lower resolutions, but if I end up zooming to just 10% of the original width, that’s a big jump in original resolution. And sometimes, for historical photos, I go from an establishing shot to a tight, tight closeup.

That said, I do believe that I may be able to go with a slightly lower resolution for many of my pix. Also, I may have to work around the problem by using a lower-res pic for the establishing shot and then zooming to a higher-res version for the closeup.

But the bottom line is that Vegas 6 does not handle large jpeg files as well as previous versions. See my next post for some data from tests I did today.

Thanks everyone.

James (seatlanta)

[Seatlanta]

I used a black-and-white photo from the late 1940s and used Adobe Photoshop to save it in different formats (*.jpg, *.tif, *.psd) and different resolutions from 1500 dpi to 10,000 dpi. I cropped the picture into a square so that the horizontal and vertical resolutions were the same.

I tried dragging the file to the timeline in Vegas 6 and in Vegas 4. The *.psd files were almost exactly the same size as the corresponding *.tif files. The *.jpg files were much smaller for each corresponding resolution. For example, a 3000 dpi file for each format was:

psd: 25,908 kb
tiff: 26,388 kb
jpeg: 1,357 kb

The jpeg files were much, much smaller (in Kb), but they caused the most trouble in Vegas 6.

Here are the results.

JPEG files
Vegas 6 handled everything through 6000 dpi.
Vegas 4 handled everything through 10,000 dpi.

TIFF files
Vegas 6 handled everything through 5000 dpi
Vegas 4 handled everything through 4000 dpi

PSD (Photoshop) files
Vegas 6 handled everything through 8000 dpi
Vegas 4 handled everything through 10,000 dpi

Other observations:
Some hi-res files were not visible in the timeline preview; they were just black, although they did show on the preview screen.

Some hi-res files did not show up in the crop window. There was just a white background with the letter “F” on it. Even so, panning and cropping worked, but it was a hit-or-miss operation.

I suspect from past experience that there will be more crashes as the number of different photos builds up on the timeline. For the above test, I simply dragged 10 copies of the same photo onto the timeline, panned-and-cropped one of the copies, dragged them around on the timeline, overlapped some of them for dissolves, and generally just played around with them, trying to get it to hang.

Everything was pretty stable as long as the photo’s resolution stayed below a certain range (see list above). But when the resolution got too high, the program stopped as soon as I tried to put just one copy on the timeline.

James (seatlanta)

[Strobealific]

Have you tried .png files. They seem to work best.

While I understand you are trying to get the best quality possible, I would focus on the pixel ratio (i.e. 1440×1080, 640×480, etc.) instead of dpi. Again, 1140×1080 is good enough for HD video. Make sure you watch your project on a video monitor.

Try zooming into a video clip. You will notice it looks awful on a computer screen.

Another solution for images at a lower resolution is to duplicate the track when you have finished your edits and transitions. Put the duplicate track above the original. Make the top track progressive scan and set opacity to 50%.

Marc Bowyer
StrobeAlific Media

[Donatello]

also i would set RAM preview to ZERO ..

[Edward Troxel]

I wouldn’t. That can INCREASE your render time. For example, if you put a still on the timeline 30 seconds long and render that with it set to zero, it will take a fair amount of time as each frame will be rendered individually even though nothing has changed. If you up it to even 1 meg, it will render the first frame and the zoom through the remaining 30 seconds. I’ve found the default of 16 meg to work well for me. I can see making it smaller but would not reduce it to zero.

Edward Troxel