[Al Bergstein]

Thanks Steven, that sort of confirms what I was thinking, which is that we all seem to be running very modern, state of the art systems, and experiencing very different results.

My time spent video editing in the last two years has been plagued by crashes occurring randomly (sometimes not randomly) with Vegas. I’ve also used FCP a lot, did my last production on it (30 hours of video edited to 15 minutes) and never experienced a crash. So it’s easy to see why it flummuxs me so. I really prefer editing on Vegas, so it’s not that I am biased, except in favor of Vegas.

The fact that you have such a stable system, while the only wildcard that seems to point to something much different is the amount of HDV that you edit. I edit no HDV. It sounds like neither does James. I do edit a lot of different formats, unfortunately, because in my neck of the woods, it’s hard to find people with the same cameras. We do the best we can.

I agree with ALL your recommendations as to making sure to stress test your system, etc.

I’ve got a large amount of work today, typing this while I eat my lunch. If I get a chance, I’ll drop you a clip of my AVCHD (and James,I’d also ask you send Steven a clip as well). it might be tomorrow, also. I would recommend making a bunch of copies of the clip, and throwing a lot of them on the timeline.

Anyway, maybe we can discover something odd that can be tracked down…

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

If the stability problems started at the time you upgraded, it is going to be a bit of a problem tracking it down, as there were so many different changes happening at once. A good idea is to make changes to the OS separately from the applications for just that reason.

Are you using the 64 bit version of W7? Or the 32?
If the 64, did you make sure you downloaded the 64 bit version of Vegas??? It’s easy to make that mistake on Sony’s site. I did once, and the 32 bit version was very unstable on the 64 bit version of Windows. By upgrading to 64 bit Vegas, much of my crashes vanished.

Is there any instability with other apps you use?

Is the instability happening on projects you started on 9 and now opened in 10? Or brand new 10 projects? Or both?

I also shoot on an xf305 and a 7D (so underlying footage is similar). I’ve had more instability with 7D footage than my xf305. So perhaps thinking about transcoding the 7D footage with Cineform or something like it might be worth exploring. But to be clear, in the last few weeks, I’ve not had instability with my 7D footage, it was happening a while back. Was it a drive problem? I’ve upgraded my RAID since those crashes, and…the 7D footage started crashing less… maybe an unrelated problem.

The QT clips are somewhat suspect, IMHO, and I try to keep QT away from Vegas. Not that I suspect Vegas, but I suspect Apple causing problems. If you can transcode them and see if the problems are reduced, that might be worth doing.

Again, one of the things that seem to help the FCP world, is the fact that they are forced to transcode everything.

Are you doing much in the way of multicamera? There are very problematic things I’ve had happen with multicamera. There seem to be unwritten tricks to using it.

I don’t work much in 60p, and I try to keep stuff either all 720 or 1080. I don’t know if that might contribute or not, but…it seems to help me.

Your hardware is unlikely the problem, unless you can find the problems happening outside of Vegas. Blue screens, for example, are almost always hardware or software drivers.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

James, can you fill in a bit more of your problem for us? Did anything change on your system or is this a new install? What formats are you editing?
————————-

Steve, maybe for those unfortunate people here like myself, who findweeks of vegas stability matched by weeks of crashing for no apparent reason, could you clarify your hardware, versions, types of video input and output and general workflow. I say this in all sincerity.

I believe from previous posts you use hdv tape format, do you edit footage fom avchd, canon h.264, canon .mfx, etc? If so do you transcode it all first? It appears from john r. And others that Vegas is pretty stable with hdv.

What is your machine setup? Do you have raid and is it internal or external?

Do you use third party apps like Boris?

These might help us understand why some of us are experiencing instability with our setups and you aren’t.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I do sound off the boards a lot, the edirol is my choice though the tascam is a close second.

I don’t use the zoom for line feeds, if i can help it. I do always try to use my mixpre.it’s worth the money.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

The hdp2 has a limiter. A switch on the top for each channell.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

R u working with a sound eng or is it just you alone?

What mics r you using? Xlr?

Tascam h2p2 is pretty sweet, around $800.

Read this too..
https://www.martin-doppelbauer.de/fieldrecorder/distortions.html

Edirol is superb at around $1k.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Yes, I understand all that, but I use RAID 1 for my raw video footage storage. This gives me an instant backup, and it’s standard practice in both the Mac and Windows shops that I’ve used OWC drives on my Mac and Windows machines for some time now, with no problem. (knock on wood). OWC seems to do a good job of customer support on both Mac and Windows.

I then render to a none raid drive, and store my fast access needs on those drives as well. Seems to work for now.

This brings us back to the OP question, you need PRO to support external RAID arrays, or you need a BIOS level controller to get around it. But I agree with all of you, if you are setting up a new machine, it’s worth exploring its’ support of RAID on the motherboard. That gets you around the problem of needing PRO, until you need to setup external RAID.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

So i guess that both of us are right.my motherboard only supports a two drive raid. If i want to setup external raid arrays, like i did, to put my new two year documentery project onto i needed to add a two sata card, and either use a third party driver or use windows pro, not home. Or am i still missing something?

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Good point, if you are running multiple o.s.’s on the same machine. I like the simplicity of os based raid 1 or 0, but if i was running two or more, i would also get a raid card. Microsoft raid seems to work pretty well, as does Apple’s, for that matter. Which raid card do you use?

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

So today I spent most of the day editing a multicam shoot. No problems. After reading up on Final Cut Pro’s multicam issues, I thought about Stephen’s ideas. While worth considering, I’m wondering this. In FCP, you want to collapse all the tracks into a multitrack for rendering, as it apparently does it much faster than when you expand them out.

But is the recommendation in Vegas to edit the multicam as collapsed, then expand for fine tuning, i.e. transitions, then collapse again to render. That’s how I handled it today, and while not scientific, it seemed to go much more smoothly. Vegas did not crash at all this time…whereas last week if I did this it crashed a lot. But I was moving thing around on a collapsed timeline then. That’s the one main difference.

thoughts?

Alf