Stephen Mann
Forum Replies Created
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2) My reference to file saving means that after I “enhance” a .avi file, I do a “save as” as a .veg project file and use these files when creating a multi cam project.
This still confuses me. A veg file is NOT media. If you are dragging the veg file to the timeline, then you’re nesting projects.
If you only have one track of video and one track with jpegs, then multicam is overkill.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
I am not grasping what you’re doing. What “toggle” feature are you referring to? I’ve been doing multicamera editing on Vegas for ten years an I am unaware of any “toggle” feature. (The multicam feature in Version 10 definitely rocks).
I am also confused what you mean by: “I first save the .avi footage clips as .veg clips before dragging them to the timeline for multi cam editing”
You don’t save AVI as VEG files. The veg file is your project file and the avi is your media.
If, for example, your avi is on track two and your jpegs on track one (above the avi), and there is blank space between the jpegs, then you will see the avi in the preview window.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Everything after “access violation” is of value only to the original programmer, and then only in controlled conditions.
We have all seen access violations occur since we took ownership of our first x86 PC’s. The infamous “Bluescreen”, application crashes, it doesn’t really matter, access violations are all over the place. For any of you that remember the good old Windows 9x days, a General Protection Fault and Invalid Page Fault are basically the same thing (and a segmentation fault too). To many people, the phrase ‘access violation’ is synonymous with “crash”. But what exactly is an access violation?
To put it simply, an access violation occurs any time an area of memory is accessed that the program doesn’t have permission to access. This can be due to bad code, faulty RAM or even a bad device driver. It really doesn’t matter who the culprit is, the root issue is the same.
The free program: Prime95, available at https://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=103 will torture test your PC. If you have bad RAM or a heat sensitive component, this program will find it. While you may not be overclocking, Vegas is very processor intensive – more than Premiere. If you have a PC on the edge of stability, Prime95 will push your PC hard. If you can run Prime95 for an hour, then your PC is probably not the problem.
If you have a problem driver, I recommend running Driver Detective from https://www.drivershq.com/ (Actually a good plan is to run Driver Detective periodically. I doesn’t do anything to your installed drivers unless you tell it to.)
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
You do know that Ram Preview is only for a selected region on the timeline?
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
“Is there some codec pack I should try instead?”
What part of “Codec packs tend to break things. Pretty badly.” did you miss?
It’s possible that something happened to the codecs installed by Windows.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Then, close Vegas and run CHKDSK to see if you have cross-linked sectors on your hard disk. If so, IMMEDIATELY copy your important files to a new drive. Then you can try fixing the original disk structure with CHKDSK /F.
If you do have cross-linked sectors, then you have two files that are permanent trash. Problem is that CHKDSK can’t tell you the names of the files using the same sector.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
This may not relate to the OP, but it’s worth considering for anyone doing an image sequence import.
Once any single process hits 10,000 GDI Objects, it’s terminated. This is the default limit defined by Windows that a single process can reach.
Each image consumes one GDI Object, every window, icon and graphic element on the desktop consumes a GDI Object. Every toolbar item, button and status bar item consumes a GDI Object. Firefox on my system is using over 2,000 GDI Objects right now. Importing 7000 images could easily hit this limit in your case.There’s a registry tweak that can change this in windows 7:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\GDIProcessHandleQuota
Right click on the registry key GDIProcessHandleQuota, click on modify, set the BASE to DECIMAL. The value should default to 10000. You can change this to the upper limit of 16,384 (4000 HEX).
** WARNING! – I recommend only making this change if you are very comfortable editing the Windows Registry. Accidental changes to the registry can render your system inoperable, so exercise extreme caution when making any registry edits. I strongly recommend creating a Windows Restore Point prior to performing any registry edits.
Here’s a site that explains and shows the process of creating a Restore Point in Windows Vista and 7 if you’re not familiar with this tool – https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/create-a-restore-point-for-windows-vistas-system-restore/
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
My first reaction to reading your original post was “I’ll bet he has a codec problem”. Then I read your last post and you confirmed it.
You may have had an unrelated problem with a media file, but then your blind man with a shotgun approach to fixing it only complicated things.
Codec packs tend to break things. Pretty badly. You can’t just uninstall it, you have to reinstall the codecs that the pack overwrote.
At this point I would reinstall Vegas.
(And, yes, you can run out of memory without warning – especially if you have a rogue codec eating commit resources every time it’s called).
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Are you using any plug-ins?
Low Memory or Out of Memory does not mean “Not enough RAM”, though adding RAM can sometimes fix a “Low Memory” waning. A “Low Memory” warning usually means that you have exceeded your commit limit. You need either a bigger page file, more physical memory, or both.
One of the biggest sources of confusion over memory usage is the whole concept of virtual memory compared to physical memory. Windows organizes memory, physical and virtual, into pages. Each page is a fixed size (typically 4 KB). To make things more confusing, there’s also a page file (sometimes referred to as a paging file and dynamic RAM). Many Windows users still think of this as a swap file, a bit of disk storage that is only called into play when you absolutely run out of physical RAM. In versions of Windows starting with Vista, that is no longer the case. The most important thing to realize is that physical memory and the page file added together equal the commit limit, which is the total amount of virtual memory that all processes can reserve and commit.
All Windows since XP (and Unix/Linux for that matter) always wants to have page space. Always. Programs like to and are allowed to pre-allocate as much memory as they want. Even if they are never ever going to actually use it. Sometimes those programs properly deallocate memory, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, programs leave parts of themselves in allocated memory just in case you are going to run that program again. If you have no page file and a program wants to commit some for itself, your PC will crash.
Paging file configuration is in the System properties, which you can get to by typing “sysdm.cpl” into the Run dialog, clicking on the Advanced tab, clicking on the Performance Options button, clicking on the Advanced tab (this is really advanced), and then clicking on the Change button. I would suggest a value of 1.5X the currently allocated value. Windows supports up to 16 paging files, where each must be on a separate volume, so if you have more than one internal disk drive you could also try enabling a Paging File on your second hard-disk.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
ANY dropped frames is unacceptable. Your camera spits the data through the firewire at a constant rate (25 mb/sec, or 3.6 mB/sec). Its destination is your hard disk drive. If something in the data path clogs up the flow, then you will get dropped frames. Most of the time the problem is that the hard disk can’t write at that rate because it’s seriously fragmented or the processor may be busy doing something else and can’t get around to servicing the I/O protocol fast enough. Especially on systems with only one hard-disk drive. Antivirus programs frequently get in the way of a Firewire data transfer. A bad Firewire cable may be noisy, corrupting a data frame (AKA Data Packet), resulting in a dropped frame. I’ve never seen dirty heads in the camera cause dropped frames. Data dropouts, yes, but not dropped frames. Similar but not the same.
Do NOT turn off the “Abort Capture on Dropped Frames” or whatever your favorite editing program calls it. As I said above, ANY dropped frames is unacceptable.
Your video media should be on a separate drive from your operating system – not a separate partition (because that’s on the same drive).
For capturing DV tape, I always use scenalyzer live (https://www.scenalyzer.com/)
For HDV tape I use HDV Split (https://www.videohelp.com/tools/HDVSplit).RAID is unnecessary in my experience – at least for speed considerations. I routinely capture DV tapes through a dual-core laptop into an external hard disk plugged into a USB 2.0 port and never a dropped frame. 5400 RPM drives should be avoided because their maximum sustained write speed is not much higher (in general) than the DV data flow, but I have used 5400 RPM drives with mixed success.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com