"zooming out on the timeline will often dramatically improve playback. I feel a fasst tip coming on..."

SPOT! Glad to see you back here! I hope your recovery is approaching or surpassing 100%!

I had no idea about timeline zooms affecting playback. I will begin investigating this ASAP.

Speaking of fasst tips....when is the new edition of the book coming out (or is it already out)?

Piotr, perhaps I'm not understanding your problem.

I just put a 1.7GB clip in the timeline, did a smart-render, and didn't encounter any problems--got both video and audio.

FWIW, I'm running under Windows 7.

Perhaps you could give me a specific task to follow and I can report back to you how it turned out.

Thanks Jay - the problem is Vista x64 specific.

Still, your suggestion of a scenario to follow is a very good one; here it goes:

If anyone running Vegas 9.0 under Vista x64, and having access to PMW-EX1/3 1080/25p 35 Mbps and/or NanoFlash 1080/25p, 100 Mbps MXF clips, would be so kind as to help me establish the culprit of my problems, please follow the following procedure, and answer my questions:

1. Did you have VP 9.0 -64bit installer procedure failing at the very last step, with the "your system has not been changed" message?

2. When playing back an mxf timeline, does your RAM usage (as reported in the Task Manager) increase at the rate of some 0.1 GB/sec (e.g. 3.0, 3.1, ..., 7.99, CRASH)?

3. When smart-rendering 35 Mbps mxf, does your RAM usage increase as per point 2 above?

4. When smart-rendering a 100 Mpbs 4:2:2 mxf file larger than some 0.5GB, do you get proper results (i.e. a 100 Mbps mxf file), or do you just get a clip with audio only?

Well, I guess answers to the above questions would help me tremendously...

Thanks,

Piotr