I think the previous post needs to be slightly modified. IN MANY CASES a lot of ram is not needed, but there are exceptions. In the stuff that I do (documentary-style epics), Vegas never needs all that much ram, maybe 100MB. But I get the distinct impression that Vegas eats up ram like candy under certain conditions. I think one of those situations would be where there are lots of high-resolution stills on the timeline. And of course, a lot of ram is needed if the user sets aside a large chunk for ram previewing.

"I think one of those situations would be where there are lots of high-resolution stills on the timeline."

I've had two projects - one with about twenty stills in them (1024x768)
and one with 270+ stills of same size.
In both instances my pc used about 700MB RAM when I rendered.

Ayath

There was a "bug" in early 6.0 versions where RAM usage got way out of hand when rendering lots of high resolution stills. I think that is somewhat under control in 6.0c, although I haven't done a project in six months that used more than a dozen stills.

You have a few factors at play. The first is that Windows may not let Vegas consume more than 2 GB of ram without some registry tweaks. The other is that a 32bit system can't really address a full 4GB of ram, even though you can install it. The total addresses available would be able to handle that much memory as long as there were no other hardware and software in need of addresses. So, get rid of the computer and you can address the ram.

If you look at your system properties, on the general tab, you should be able to see how much memory Windows is addressing. I expect you'll see a number around 3.2GB

Rob Mack

It will be around 3.2 gigs but it will make a ton of difference on a 1.5 hr. HDV project.

JJK

The wierd crashing might be a different issue. We just had a somewhat similar issue with jpg files in Windows Explorer. Folders full of jpegs would eventually crash explorer.

Turned out that the problem was related to Photoshop 6. The user had allowed Photoshop to associate jpegs with itself when it was installed. So every time the Explorer would go to photoshop to get the PSD icon, photoshop would read the file's data and provide all sorts of extra information back to explorer. This was information like camera data embedded in the file.

Eventually Explorer would crash. The solution was to uninstall photoshop and then reinstall it. It's possible that Real is doing the same thing with your media files. While researching this I saw that people were having similar problems with AVI files.

Of course it could be something else entirely. You didn't say what type of media was on the timeline.

Rob Mack

The media files are AVI files, I guess my REAL player is assigned to play those types of files. Vegas basically forgets where the files in the timeline are located and I get those weird icon changes in the explorer tab. I also get crashing. I looked around for topics on it and found none. The only thing I read about was FAT32 formatted hard drives having some similar problem but my drive is a RAID, do they format RAID hard rives in FAT32?

Sure, RAID can be formatted as Fat32.

I've never seen Vegas do this. I'm suspicious of the fact that REAL is associated with AVI files. Real has a reputation for doing unwanted and spyware-like things on people's computers and the best course is to never ever install it. However, if you do install it you need to read every possible screen during setup, as they put opt-out checkboxes in very obscure places that you wouldn't normally see.

Here's a possible test. Go to Windows Explorer and find an AVI file (with the REAL icons, of course). Right-click and select properties. Are there extra informational tabs in there? On my system I get three tabs: General, Security, and Summary. If you have more then REAL is adding them. I think this can create some performance issues as the system has to go to REAL to get the icons and this other info as well. It could be that increasing your Windows Icon Cache to 4 MB might help but probably the best thing you could do is uninstall REAL. You can install it again later being sure to read every possible screen and making sure REAL isn't the default player for anything but REAL files.

Vegas makes heavy use of the plumbing that comes with Windows. This usually makes it stable but if another program is messing with the system at a fundamental level then it could quite possibly cause trouble for Vegas.

For now, just check the file properties of the AVIs to make sure REAL isn't adding info to them.

Rob Mack

No, I just have 2 tabs in the properties menu, GENERAL and SUMMARY. I have unchecked real player as the default player for ALL files. Should I also do this for quick time? Where would I check to see how my hard drive is formatted?

How do I play files now if I want to view them or do you just not use players on your CPU? Is it ok to have windows media player as my default media player?

Certainly having WMP as the default will not hurt and it's easy enough to open the player that you want and then open the file from that, gives you more control.
Bob.