6b hanging - sample veg files

Lance Lenehan wrote on 7/7/2005, 3:48 PM
Hi All,

Apologies for re-posting but my previous post seemed to have got lost in the flood and I'd really like to see others results from this.

I have created a veg file that will consistently reproduce this problem (at least on my system). I want to know if others can reproduce this same problem on their systems (Spot?).

The relevant files can be found at:

http://www.soundscapemusic.com/vegas6/vegas6hang.zip

The ZIP is about 10MB (the included jpg images are large). The purpose is to demonstrate/reproduce the 6b hanging bug. This project consistently hangs Vegas 6 on my machine.

For completeness, I have also made Vegas 5 version of the identical project, which renders without a hitch.

Unzip the files, and load the project into vegas 6. For interest sake, fire up the windows task manager and view the performance tab graphs.

Now start the render in Vegas 6. You will see the page file (PF Usage) climb as the render reaches each new image ... till eventually ... no more CPU activity. It has hung. On my system, that happens consistently about 58% into the render of this project. You may have to kill vegas via the process tab in windows task manager.

As you can see, there is nothing fancy in the project. No zooms, no pan crops, no effects. Just a simple straight through slide show of 10 (admittedly large) slides.

And has been mentioned before, this renders in Vegas 5 without a problem. So, load up my Vegas 5 example, and render it.

I'll be interested to see what results others obtain.

And Sony, any progress on this issue?

Thanks,
Regards Lance.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 7/7/2005, 5:10 PM
By amazing coincidence, I just sent a VEG file to Sony (as part of a bug report) which demonstrated exactly the same thing: a still photo project that caused Vegas 6.0b to consume resources until I got a Windows "out of resources" message, followed by a Vegas crash. The same project renders in 5.0d just fine.

I didn't look at your project files, but in my case, my photos are fairly high resolution (most are 1600x1200, but a few are four times that large, namely 3200x2400).

I still am not using 6.0b very often, but the reason I wanted to use it here is that it definitely renders faster. If the estimates are to be believed, 6.0b was on track to render about 30% faster than 5.0d.

I'll let you know if Sony offers any workarounds or advice for this problem.
TeeJay wrote on 7/7/2005, 7:22 PM
Tried a render and it hung at 58%.

So, what I did was open all of your JPEGs in Photoshop. One thing I noticed is that your pics were HUGE! Some were 145cm's and some had resolution of 300DPI.

I reduced the big ones to about a 3rd their size, and made all of them 72DPI which i am sure is the correct res for video. I then saved them all out as PNG files and then opeded your VEG and replaced all of your JPEGs with the PNG files.

Rendered out to PAL MPEG2 in seconds!

So, your probelem may very well have been some sort of discrepancy with pic size/res.

Cheers,

T
johnmeyer wrote on 7/7/2005, 7:39 PM
TeeJay,

I think you've got the right idea for a workaround: down-res the pictures in an external application (e.g., PhotoShop). Still, the problem does not exist in 5.0d, so something definitely changed.
Lance Lenehan wrote on 7/7/2005, 9:18 PM
Hi TeeJay, thanks for your reply.

That's right, the files are big. The critical factor is number of pixels of the image. The DPI is only going to effect printer resolution, not screen resolution. (The target video width is around 720pixels).

If you change the DPI in photoshop (eg to 72 dpi), you are effectively just reducing the number of pixels of the image (eg from 4000 pixel width down to 960 pixel width) , which kind of defeats the purpose. In the full project, I zoom into these images quite a fair way. Thats why I have the high resolution (high pixel count).

Try doing a pan/crop zoom on your 'resized' images, and then do the same on the big images. You'll get the picture. The image quality just dies at high zoom levels with the smaller image files.

If the full show was just the images (without zoom), then I would be doing as you did, and resizing them in photoshop before droppiugn them into vegas.

The JPGs where converted from PNG's which I orinially had, but for the purposes of this example, I changed them to JPG's to same on file size.

And, as I mentioned, the big files work fine in Vegas 5.

Regards,
Lance.
jimingo wrote on 7/7/2005, 11:43 PM
That's really wierd. My CPU usage stopped about 7 times throughout the render and there would be pauses in the render during the cpu usage stop. Then it stoped again at 91% and would not pick up again...had to cancel the render. My page file usage got to about 1.47 gigs but I've had it up higher than that before without any problems.
JJKizak wrote on 7/8/2005, 6:06 AM
I have had to work around this ever since V4. Not a big deal. A lot of my pictures are 3400 x 3400 jpg. Just a PITA. Try some behind a one minute credit roll and you will not get the render passed the credit roll before it hangs.

JJK
rs170a wrote on 7/8/2005, 7:17 AM



Hate to tell you Lance but I tried it earlier this morning on my home setup (AMD 2200 with 1 GB RAM) and it worked fine for me. Took about 3 min. to render out the mpeg-2 file. PF usage did climb up to around 1.3 GB and things did slow down at picture changes but it didn't hang.

Mike

Edit - I should also say that I didn't bother shutting down any background tasks either. I just downloaded it and ran it.
cyvideo wrote on 7/8/2005, 8:02 AM
It is a well-voiced problem on this forum and others. If you go back to a thread started by 'Greenmartian', 'V6b hangs during render', it’s around the #160+ mark and you will see that many of us have suffered some kind of render problem with V6b. It appears to be a memory 'hogging' problem that causes the system to run out of resources and hang. Problems I haven't seen in V5+. So far all we have heard is a deafening silence from Sony :-( Sorry to say I have no answer and I guess many others are in the same boat.

The only thing I have been able to ascertain is that if you set your 'Dynamic RAM preview' to 16Mb, the default setting in V6 then it appears that you can render most timelines which have large JPEGs and 32 Bit TGAs without hanging. Notwithstanding it still uses a massive amount of Ram during the renders, way more than V5. Let's hope Sony get it fixed soon as many of us have gone back to V5 for reliability.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney
johnmeyer wrote on 7/8/2005, 12:50 PM
The only thing I have been able to ascertain is that if you set your 'Dynamic RAM preview' to 16Mb, the default setting in V6 then it appears that you can render most timelines which have large JPEGs and 32 Bit TGAs without hanging.

Unfortunately, this didn't help for my situation. I still had the hang with Dynamic RAM ste to the default 16 MB.
Lance Lenehan wrote on 7/8/2005, 4:01 PM
Hi Mike,
Thanks for that. Just to confirm it is ver 6 of Vegas you are rendering under? My system is P4 3Ghz with hyperthreading and 3GB ram. You have an AMD, so thats a difference. I wonder if anyone else running Athlons can report success or failure with this sample project.
Regards,
Lance.
rs170a wrote on 7/8/2005, 4:11 PM
Sorry Lance. Yes, it's 6.0b here. RAM preview set to 16 MB. and rendering threads set at 2.

Mike