A Vegas tale with a happy ending.

farss wrote on 11/3/2011, 1:41 AM
It was a cold winters night in the Nevada desert. The stars shone bright. Suddenly a bright light appeared in the night sky.....oops sorry wrong script :)

For a few years now I've been happily editing with V9 on WinXP/32. Typically a mix of XDCAM EX and HDV from our HC5. Just lately I've added the Crocolis into the mix. No real problems. V10 has always had issues for me, one being the second monitor would take forever to "lockup" and it was a bear to get Vegas and it to play nice, also somehow V10 kept reverting to thinking it was a 1920x1080 monitor.

Over the last few days my state of bliss hit a major bump. I shot a job a couple of weeks ago using a Z5 instead of my EX1 and V9 just became a mess. As soon as I would add the HDV footage from the Z5, crash. No problem with the HC5 HDV, go figure. Even stranger if I added the HC5 footage to the T/L first, all was OK.

Now I'd almost finished this job and I decided to do a closing piece using just the Z5 footage and again, BAMM. Restarting Vegas and taking the restore unsaved project ption was instant "Vegas has stopped working, would you like it to phone home...". I got so desperate I tried using V10 but the secondary monitor issue was driving me nuts. OK, I edit in Picture At Last but this was silly, something had to be done.

So I threw caution to the wind and updated the drivers for the FX570 card. I tried this once before and it did not go well hence my intrepidation. This time I told the installer to do a clean install. and it was a much later version of the drivers.

Well as hard to believe as it is the problem is now fixed. Even V10 now works happily with the Secondary Display, my "PAL" delay is gone, the PAR stays put, life is good. Well not quite, I'm still wondering how HDV from two different Sony cameras could have sent me down the road to Nirvana, completely baffling.

I would like to thank John Cline for having posted 9,765 times to tell us to update our video drivers and give him the opportunity to say a well deserved "I told you so".

Bob.

Comments

ushere wrote on 11/3/2011, 3:27 AM
glad to read it worked out well.....

i have to admit to being a driver freak - new drivers wouldn't come out if there was nothing to fix - and yes, i know the argument that most updates are aimed at the gamers and their troubles (as if a glitch in crysis is as important as a glitch in MY video!!!!).

same as sp's in windows (though i always test both on the office pc before the editing one, just to make sure there's nothing really going to screw up. yes i have vegas on the office pc as well, but never use it for editing, it's not really built for it).

so now bob you can really mix it up on the tl ;-)
farss wrote on 11/3/2011, 7:47 AM
"so now bob you can really mix it up on the tl "

I fear I have spoken too soon :(
I could get one Z5 HDV clip onto the V10 T/L without a problem however anymore and Vegas managed to crash not only itself but all so the ErrorReportLauncher, now that's a first.

I'm back up and working on the project but how I'm working around this is wierd.
Open good old V8, add all the clips to the T/L and save. Open the V8 project in V9 or V10 and all works just fine, sigh.

I'm increasingly convinced that something in the low level code got changed between V8 and V9. Whatever it was has carried forward to V10 and V11. Switching to external preview in V8 is instant and smooth, still a cough and a fart in V9 and V10. V8 is very solid for me, the level of negative posts took a quantum leap when V9 was released and the same happened with V10 and V11 isn't looking too good so far either.

Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/3/2011, 7:50 AM
Glad it's fixed! Strange it was only with HDV though. If mpeg-2 worked on the TL then you'd think HDV would.

I never needed to update my drivers to get my ATI card to work with Vegas though. I guess the drivers suck so much they just work out of hatred of me so I don't need to spend quality family time updating, I can edit instead! :p Stupid ATI/AMD for making me so damn efficient in the editing department.. Can't stand those awful working drivers!
Leopardman wrote on 11/3/2011, 11:49 AM
I use a Philips 244E (1920x1080) as my primary screen, a Philips 192E (1366x768) as secondary screen dedicated for my Vegas Video Preview window/panel. In addition I have a Samsung LCD HD tv connected via a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card (HDMI) as external monitor for preview.

I have a Sony EX3 and Sony V1E and frequently have projects where I mix footage captured with both cameras. I have never had a crash yet in any version of Vegas in either XP, then Vista 64 bit and for the last 18 months Win 7 64 bit Pro. I'm currently running V11, latest release.

To the contrary I have really found it to be a very stable environment. Interestingly enough software that ran on my previous hardware configuration gave me problems when I upgraded my mobo, CPU and RAM.

I like my gadgets, i.e. Networkmeter, Drives Meter and CPU Usage with CoreTemp and for years have been running McAfee a/v. Running with my Q6600 cpu and DDR2 RAM and old mobo, never had hassles. When I upgraded my hardware I had endless hassles the first 3 days with Explorer hanging or any other app that interfaced to it. At that point I have not installed McAfee yet and Windows decided to "install" Windows Essentials.

After lots of frustration and debugging, I managed to narrow the culprits down to the latest version of the CPU Usage gadget (v3.7), CoreTemp.dll and Windows Essentials. I got rid of these, installed McAfee, regressed to v3.6 of CPU usage and have not had a problem since then.

Windows Event Manager I find very useful to identify problematic software and bugs.

Eddie
Win 7 Pro 64-bit, Intel i7 2600k 3.4GHz, Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4 Mobo,8GB RAM, 500GB Boot drive, 2x1TB Raid drives,
1x500GB scratch drive, 2xBlu-ray writers, GeForce GT 440 2.1 Capable, Black Magic Intensity Pro HD External Preview
TheRhino wrote on 11/3/2011, 1:04 PM
Here's how WE handle driver updates or even Vegas updates...

First we wait to see that a few others are having success...
Then we make TWO backup images of the OS drive.
(During peak seasons we can actually multi-boot to the old image.)
Then over lunch or overnight we run our most complex/buggy VEG project that has been saved to a hot-swap drive for this very purpose.
If that project works, we run a couple more tests & then make another drive image of the OS with the new driver.

At no time do we ever erase past images of our OS drive. We now have (2) 2.0TB hot-swap drives with identical copies of all OS images. Since our OS runs from SSDs and contains no work files or stock video/music, they are only in the 60GB range and do not take long to backup or restore.

This methodology has saved our neck many, many times. Anyone who does not have a good plan to revert to a backup image, backup VEG files, or a backup of the source video should not consider themselves a pro. As a pro you plan for the worst-case scenario and always have contigency plans in case of hardware failure. For example, within moments we can transfer a client's work to another workstation and continue the editing on that system. Since the customer's files are backed-up on hot swap drives, it is only a matter of plug & play. At most we may lose an hour of work if we forgot to make regular saves of our VEG files (renaming them of course as to not overright a good file with a corrupted one...)

Workstation C with $600 USD of upgrades in April, 2021
--$360 11700K @ 5.0ghz
--$200 ASRock W480 Creator (onboard 10G net, TB3, etc.)
Borrowed from my 9900K until prices drop:
--32GB of G.Skill DDR4 3200 ($100 on Black Friday...)
Reused from same Tower Case that housed the Xeon:
--Used VEGA 56 GPU ($200 on eBay before mining craze...)
--Noctua Cooler, 750W PSU, OS SSD, LSI RAID Controller, SATAs, etc.

Performs VERY close to my overclocked 9900K (below), but at stock settings with no tweaking...

Workstation D with $1,350 USD of upgrades in April, 2019
--$500 9900K @ 5.0ghz
--$140 Corsair H150i liquid cooling with 360mm radiator (3 fans)
--$200 open box Asus Z390 WS (PLX chip manages 4/5 PCIe slots)
--$160 32GB of G.Skill DDR4 3000 (added another 32GB later...)
--$350 refurbished, but like-new Radeon Vega 64 LQ (liquid cooled)

Renders Vegas11 "Red Car Test" (AMD VCE) in 13s when clocked at 4.9 ghz
(note: BOTH onboard Intel & Vega64 show utilization during QSV & VCE renders...)

Source Video1 = 4TB RAID0--(2) 2TB M.2 on motherboard in RAID0
Source Video2 = 4TB RAID0--(2) 2TB M.2 (1) via U.2 adapter & (1) on separate PCIe card
Target Video1 = 32TB RAID0--(4) 8TB SATA hot-swap drives on PCIe RAID card with backups elsewhere

10G Network using used $30 Mellanox2 Adapters & Qnap QSW-M408-2C 10G Switch
Copy of Work Files, Source & Output Video, OS Images on QNAP 653b NAS with (6) 14TB WD RED
Blackmagic Decklink PCie card for capturing from tape, etc.
(2) internal BR Burners connected via USB 3.0 to SATA adapters
Old Cooler Master CM Stacker ATX case with (13) 5.25" front drive-bays holds & cools everything.

Workstations A & B are the 2 remaining 6-core 4.0ghz Xeon 5660 or I7 980x on Asus P6T6 motherboards.

$999 Walmart Evoo 17 Laptop with I7-9750H 6-core CPU, RTX 2060, (2) M.2 bays & (1) SSD bay...