Boosting the Ram Preview

emilioarteaga wrote on 7/30/2009, 8:09 AM
I`m running Vegas 9 on Win XpPro. I have 4Gb RAM installed.
In the Bios appears:4096-installed and 4096 available
Windows recognizes 3.5Gb
Vegas in Preferences/Video, allows only 1024 available for the RAM Preview,
Is this normal?
I know that the software requires RAM to run, but I would like to have a larger preview.
Anyone had a tip to increase it?
I heard about a hidden option to do that, handy only during the startup. How?
Thanks

Comments

R0cky wrote on 7/30/2009, 8:36 AM
This is normal. Various other internal devices (especially your video card) take up address space so XP cannot use the entire 4 GBytes.

Vegas by default limits your preview RAM to 1 GByte max. Shift-Options will turn on the internal preferences tab but you should be extremely careful changing anything. If you increase the preview ram you reduce the memory available to Vegas. The total is 2 GBytes for both preview and Vegas. That is a limitation of XP also. I would leave it at 1 GByte max if it was me. I normally reduce it to 8 Mbytes for renders so Vegas can have the rest of the 2 GBytes.

There is a thread you can find (I think started by Blink3times) about using a 3rd party utility to change Vegas and various dll's to allow more than 2 GBytes. For this to work you have to boot with the /3GB switch in your boot.ini file. Search the knowledge base at microsoft to find out how to do this. This can cause instability in XP (I sometimes get the Blue Screen of Death when I do this). I only do it when I'm having trouble rendering (low memory errors) or anytime I use After Effects (as that has worse memory mgmt issues than Vegas).

Vegas 9.0a has eliminated the low memory errors I was seeing. I now only have a problem with huge stills and that is a color error (reproduced by tech support and logged) not a low memory error.
emilioarteaga wrote on 7/31/2009, 12:05 PM
Bastinado , thank you for all these information.
I already saw the Blink3times thread about the memory, but I`m not shure to make that at the moment. I am in the middle of an important project for my job and i'm not an expert
Next step is to get a 64 bit Vegas 9 and upgrade to Win 7.
Is not the solution for this problem but...some day we need to make changes...
rmack350 wrote on 8/1/2009, 5:20 PM
Boosting your RAM preview setting would probably be a bad idea in your case because:

--You're running a 32-bit operating system that will only allow Vegas to use 2GB of memory
--That 2GB of memory will consist if physical RAM plus Page File memory.
--Your total available system memory is 3.5 GB
--No matter what you do, there really isn't enough memory available to the OS and Vegas if you make Vegas hog it all.

There are ways, as Blink and others before him have described, of getting the 32-bit version of Vegas to use up to 3GB. The problem is that if you do this while still running under a 32-bit OS you will definitely force the OS, and probably Vegas, to use more of the Page File. This will actually slow things down.

There are two solutions and both require that you use a 64-bit version of XP, Vista, or the (still in beta and thus unsupported) upcoming 64-bit version of Windows 7. Using a 64-bit version of Windows would make all 4GB of your RAM available and it would allow an application to use more than 2GB of RAM if it that application was capable of that.

Once you have any of those three installed you could then run either the 64-bit or the 32-bit version of Vegas on it. You'd have an additional half GB available that wouldn't need to be swapped to the page file. You could probably set the 64-bit version of Vegas to use a little more RAM for preview, and if you hacked the 32-bit version and some of its DLL files as blink describes then it could also use a little more memory for the RAM preview.

Really, at this point you'd want to install more RAM. In general, if your OS will support more RAM then you could use the PAGE File less and everything would be a little more sprightly.
emilioarteaga wrote on 8/4/2009, 2:18 AM
Thank you, rmack350 with all these details I think have understood the situation. First, I need to change to 64-bit. OK.
Waiting that time comes and due the style of my work (making a lot of small renders), I'd like to try to increase the RAM preview,(using Shift-Options on the internal preferences tab ) just during the video loops creation, to return to normal after done this part of the job.
I will see what happens....