Build394 – A dozen crashes fixed, still many to go

JasperD wrote on 11/3/2012, 2:35 PM

Another topic posted yesterday was optimistic in its title “crashes fixed but One” in relation to the new build 394. Alas, if it were just one crash left! One can see several other posts reporting various ways to trip Build 394.

On my part I still cannot load a simple project I created earlier with V12: it is only 3 minutes long, all simple stuff. Reading through other postings I turned off anything that I could think of (GPU rendering, RAM preview, transparency, Aero) to no avail. If these are indeed the source of the crashes why doesn’t SCS advertise it in a sticky note to save everybody the hassle of finding out for themselves?

Also, if these were the causes how could they release software in a state that requires you to turn off so many of the standard features in the product or the operating system? One would expect them to have tested this on a Window 7 PC, which normally has Aero turned on. Or they would have checked that the RAM preview actually works. Or if they cannot make it work, they should just take it out. This is bog standard stuff, not some weird configuration!

I had high hopes from this patch and now I have to resign myself to waiting for another month till the next one when, fingers crossed, they’ll get to fix my crash. In the meantime I keep sending them crash reports, including the project information and the log files where hopefully they record enough information to allow them to work out what’s going on.

As much as I like Vegas (I’ve been a fan for 5 years and recommended it to five people to get it too) I am starting to get fed up with its instability. In its current form V12 is simply not fit for purpose.

Comments

VidMus wrote on 11/3/2012, 6:08 PM

JasperD said, "Also, if these were the causes how could they release software in a state that requires you to turn off so many of the standard features in the product or the operating system? One would expect them to have tested this on a Window 7 PC, which normally has Aero turned on. Or they would have checked that the RAM preview actually works. Or if they cannot make it work, they should just take it out. This is bog standard stuff, not some weird configuration!"

Well, I have a Windows 7 64 bit PC with Aero turned on and it works just fine here. This is a fresh install of Windows 7 64 bit. Point is, Vegas 12 does work on the systems that SCS has and mine but not yours.

So instead of saying what you did, how about doing some troubleshooting to find out why Vegas 12 does not work on YOUR system!

Disregard my current system specs because I have also just built a new system and I haven't put together my list for system specs yet.

I love this new system! Idles at 38 watts instead of 230 watts. It uses 130 watts maximum on renders instead of 398 watts. Overall it is an average of 17% below performance of the old system but I will take the trade-off considering the power savings!!!

bigrock wrote on 11/3/2012, 6:50 PM

This version seems worse than ever. Getting crashes constantly dropping and then playing Motion Jpeg video on a DVD timeline with some still pics. Totally useless. There is no excuse for this, none whatsoever. Same exact piece of video works perfectly in 11 ver 701. Can't take much more of the garbage from Sony until I jump ship forever.

Update: I rendered the Motion Jpeg pieces to Meg2 in Vegas 11 and then imported them to 12 where they seem to work ok. But I should never have to do that. No excuse for these issues - one unimpressed long term customer.

TheRhino wrote on 11/3/2012, 8:14 PM

If you are using a 3d party M-JPEG codec like Blackmagic try reinstalling the codecs after you install V12...

EDIT - Just made V12.394 crash trying to load a reload a NEW project made entirely of files that used the Blackmagic MJPEG codec... I even reinstalled the drivers & codecs for my BM Decklink card...

I notice that Blackmagic updated their driver website to include CS6 as one of the supported programs but it still only shows that they support Vegas 9. Does anyone know anything more about Blackmagic's support for Vegas Pro 10-12? I know the codecs install & Vegas recognize files as BM MJPEG but then I get crashes using BM codecs in Vegas 10 - 12...

JasperD wrote on 11/4/2012, 2:16 PM

I am starting to believe that the use of tags in Project Media can break a project to prevent it from loading successfully on subsequent runs. Sounds like a wild theory, but early signs seem to confirm it. I am a big fan of these media tags (the cool feature added in V12) and use them to classify clips into buckets (e.g. a tags for character A, character B, etc.), which eases the subsequent activity of dragging clips into the timeline to suit the story at a given time.

So, at the simplest level I have two smart bins, one of them retrieving clips with a certain tag (e.g. “Fred”) and the other one for clips with that same tag (“Fred”) that I have not yet used on the timeline. Very powerful feature and one of the reasons that I’m still clinging on to V12 rather than throwing the towel!

I’m pretty sure Vegas does some clever manipulation of these tags (there seem to be some clever caching to minimise the times when it has to hit the disk to read a clip), but I think this is what goes wrong. These dynamic lists must have a lot of complexity to them and there is plenty that can go wrong. E.g. deleting a clip from one bucket needs to be replicated in the necessary bins to avoid re-querying them every time.

All speculative, hence my question for people in the forum who say that all is well for them: do you use tags? Do you use smart bins?

In the meantime I have deleted my smart bins and I have been running for 30 minutes with no crashes and extended my previous project (3 minutes long, crashing on load) by a full minute of extra clips and with no crash. Wow!

Interestingly enough, after deleting the smart bins they were gone from view – all fine so far. I saved the project, closed Vegas, re-started. The project didn’t load automatically (indicating an earlier crash on exit that didn’t save latest project). Not a big deal.

However, when reloading the project the smart bins are still there, which is of course wrong. I’m not too aggrieved about this (hey, I can now work in my project and don’t care about a few awkward artefacts!). The point is that something appears to be wrong in this area and that may also explain the crashes I was experiencing earlier.

bigrock wrote on 11/4/2012, 3:49 PM

Only using standard Mjpeg codecs. I use just one Mjpeg video on the timeline and nothing else Vegas goes off to LALA land. Seems to be hard bug in Vegas 12 - so sad really, did anybody test that very common media type? Same thing in last 11 version works just fine on the same machine.