Freeze and Close

rextilleon wrote on 9/25/2003, 7:23 PM
I am working on an extremely long documentary with a ton of clips etc. My work process is to go through my footage via Explorer, preview the clips then place them into one of the bins I have set up. Very strange things are happening---first of all, ever so often I get a complete freeze and Vegas shuts down after showing me the dialog--fatal error---On other occasions I have placed clips into a specific bin, and they appear to be there but when I check later they are gone---Anyone have any answers---I am under deadline and I am beginning to worry. Thanks.

Comments

rextilleon wrote on 9/26/2003, 11:43 AM
Anyone?????
SonyEPM wrote on 9/26/2003, 12:58 PM
If you are trying to open huge amounts of media (many hundreds of gb) or you are using an extremely large number of separate files (thousands) the system could be overtaxed and Vegas could then bog down or possibly become unstable. Takes quite a bit to get to that point...

What is the project duration? How many separate media files are in the project? How many separate events? Approx how much media is open in the project?
FadeToBlack wrote on 9/26/2003, 3:34 PM
johnmeyer wrote on 9/26/2003, 3:42 PM
I ended up with almost 300 clips from each hour tape. I put all those clips on the timeline (five tapes, five hours and almost 1500 clips) and Vegas choked, froze and died.

I can also confirm that Vegas chokes when you put on the timeline a large number of individual clips that are contained in separate files. It becomes very sluggish (Vegas sluggish? Not usually, but it happens under this scenario). Even as few as 150 files can cause problems. I sometimes avoid using scene detection to get around this problem. I hope this gets fixed in the next release.
RichMacDonald wrote on 9/26/2003, 4:28 PM
Just this weekend I was playing with some different ways to import some time lapse work. I had setup my TRV900 to tape 2 seconds every 30 seconds. With scene detection, vidcap interprets each 2 second clip as a separate file. So, given that I had taped about 9 hours of the clouds flying across the lake, I had over 1100 clips from a single tape !

Before I relate my experiences, a request to SF: For the next generation of vidcap, please change the "[tapeName] - Clip XXX.avi" format to "[tapeName] - Clip XXXX.avi". So I can select the whole bunch as a group and drop it on the timeline in the correct order. Thank you *very* much :-) (P.S. I used another app to batch rename the clips that were numbered > 1000.)

Note: Previously, I was turning off scene detection. My experiment was to capture the individual clips instead, then drop them onto the timeline with a default 1 second overlap. FWIW, the result is less jerky and much more pleasing. Anyway, to continue...

With my 350Mhz PII and Win2K, I can confirm that both vidcap and VV had a helluva time handling 1000+ clips. For example, it took about 10 min for VV to drop the clips onto the timeline, 5-10 min for vidcap to log the captured clips, and I can make myself a cup of coffee waiting for the project to open. And I have to play some tricks with vidcap to prevent it from creating all those thumbnails, i.e., click on some other bin or just ctrl-alt-delete it. And trash the vidcap project file after you're done. But neither Vidcap nor Vegas crashed!

So here is another benchmark: An old 350Mhz PII handled 1100 clips and did not crash. Some steps were very slow, but once loaded, everything worked just fine.

Can we blame SF for the sluggishness? Well sure, its clear that Vegas and vidcap are not optimized for massive clip counts. But neither is Win2K: If you've ever worked with a folder in Explorer containing thousands of files, you know what I mean :-)

One thing I'd do in the next release is allow the user to turn off the logging features in vidcap. Or at least have an option in the file listing panel that allows one to turn off thumbnailing. Same goes for the file explorer panel in Vegas. (Actually, don't we already have this feature?)

JM, how much RAM do you have? I'm working with 256MB, which is another bare minimum.
johnmeyer wrote on 9/26/2003, 5:05 PM
JM, how much RAM do you have? I'm working with 256MB, which is another bare minimum.

I have 512 Mbytes of RAM, 2.6 GHz P4, two 120 Gbyte drives, ATI 8500 DV "All in Wonder Video card, Windows XP Pro SP1.

Now, as to your time lapse, if you want to do completely, totally pro time lapse (gees, I'm 51 and I'm writing like my teenage daughter), then run, don't walk to the www.scenalyzer.com website and get scenalyzer. It can capture true timelapse directly to the hard drive. It captures 1 of "N" frames, where N can be a really large number. Since it only captures one frame each time it "clicks" the video camera shutter, you don't have to do anything in Vegas. It is true time lapse.

I capture to my laptop which lets me go anywhere. Sunsets, growing flowers, you name it. You can do stop motion animation (a la "Claymation") with Scenalyzer as well.