Gigapixel Stills in V9

R0cky wrote on 6/9/2009, 11:24 AM
Yesterday the V9 overview page on the Sony website described V9 as able to handle Gigapixel stills. Today that paragraph is gone.

From the V9 specifications page on Sony's site:

New! Support for gigapixel images

- maybe they missed deleting this line? It is also still listed on the "Vegas Family Comparison" table.

This feature is the only reason I bought the upgrade to V9. I frequently create high resolution panoramic stills that I want to pan and zoom in video. Of course I want to have full resolution of the video so the still needs to be signficantly bigger if I want to zoom in very far.

My results: A SINGLE image on an HDV-60i timeline.

29,998x1739x24bit PNG file - a very wide panorama.

52,166,522 pixels or if you want to count 3 color planes and an unused alpha channel it is 208,666,088 pixels.

This is far less than a gigapixel but is significantly more than a gigabit.

I get the low memory error when I try to render this. Task Manager says that Vegas is using about 234 Mbytes and over 2 Gbytes of physical memory is available . I have the preview set at the default of 350 MBytes. I have 3.6 GBytes of physical memory and several times that in virtual.

If I resample to 18,630x1080x24bit PNG it will render. This is about 20 Mpixels or 80 if you count 4 planes. This is less than a gigabit. Maybe that is the limit, bits not pixels?

As an experiment I limited the rendering threads to only 1 as I've seen a lot of messages about problems with the Core 2 Duo. This made no difference and hasn't made any difference any other time I've had problems with V8 crashing (rendering large stills or using neat video in a project with large stills).

My system specs are up to date.

Rocky

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 6/9/2009, 1:31 PM
I work with huge panorama images fairly often, and it really is a RAM issue. Turn the Preview RAM down to 64 or 128 and see if that gets you enough RAM to finish the render. Also, the 64-bit version of Vegas will handle much larger images than the 32-bit version.
ritsmer wrote on 6/9/2009, 1:41 PM
Maybe the problem is not Vegas 9 but your XP x32 which really is limiting the possibilities.
I have very excellent experiences changing to Windows 7 x64 and Vegas 9 x64.
jrazz wrote on 6/9/2009, 1:54 PM
I rendered out 6 panoramic images stitched together in photoshop- extremely large pictures, and they showed up fine in the 32 bit version. I couldn't get the 64 bit version to render them correctly until I restarted.

j razz
R0cky wrote on 6/9/2009, 1:56 PM
32 bit XP allows each process to use up to 2 Gbytes and Vegas is barely using more than 10% of that when it fails.

Setting preview RAM to zero does not help.

rmack350 wrote on 6/9/2009, 3:51 PM
Zero is sometime bad. Vegas seems to need *some* preview RAM. But I don't really think that this is the deciding issue.

I'd imagine that a 64-bit version of Vegas would handle this better but Sony's marketing doesn't say anything about this. Maybe SCS didn't test it on 32-bit vegas or maybe they DID but their marketing people were saying LA-LA-LA-LA-LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU! LA-LA-LA-LA-LA, GIGAPIXEL IMAGE SUPPORT! WHEEEEEEE!
farss wrote on 6/9/2009, 9:16 PM
Thought this worth a mention here:

http://www.bouncingredball.com/2009/05/30/japanese-camera-buff-builds-130-megapixel-scanner-camera-for-next-to-nothing/

Bob.
R0cky wrote on 6/10/2009, 1:39 PM
I have also tried 16, 64, 128 MBytes preview ram w/o a difference.

Now I'm having trouble just rendering 30 minutes of HDV clips to m2v with no FX, just cuts and crossfades. Getting the same low memory error. The clips were transcoded with Neo Scene on capture. No problem with these in V8. I'm going to recapture as native m2ts and try again.

I am a big Vegas fan and don't want to be a complainer, but this is basic memory management. 32 bit Vegas should be able to use 2 GB before complaining about memory.

On a side note, I just went back to AE CS3 from CS4 since that was repeatably crashing on rendering a 1 minute clip (again with the Cineform codec for input and output) with the only processing a time stretch, no FX, no fades, nada. Sometimes it would give a "crash in progress" message, other times it would just disappear from the screen.
rmack350 wrote on 6/10/2009, 3:54 PM
"Crashing" is not really the area where Vegas should be competitive with PPro.

Rob Mack
jrazz wrote on 6/10/2009, 7:20 PM
Just out of curiosity, have you done a memory test to make sure your modules are working as they should?

j razz
R0cky wrote on 6/10/2009, 7:44 PM
Re: memory test. Yes.

I also have spent a big part of my life designing integrated circuits for a living..... The memory tests that you can run typically from a boot cd are not going to catch subtle and intermittent problems. Memory is remarkably difficult to test thoroughly. If you have a problem that these memory test programs can catch then you are likely getting BSODs all of the time and are lucky your system will even boot.

My issues do not seem inconsistent with other posts I've seen here.