Help Sony EPM or Spot Anyone: Memory Problem and Vegas 5

Dezine wrote on 10/11/2004, 5:40 AM
I am hoping that someone can help me with this problem ASAP as I have to get this montage done for a wedding rehearsal in 2 weeks, but I have to get him a first draft. I don't have time to redo this in Vegas 4.

I am running Vegas5 + DVDA2 on a new custom build PC from PC Nirvana that has:
Asus P4P800-E Processor
3.4 Pentium Processor
Geforce 5900XT 256MB AGP Video Card
M-Audio Revolution 5.1 Digital Audio Card
2GB of 184 Pin Crucial DDR 3200 Ram
80 GB WD Hard IDE drive (Main)
2 250GB WD SATA Drives
2 120 x 120 mm Case Fans
Metallic 450W ATX Case
Windows XP Professional
Pioneer 8X DVD+/-DVR-107D
MSI DVD Drive 16x

Whenever I try to render out a 15 minute photo montage in its entirety as an MPG1 or MPG2 or even AVI, and the render gets to about 30% done, I get a message my that my that I doesn't have enough memory resources available to render the finished video. As a result Vegas hangs up.

I didn't have this problem when I rendered out a Quicktime file.
I was able to render out MPG2 in 3 parts without hangups, but this is not a viable solution as I should be able to render this video out without any problem with this kind of horsepower.

I haven't had this problem using Vegas4 in the past when creating motoges.

I have turned off anti virus and background running applications as usual and allocated all available Ram in the Vegas preferences 1119 MB I believe.

Anyone have ay idea what may be causing this problem. I have the max amount of Ram that my system can take and plenty of free space.

Thanks for the help,
MLiebergot (Dezine)
LVProduction

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 10/11/2004, 5:57 AM
1. Reboot the c omputer
2. Open Vegas and the current project.
3. Open Taskmanager
4. End processes that are not used
5. If that isn't enough then go to the advanced memory settings in XP
and set it for 4000 min and max then reboot.
6. If that isn't enough render out the complex sections of your project
such as still pictures, credit rolls, blurs, using the pre-render then
reboot and start all over again. Do not make any more changes to
the timeline after you make the pre-renders to avi. If you have
interlace flicker or motion blur set for the entire video your render
will be about six times longer then usual. Keep in mind you can
end a huge slug of processes in the task manager without affecting
rendering operations. Spooling, printer software, sound card
software, dual monitor software, etc. It all comes back on the next
reboot.

JJK
Dezine wrote on 10/11/2004, 6:10 AM
Thank you for the quick reply.

"If that isn't enough render out the complex sections of your project such as still pictures, credit rolls, blurs, using the pre-render then reboot and start all over again"
The problem here is that this montage is all pictures and involves alot of motion on most every picture here, no blur or interlace flicker. This methos would be extremely time consuming for me to do. What I might try to do is render out the 3 sections of the video to a new track as an AVI.

The thing that worries me is that I souldn't have to go through all of this trouble to render out a 15 minute montage in V5 as I was able to do this every time in V4 without ever a problem.

Thanks again,
MLiebergot
LVProductions
TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/11/2004, 6:12 AM
maybe you have a problem with that much system ram? Also, what's your swap file size (I manualy set mine to 3gb). What if you took a stick of mem out?
winrockpost wrote on 10/11/2004, 6:32 AM
are the pics on your HD or disc, if on a disc copy to HD,, how large are the pic files ?
I seem to remember having some stability issues with very large pic files, resized and all was good.
OdieInAz wrote on 10/11/2004, 7:32 AM
I ran into a similar problem with V4 doing a montage. The stills were all high resoution, PNG or maybe PSD format. Render would get about 1/2 finished and simply die. I hav 768 MB of RAM. I batch converted the files in PS Elements II to JPEG, retargeted the photos in the media bin and all was well. I think it workd because the jpeg photos were much smaller in terms of memory requirements. I was doing lots of pans and zooms.

Dezine wrote on 10/11/2004, 7:44 AM
"Are the pics on your HD or disc, if on a disc copy to HD,, how large are the pic files ?
I seem to remember having some stability issues with very large pic files, resized and all was good."

All pics are PNG and have been reduced from 300 DPI originally to 150 DPI. I can't go any smaller size wise due to alot of Zoom/Pan Crop pics.

"Maybe you have a problem with that much system ram? Also, what's your swap file size (I manualy set mine to 3gb). What if you took a stick of mem out?"

How do I set and check my swap file size?

Thanks again,
MLiebergot
LVProductions
Chienworks wrote on 10/11/2004, 7:52 AM
300dpi and 150dpi really doesn't mean anything at all other than that you have apparently resized the pictures to half size. For all we know your pictures were 24000x18000 pixels and you reduced them to 12000x9000. These would still be enormous files. For that matter, they could have been 24000x18000 at 300dpi and are now 24000x18000 at 150dpi, which would mean that they would still be the same size. We need to know the size of the images in pixels. This is the only measurement that matters in video.
RichMacDonald wrote on 10/11/2004, 8:24 AM
Very strange. When you re-render, does Vegas crash at *exactly* the same place? If so, then it suggests a problem with something on your timeline, i.e., one of your stills is wacked. Changing the still format might help, as has been suggested.

Open task manager when you render and watch the memory used. If it climbs steadily, then you have a problem, indicative of a Vegas bug.

Another possibility is bad RAM: I have 1GB of bleeding-edge RAM (circa Jan, 2004). I was getting crashes and BSODs from a variety of apps. Turned out my RAM did not work at *non*-overclocking rates. When I enabled the over-clocking, all the problems went away. Download a copy of the free app MEMTEST, put it on a floppy, reboot from the floppy, and see what happens. You might get a surprise.
Spot|DSE wrote on 10/11/2004, 8:30 AM
I'd do as suggested here. Enlarge paging file, maybe temp render where the images are first, kill all background apps that aren't necessary. "Enditall" is great for this, it can be found on many websites for free.
Anything much bigger than 2k x 2k doesn't do real well on the timeline, particularly if it's a .tif file format.
Sorry for weighing in late, we had a late session last night so I slept in. :-)
nickle wrote on 10/11/2004, 9:40 AM
You didn't mention the type of stills.....if they are png you can change them to jpg which will cut the size down to 10% and save a lot of memory.
johnmeyer wrote on 10/11/2004, 9:52 AM
1. Doubl-click on "System" in the Control Panel.

2. Click on the "Advanced" tab.

3. Click on the "Settings" button in the Performance section.

4. Click on the "Advanced" tab.

5. Click on the "Change" button in the Virtual Memory section.

For each drive, what is the Paging File size? Some advanced computer setups put the paging file on a different drive (a good idea), but neglect to keep a small paging file on the main drive (a bad idea). Even with tons of RAM, the paging file is still needed.

Another thing to try:

In Vegas, go to the Options -> Preferences dialog and try changing these things:

1. The disk drive for your Temp file.
2. The Dynamic RAM Preview amount (if it is small, make it large; if it is large, set it to zero).

Since I haven't had this problem myself, these are based on general assumptions about what usually causes crashes.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/11/2004, 1:07 PM
it's under Control Panel- system. The performance tab has a virtual memory option.

I'd also suggest taking out one stick of ram. But, it sounds like it's a picture thing.
chaboud wrote on 10/11/2004, 3:41 PM
Dezine, if you have time to try something for me, I'd appreciate it:

Set your Video RAM caching value back to its default of 16MB and try rendering again.

Thanks,
Matt
Dezine wrote on 10/13/2004, 5:53 AM
I just wanted to thank everyone for their advice and help in solving my memory rendering problem in Vegas5.

Here was the solution:
1. I changed my Virtual Memory oaging file's size and locations to double my amount of RAM. I placed a small amount 500 mb on my C drive and the rest on a seperate drive that I don't do video work on.
I also set up windows (With the help of System Mechanic) to dump my virtual memory during shutdown, which is good for both security and performance reasons.

2. I went into the Vegas preferences, as per suggestions, and lowered my Ram usage from 1919 MB back to 150 MB, before I rendered, and as a result was able to free up the RAM that Vegas would be using during renders. I will only turn up the RAM usage for previewing while working in Vegas and turn back down before renders.

Thanks again to all the advice, as you all are life savers.

MLiebergot (Dezine)
LVProductions