There have been many threads regarding the crashes of V8 when rendering. You may want to search for them on this forum.
I have found that to minimze the crashes, I keep the clips "short". This means keep the actual memory usage below 65%. Vista has a gadget you can put up on the screen to watch this.
If you go over this, renders seem to always fail.
It seems to only happen to a select few, but it is rather anoying...
I am still awaiting v8c, which I hope frees this memory problem.

Ted

I also have these memory leak render crashes and can agree with Ted that the solution is to keep the clips ‘short’. I have to keep them less than 5 minutes to get a render.

I have found for my setup that the critical limit is keeping Vegas to use less than 1GB of RAM. With my system as soon as Vegas goes over this limit it will crash. I check this limit using the Windows Task Manager. It’s possible that a different setup may fail at a different level, or not at all as most users don’t seem to have this issue.

Just today I have been testing a lot of renders and have found that with my setup this problem occurs when the source clips are in MPG format. If I create a project using M2TS clips, this problem does not occur. With M2TS on my setup, no matter how long the project is, Vegas memory won’t go over about 500M and so every render is OK.

What I have found may not applicable to your or any other system as such a memory leak could be triggered my all manner of minor interactions.

Martin

Thanks for the advice. I got the project to render by splitting it up, taking the rendering threads down to 1, etc... but, what a pain! I'm thinking of setting up an XP partition on my computer just to deal with this, assuming that Vegas 8 is more stable on XP?

Sorry dude,

Vegas 8b is just as crap under XP as it appears to be under Vista on your machine ... I've gone back to 7 for some of my project ... other portions of my 90 minute film are still in 8 because of the complex titling I've set up in Protype ... and the only solution is (as others have just mentioned) is to keep your project portions small so that you don't use too much memory ... I'm hanging for 8c as well with hopefully some improvement in stability.

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

I Patrick, this must be other software that is conflicting with Vegas, I'm using Vegas Pro 8 on both OS (XP Pro and Vista HP) since November, editing DV and HDV and haven't had any serious problems. On the XP machine I had previously used Vegas 7.

I even use must of times the same project on both OS and they perform with out any problems. I don't have any anti-virus or firewalls and set up the OS to best performance in the visual settings.

It seems that most users of Vegas are not experiencing this memory leak crash. So I have created a very simple test that can reproduce this problem on my setup very easily. So it would be very useful if some other users who don’t see this crash could run this test on their system.

This should confirm if the problem is related to my and other user’s setup. Or the problem lies in Vegas, but only we are seeing the problem due to something unique in our projects.

I can email you two files to create the project:

Test.mpg; a 10MB MPG video of a steaming dish of noodles, yum!
COPYMPG.BAT a 55 byte batch file

To reproduce the problem I am seeing all you have to do is. Create a new folder and copy in the two files. Then double click on the batch file which contains a single command:

FOR /L %%G IN (1,1,100) DO COPY TEST.MPG TEST%%G.MPG

This command will copy the test.mpg file 100 times into the same folder. Now start-up Vegas, close any open projects. Go to the windows explorer and select 20 of the MPG files and drag them into the timeline. The MPG files should appear in the timeline and you should be able to render OK, showing that the MPG files are OK.

Exit Vegas and restart, closing any project. Now select 60 of the MPG files and drag them into the timeline. On my system this will cause Vegas to crash as the memory allocated will have now exceeded 1GB.

I have found if you copy over about 52 copies of the MPG file into a timeline then Vegas will crash. You may have to copy in more on your particular system, so keep trying until you can get all 100. You don’t even have to render the project. Just simply dropping the MPG files into the timeline will cause the error.

However I feel this is exactly the same crash as occurs on a Render, as the fault is not in the Render code, but in reading the clips into memory. This normally occurs on a render as during a render all the clips will be read into memory.

Send me an email, via clicking on my Posted By: name above and I will email you these files, so we can track down this problem. Because you may not see this bug now, but it may suddely appear when you are working on a critical project with a tight deadline :-).

Regards

Martin

PS: You may feel that the single MPG file is somehow corrupted. That may be the case, but either way Sony is not off the hook as the MPG file is directly copied off a Sony HDR-CX7 Memory Stick camera. The MPG file has not been modified or re-rendered since being copied directly from the camera’s memory stick.

> It seems that most users of Vegas are not experiencing this memory leak crash.

I've had lock-ups after leaving a project with HD open for a long day. Task manager shows max memory and swap file in use, but my apps aren't using that much. Killing the Vegas 8b process frees the memory immediately.

I've been doing some tests with Martin's file, and tested with some files of my own, I get to this conclusion:

I've done exactly like martin said and I can get only 67 copies of the MPG files to timeline, with 68 MPG files Vegas Pro 8a crashes. After that I tried to drag 158 M2T files captured from Z1E with a total of 21GB, everything went smoothly and nothing happens Vegas rocks!! After that I used some clips from a Sony SD DVD camera that Vegas transforms into 14 MPG clips with a total size of 1,26GB, dragged them exactly the same method of the first MPG clips that Martin send me. And nothing happens, Vegas again stays firm like a rock.

After analysis of the files all I can say is, this is something have to do with the Dolby AC3 audio that's generate with MPG files because mine plays fine without no crashes.

Martin's file from Sony CX7:
Video: MPEG2 720x576 (16:9) 25.00fps 9100Kbps
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz 6ch 448Kbps
- Crashes Vegas when drag above 67 Files, aprox. 680MB

My files from a Sony SD DVD Camera (can't remember the model):
Video: MPEG2 720x576 (16:9) 25.00fps 9100Kbps
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz 2ch 256Kbps
- Doesn't crash, 14 files, aprox. 1,26GB

My files from a Sony Z1E HDV Camera
Video: MPEG2 1440x1080 (16:9) 25.00fps 25000Kbps
Audio: MPEG 48000Hz 2ch 384Kbps
- Doesn't crash, 158 files, aprox. 21GB

So I conclude that the 6Ch Dolby AC3 @ 448Kbps is messing somehow with the memory of the PC.

Has any one have other input.

Hi Pedro,

Huge thanks for running the test showing that it is not some weird setup on my side that is causing the crash. I will pass on these details to Sony Technical support, so hopefully they can also reproduce the problem and get this fixed.

To date all my contact with Sony Technical support, they fail to acknowledge that this is a problem in Vegas. So hopefully this will convince them that it’s a real issue.

Cheers,

Martin

Why doesn't Vegas make it's own unlimited swap file (maybe a script)and let windows use the windows swap file?
JJK

Good question.
Why doesn't Vegas let us configure a scratch disk etc like Ppro does would be another good question.

I tried running Martins test, took forever. The amount of disk thrashing is appalling. V8 managed to generate over 100GB of disk I/O, that's pretty staggering considering the total media is 1GB. I haven't actually managed to make it crash, yet. But I've wasted over 1 hour waiting for this slugware to creak and groan its way along. I've turned off thumbnails, I've told Vegas not to close files if it looses focus, everything I can think of to make it vaguely viable but still I get Media Offline at times and other wierd behaviours. Probably the only reason it doesn't actually crash is because I'm not running it on a quad core.
Thanfully the only time I'm forced to use V8 is for files from my EX1, one of the things that somewhat tempers my enthusiasm for the camera is having to use V8. Well that and all the problem with the camera that Sony also seem to be in denial over.

Bob.

After much perserverance I managed to build the project with all 100 clips, save the project and open it without it crashing. Just how long it took to open I can't say, I just left it to run overnight.

I then tried building the project in V7.0d, I've only got the first 5 clips on the T/L and found something very strange. Vegas 7 does not see the clips as being the same. The odd numbered clips show the first frame as solid green. The thumbnails are fine, just the preview. The even numbered clips don't exhibit this problem.

Bob.

Hi Bob,

I see from your system specs you have 512 – 1GB of RAM. I think this is going to cause an excessive amount of disk thrashing when you load a large amount of data into memory. This is not really a problem of Vegas. Any application that you run that would load more than 512M of data into memory is going to give you horrible performance.

Thanks for all the effort of running the test, but maybe your system is too different from mine to show the same effects (me 4GB Quad takes about 30 seconds to create project with 50 clips). Pedro has reproduced the problem and I have had a reply back from Sony Technical support, saying this is a known problem and the engineers are working on it (but not giving any commitments to what release it will be fixed).

“Why doesn't Vegas make it's own unlimited swap file (maybe a script)and let windows use the windows swap file?”

I don’t think that would produce a solution, as the question should be why can’t Vegas make more efficient use of the available memory.

It’s a bit like living in a house with your own private water supply and now and again you run out of water because you have leaky plumbing and teenagers who like to take 30 minute showers. You could buy a bigger water tank so it will take longer for the tank to run dry. But what you should be doing is fixing the leaks and telling your teenagers to take 5 minute showers:-)

So I would not beat up on Vegas too much, remember this is just a simple bug, which when fixed should quickly solve these problems. Also I expect that this bug is not even in Vegas but in the MainConcept MPG codec, or how Vegas interacts with that codec. Vegas is the solid water tank, MainConcept is the wastful teenager!

I am going to have to work around this problem by converting all my MPG into AVI files (Yikes all 300!). I have found if I create a project using AVI files, Vegas uses only a tiny amount of memory (<100Meg) and runs like a rocket on my setup. Any tips on best way to do this? IE convert all MPG to AVI and replace the MPG to AVI in the timeline. Is there a script that can do this?

Cheers,

Martin