Specs:

Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor

ASUS P8Z68-V PRO LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

HIS H467QR1GH Radeon HD 4670 1GB 128-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBRLDual Channel

Western Digital Caviar Blue WDBAAX3200ENC-NRSN 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus RR-B10-212P-G1 "Heatpipe Direct Contact" Long Life Sleeve 120mm CPU Cooler Compatible Intel Core i5 & Intel Core i7

Antec BP550 Plus 550W Continuous Power ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

Editing two 35 minute streams of AVCHD, no effects have even been applied yet, just raw footage on the timeline. Not using the system drive for my projects and media; they're on a separate external USB hard drive

not what you particularly want to hear, but no problems here, though 11 on the same system was a bugger.....

2 things:

1] Please fill out your System Specs in your : My Account (top of this page) > System Information. Not only will it help others who read your posts it will also assist SCS to better determine IF you have a compliant PC - it's always a starting point.

2] Stoopid question by me, but what Operating System have you had installed?

Cheers

Grazie

"Not using the system drive for my projects and media; they're on a separate external USB hard drive."

The USB 2.0 drive could be the root of your problems. Some USB controller chipsets are more reliable than others, plus USB uses a fair amount of CPU horsepower because it isn't a bus-mastering protocol like Firewire.

Almost all USB drives go to sleep, even having one my editing system can cause Vegas (all versions) to appear to hang as it waits for the drive to wakeup.

The mystery for me is why Vegas needs to enumerate every drive on the system, Windows Explorer doesn't.

Bob.

Bob, please explain: "The mystery for me is why Vegas needs to enumerate every drive on the system, Windows Explorer doesn't."

TIA

G

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/prevent-hard-drives-sleep-keepalivehd/

I dont' think your power supply is big enough for all that stuff. Go to at least an 800 watt and get rid of the wimp.
JJK

"Bob, please explain:"

In Windows explorer if a drive is asleep I don't have to wait for it to wake up unless I'm accessing it.

In Vegas's explorer and other functions as well that seem to want to scan every piece of storage media connected to the PC, Vegas waits until all the drives are awake. That could be because of how it's asking Windows for a list of files for some reason, it could be because media has gone offline, I'd need to do some testing to confirm this.

Whatever it is, it can be frustrating but at least I know what's going on and the "Not Responding" status will fix itself after I hear a couple of drives click into life.

Bob.

Agreed, your power supply is marginal and one thing I've found is power supply becomes problematic when you are taxing system resources.

I'm using Windows 7 64bit
Hmm so an underpowered system can cause Vegas to freeze. Is there some way to troubleshoot that other than replacing the power supply? Or is there a way to see how much power is being used by the system when the lockup happens?

I know what you mean about the external drive going to sleep, however, I don't think that's what's causing it because it happens while I'm working, i.e. when the hard drive is awake and spinning.

This and other Vegas forums are full of users who had all kinds of problems that were resolved by upgrading their power supply.
Take the recommendations here and upgrade your power supply as it will make a difference.

Mike

Your list of specs makes it look like there's more in your computer than there really is. It appears you've got a motherboard, CPU, Graphics card, and a single HDD. Maybe you're also powering the USB drive off USB power, Maybe not.

Of course power consumption and heat could both go up while you're working, but maybe I'd look at graphics drivers first.

As an example, I have Vegas 12 running without crashes on an older Core2Duo with an older ATI Radeon HD GFX card. The card supposedly can't support GPU acceleration, but after a recent driver update Vegas 12 wouldn't get past the splash screen. It always stopped at a message about GPU acceleration.

Another driver update got me past it and Vegas 12 works fine again. So it appears to me that even if GPU acceleration is off, Vegas is pretty susceptible to graphics drivers.

Rob

Thank you, I will definitely go with a new power supply!

I tried this tool: http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine
But I think it's quite inaccurate, it's not even calculating 300w!

Discovered there's a newer version driver for my graphics card, so installing that now, thanks Rob.

I also get lock-ups all the time, rendering V12 unusable. One video track, AVCHD 50p, some effects. It crashes on loading the project.

I see lots of suggestions from other people trying to blame this instability on all sorts of external factors, but these don’t stand up:
• Turn off the Aero. Why should this be necessary? Surely SVC would have tested the application on the most likely platform (W7 with its default setting of Aero on).
• Turn off RAM preview. This is so elementary to running the application and has been a feature for so many years, I doubt Sony would have failed to test it in V12.
• AMD platform. Vegas runs on an operating system (Windows) that protects it from such hardware differences. Anyway, I have both an AMD system (4 cores, 6GB memory) and Intel (i7-3770, 32GB memory) and I get exactly the same crashes with the same crash stack in both cases.
• GPU drivers. Now there can be some truth in this. Anyway, I’ve turned off my GPU rendering and still get crashes galore.
• External plug-ins. Again, these may be indeed responsible to crashes. Many people report not including any 3-rd party effects etc, yet get the crashes. Even if a plug-in is badly written, as a hosting application Vegas is supposed to survive badly behaved plug-ins. How many times have you seen Chrome falling apart due to a dodgy plug-in? Or how many times have you seen the operating system (Windows) go to the blue screen of death as a result of running an inferior piece of software. (yes, it happens from time to time, but not often).
• Lack of PSU power. How could this be an issue for V12, but same project to run OK in V11, even if V12 had the ambition to try and spin every single hard drive and optical disk it finds in the PC? If that was indeed an issue it would bring down the whole PC, not just Vegas. Anyway, I have a 750W 90% efficient PSU, with a very economical Ivybridge setup. My PSU is only used 20-30% capacity.
• Blame the user for doing silly things. Hey, most of us have been doing these same things for many years across many versions of Vegas. And even if we do something that is deemed idiotic and is no longer supported in V12, we ought to get a message, rather than a crash! Yeah?

Updated video driver, made it through 10 and a half minutes of editing and now I'm locked. Next stop,power supply!

while you're shopping, i'd get more memory (to 16 or 32) and an nvidia card (i have the 560Ti, and 32gb system ram).

Buying more memory 16BG->32GB and a better graphics card - is a good idea in its own right, but won't help the crashes. I have 32GB and nVidia 670 and still crash on project start up. If a piece of software doesn't check for null pointers and doesn't handle exceptions in a decent way you can throw at it all the hardware you can think of and it will still crash!

From Thread Subject: RE: Renders Suddenly Started to Hang
Reply by: videoITguy Date: 11/4/2012 12:04:48 PM

For those persons who get hung up rendering a project and feel they are stuck.: I would recommend you first do the following, close your project, reboot and restart your Vegas app. Then using some of the media assets of video, audio, create a scratch project in random order. In other words don't recreate your original project, just pull some random assets for a quickie project. Make it shorter by far than the length of your original project.

Now render your quickie! First try to render to a different type of output than you had in mind the first time, say SONY MXF. Is that successful? Then try render to your preferred format, does it work?

If you cannot pass these tests- please give us your total system specs and your render choice settings....more more info about your situation.

I kept the performance graphs in the task manager open while I was doing my multicamera stuff and edits. Memory usage never went above 2.5GB and CPU usage was also minimal so I don't see how adding more memory would help this situation either. Found another power supply calculator, but it's calculation is indicating less than 400W:
http://images10.newegg.com/BizIntell/tool/psucalc/index.html

But since one of the other posters said that upgrading the PSU fixed a lot of other users problems, I'll give it a go..

Since i installed Vegas 12, I've noticed Vegas 11 & Vegas 12 less responsive & sluggish. I know this is not much help, but I wanted to let you know you are not alone in noticing the quality & reliability of Vegas lessening. Vegas 12 has a lot of gimmicky features imposed on its code when reliability should have been the focus. The color match plug for instance is very slow & causes crashes so what is the point of even having it. Is this just a sign of the times?