@Rob-McMillan
Can you show us screenshots of your used settings at Options/Preferences/Video and Options/Preferences/File I/O?

Vegas keeps freezing and getting the following error message, Was working fine a few weeks ago. Thank you

"Problem Description
   Application Name:    VEGAS Pro
   Application Version: Version 19.0 (Build 643)
   Problem:             Unmanaged Exception (0xc0000005)
   Fault Module:        C:\Program Files\VEGAS\VEGAS Pro 19.0\FileIO Plug-Ins\mxhevcplug\MXVideoAllocator.dll
   Fault Address:       0x00007FFA2AC43038
   Fault Offset:        0x0000000000003038

Fault Process Details
   Process Path:        C:\Program Files\VEGAS\VEGAS Pro 19.0\vegas190.exe
   Process Version:     Version 19.0 (Build 643)
   Process Description: VEGAS Pro
   Process Image Date:  2022-06-14 (Tue Jun 14) 23:43:46"
 

@William-McIntosh You should create your own post and include details about your system and media.

"--Second, I don't think it's anything with my graphics card, because again--I've disabled the GPU completely. Vegas isn't even using it."

Can you explain what you did here? Looking at this laptop it seems to have a choice between Intel XE Graphics and NVIDIA.

Under Device manager/display adapters is only the NVIDIA card shown? (if it's disabled, reenable it! Your CPU is good but not that good and likely has pretty strict power limits due to the XPS chassis.)

My theory here is that the media you are using decoded with your old Intel iGPU but your new laptop only has NVIDIA and isn't capable of decoding it (and is disabled anyway...).

Feel free to test the theory by sharing MediaInfo for your media and a screenshot of device manager/display adapters. MediaInfo instructions: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-how-to-post-mediainfo-and-vegas-pro-file-properties--104561/

Also, how do your systems perform on a standard benchmark for playback and rendering? It uses AVC, not HEVC. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Exbi4K3hbxw6snJuisR1ble-0tCPVNcIcNnx0BAtSIM/

Thanks for your response.

I disabled using the GPU in my preferences, video settings, by turning “gpu acceleration of video processing” to off. I can also monitor the NVidia GPU in windows, and it’s not active.
 

Its kind of a moot point though, because disabling and enabling it both has the same effect. There’s something going on in the background that just isn’t right; again, a couple weeks ago my “workaround” by lower project resolution settings worked, but it doesn’t anymore.

Also, both this laptop and my old one has the same setup of an intel iris integrated graphics card, as well as a nvidia graphics card. The new laptop does have a newer graphics card though; so who knows if that’s the difference. Again though, the lagging’s persists even when the NVidia GPU isn’t active, so I think the issue is elsewhere.

And for what it’s worth, the program can RENDER projects just fine, and fast. It’s just the preview monitor issue.

I’ll upload some screenshots of settings when I get home. Thanks

@Rob-McMillan Hi, check you have the latest Studio driver & turn back on your GPU in Preferences - Video & File I/O

Geforce Experience will help you keep driver up to date https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/geforce-experience/

Also, make sure legacy HEVC decoder is unchecked in preferences>file i/o

So here's an update:

It had something to do with my graphics drivers. I reinstalled the GeForce Experience (for NVIDIA drivers), and then downloaded the latest updates for studio driver, it everything improved immensely. For those who have NVIDIA cards, here's an interesting observation. It seems like if you use the Studio Driver, the rendering speed is faster, but the video preview device is not as quick. If you switch to the Game Ready Driver, the video preview device works much better, but rendering speed slows by about 30%. So it's just a personal preference as to what you'd rather use.

However--all of a sudden this morning, it started acting buggy again. But this time I noticed that video system wide was playing slowly. I uninstalled my Intel integrated GPU, restarted the computer, and everything was back to normal.

Final thoughts: if anyone has issues with the video preview device being laggy, definitely reinstall video drivers for all graphics cards. That can help.

Graphics drivers end up being the source of a very, very large number of playback and rendering errors. If you can't get a good driver for your intel GPU, it may be worth leaving it disabled, but if you can enable it, VEGAS seems to work best when using a intel CPU (with it handling GPU decoding in the file i/o tab of preferences) and the main GPU doing timeline preview (video tab of prefs) and rendering.

Interesting, I have the older Dell XPS 15 with NVidia 3050ti but a 11th gen Intel cpu and 32gb ram. I've never been able to get it to play back HEVC smoothly on the timeline in Vegas 19 even with the latest drivers, whereas Resolve can do it just fine on the same machine with the same drivers. Hence I gave up and have been sticking with h264 source for now as I assumed Vegas was not compatible with HEVC as far as timeline goes. I'll have to revisit all this on Vegas 20.

Interesting, I have the older Dell XPS 15 with NVidia 3050ti but a 11th gen Intel cpu and 32gb ram. I've never been able to get it to play back HEVC smoothly on the timeline in Vegas 19 even with the latest drivers, whereas Resolve can do it just fine on the same machine with the same drivers. Hence I gave up and have been sticking with h264 source for now as I assumed Vegas was not compatible with HEVC as far as timeline goes. I'll have to revisit all this on Vegas 20.

I've heard a lot of success by disabling the legacy HEVC decoder in file i/o settings as well, in addition to driver issues.

Reality, it's possible Resolve is better utilizing the nvidia GPU to do the decoding, whereas VEGAS splits the load and can assign one GPU to the timeline acceleration and one to decoding, often which it assigns intel GPUs to if available... so it's possible that in VEGAS, it's using intel to decode, and there's an issue with that driver on your system causing trouble. Worth checking out.

Here’s what I’ve done:

I change my project to 1080, 30 fps… even though I plan to render in 4k 60p. I then scale the preview window so it’s a smaller resolution. I can get the preview to do pretty well: it stays at 29.97 pretty consistently, occasionally dropping to 10 fps, then zooming back up to 29.97.

I've heard a lot of success by disabling the legacy HEVC decoder in file i/o settings as well, in addition to driver issues.

Reality, it's possible Resolve is better utilizing the nvidia GPU to do the decoding, whereas VEGAS splits the load and can assign one GPU to the timeline acceleration and one to decoding, often which it assigns intel GPUs to if available... so it's possible that in VEGAS, it's using intel to decode, and there's an issue with that driver on your system causing trouble. Worth checking out.

That is one way to go about it... and nothing stops you from changing the project settings back to something higher before you render... I do that with color, I edit in 8 bit mode, then switch to 32 bit mode after to color, since you don't need smooth playback to color, then I render out from there. This speeds things up a good bit. In extreme cases, you could probably drop the resolution even lower for faster decoding. If all else fails, there's also proxies... just remember they only load in preview or draft quality on the preview monitor, good and best use the original media.

I can attest to the driver issue 100%. I’ve been all over the Internet looking at settings to adjust, things to try, etc. But the biggest issue has seemed to be drivers. Whenever there’s an issue, I uninstall my Intel display driver and reboot. If that doesn’t fix it, I update my NVidia driver and do the same thing. This always cures my problems… until it stops working and I have to try it again LOL.

That is one way to go about it... and nothing stops you from changing the project settings back to something higher before you render... I do that with color, I edit in 8 bit mode, then switch to 32 bit mode after to color, since you don't need smooth playback to color, then I render out from there. This speeds things up a good bit. In extreme cases, you could probably drop the resolution even lower for faster decoding. If all else fails, there's also proxies... just remember they only load in preview or draft quality on the preview monitor, good and best use the original media.

All good advice. I did use proxies until I figured the driver thing out. A great workaround in a pinch, but it takes up a lot of space with such big files.

Also, I don’t even have to change my project settings back to higher resolution before rendering. I simply choose a higher resolution render profile, and it supersedes the project “settings.” So it’s actually super easy.

Also, I don’t even have to change my project settings back to higher resolution before rendering. I simply choose a higher resolution render profile, and it supersedes the project “settings.” So it’s actually super easy.

It's a good idea to anyway, as the project resolution can have an effect on certain effects, AI upscaling at the event fx level, for instance, relies on the project resolution to determine what resolution it upscales to (or maybe it's the media fx level, I forget, one of them lets you go up to 4x the resolution of the original clip, the other lets you go up to the project resolution).

Also, I don’t even have to change my project settings back to higher resolution before rendering. I simply choose a higher resolution render profile, and it supersedes the project “settings.” So it’s actually super easy.

It's a good idea to anyway, as the project resolution can have an effect on certain effects, AI upscaling at the event level, for instance, relies on the project resolution to determine what resolution it upscales to.

I’m just doing cross fades, adding sharpness, a LUT and color grading. Do you think the rendering will have issues if that’s all I’m doing?

I don't think so, but I'm not 100% sure how it all works under the hood, so I can't say for sure.

I've heard a lot of success by disabling the legacy HEVC decoder in file i/o settings as well, in addition to driver issues.

Reality, it's possible Resolve is better utilizing the nvidia GPU to do the decoding, whereas VEGAS splits the load and can assign one GPU to the timeline acceleration and one to decoding, often which it assigns intel GPUs to if available... so it's possible that in VEGAS, it's using intel to decode, and there's an issue with that driver on your system causing trouble. Worth checking out.

Ah I'll have to try disabling the legacy HEVC decoder, thanks for that.

Regarding drivers, it's a bit weird on this particular Dell as I recently found out. So if you install Intel's driver update app it will install newer versions of the video drivers compared to Dell's driver update app. Seems like a good thing at first but I found when I did that the entire system ran horribly, with poor performance on everything even outside of Vegas. So I uninstalled Intel's driver update app, re-ran Dell's to have it install an older version of the Intel Graphics Driver and poof the system ran great like usual. Very weird I know but the moral of the story is on the Dell XPS 15 just stick with Dell's "Support For XPS 15" for driver updates. They may be older, but looks like they are actually tested specifically for the XPS 15. So I have the latest drivers as provided by Dell.

I should check how Vegas compares to Resolve as far as what gpu it's using for decode on the timeline with HEVC, I'll do more testing on this when I get back home in a few days. I've read that spec wise the Intel gpu is actually better than NVidia's for video decode because it apparently supports more formats and presumably does not need to do any main memory to gpu memory copies just to decode, but I guess I'll see.