Lockup during Rendering

Aggie wrote on 8/10/2007, 8:13 PM

Vegas Movie Studio 6.0b build 126 fails to complete rendering jobs. The job is a movie video of still .jpg images that is about 13 minutes long. When I use the rendering command or the "make move" command, the rendering job starts and runs for approx. 2 minutes, then just hangs up.

The rendering job seems to stop during the job, but the estimated times continue to run. Using the Windows XP Performance tool, I can tell that the task has stopped, because the CPU utilization drops from the typical 70% to less than 10%. I've noticed that the memory utilization starts out less than 1GB but always fails around 1.7GB.

I've rendered this movie clip before along with other ones. The only change here is a few edits. There is a sound track with it, but I believe Vegas renders that last.

Also, I've noticed that I'm getting a lot lock-ups when editing, so plenty of Saves has been my work-around. I think that the two crash mechanisms are linked together, because as one gets worse (more frequent) the other one gets worse. It started early on with rendering errors, so I split the total job into smaller clips, but now this issue has gotten so bad that I can't even render small jobs.

I'm running a HP e1650 with 160GB HD (80GB free) with an AMD dual 64 3800+ processor that has 2GB of RAM.

I've reinstalled the Vegas MS 6.0 and been looking for patches or other helps with no success. Please help as I'm totally stalled.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 8/10/2007, 8:50 PM

I think you are hitting a bug maybe with a memory leak that eventually crashes the encoder that is possibly not "used" to work under so much data load. A 13 minute image stills video should not require 1.7 GBs of RAM IMHO. You might want to download the VMS 8 trial and see if you are getting the same problem. Also, make sure you don't use more threads than your CPUs support.

Chienworks wrote on 8/10/2007, 9:12 PM

How large are your .jpg image files? Vegas has problems if the frame size of the images is too large and you use too many of them. You may want to resize them to something closer to the output size. For example, if your images are 3600x2400 then resizing them to something like 900x600 would help a lot.

Eugenia wrote on 8/10/2007, 9:55 PM

That's true. If you are shooting for HD, use a 2MP resolution, 1600x1200. Load your pictures on photoshop or paintshoppro or gimp, do the resizing using the billinear algorithm (don't use "smart size") and then use a unsharpen mask. Then, images are on their best quality, ready to be imported to vegas.

ADB wrote on 8/10/2007, 10:17 PM

I've been getting similar lockups with 8.0a, but with video (haven't tested stills). Also getting occassional crashes. I've been working with the Sony support people, who have been helpful, but still no fix as yet.

I have:
Rebuilt the Win swap file (set to zero, restart, reset to system set)
Installed the latest drivers for video, audio, ide, network cards
Tried changing BIOS settings "No-execute Memory Protect", C1E, EIST. No overclocking.
Defragged ... 100GB of spare disk space.
Cleaned the registry
Closed all non essential memory resident apps, including rundll32 and ctfmon
Closed all non essential services via services.msc
Tested for viruses ... always very careful in this respect anyway and its a fairly new PC (Pentium 4, Gigabyte GA-8VM800M, VIA P4M800)
Windows/Temp folder exists
No dlls on desktop
Removed VMS, cleaned the registry and re-installed.

I've done a lot of trials and what I've found is:
1. Reducing the number of VMS threads increases stability. That is, 4 threads crashes/locks up/stalls sooner in the render than 2 or 1. There is almost no difference with render times by changing the number of threads.
I ran a test program "Thread3r" and it showed that 1,3,4 threads ran at about 8% of the speed of 2 threads.
I don't know if this is normal ?
2. Having the project resolution the same as the render, increases stability.
3. Having a mix of avi and m2t files reduces stability
4. Reducing the render frame rate increases stability

I do get some successful renders but it almost seems a matter of chance.

Is it possible there is a VMS bug or does anyone have any other suggestions please ?