>>>Set dynamic ram to zero worked? That seems strange. Nice to hear it worked for you but I'm not exactly sure either why it would since the dynamic ram is used only for previewing short sections of video smoothly and does not come into play during rendering to an ouput file.<<<


Not strange at all. Once the memory is allocated for dynamic previews it is not available to the render engine for its purposes. This is true for other functions with Vegas as well. SCS has made this clear in previous publication. Using low memory numbers for dynamic preview will speed up things. It also can play a part with render memory issues. Set the dynamic preview memory numbers high only for specific needs or when you find a good balance. Before you complain about Vegas , it has to do with how Windows allocates dedicated memory, not a bonehead problem with Vegas. It is a simple user action to choose when to allocate memory for dynamic preview and when to free it up.

Thanks for the reminder to folks Vic. As always your experiences tell the story for many users. That and you are just an all round inspiration to many of us.

KK

...I went into Preferences and unchecked the box to show a preview of the video as it was rendering.

The preview RAM does two things. It sets aside space for RAM previews but it's also the place where cached frames go. I may be wrong about this but I think Vegas caches frames from the preview window, so Vegas would be caching frames as you render. When you turn the preview during render off Vegas probably won't cache frames.

Setting Preview RAM to zero would have a similar effect. On the other hand, people say varying things about this and a set of tests at different settings might be in order. I'd maybe try renders at 0, 16, 127, 129, and 256 to see if there's a difference. One of the users here did that several years ago and found that there were sweet spots, but Vegas has changed since then so I'd retest it.

Or, if you have a system that works, stick with it.

The truth???

I have been doing this a Looooonnnnng time. Started as a professional still guy when I was 15 and was doing stuff for Ingenue, Vogue and McCalls by the time I was 22.
So I have always Looooved new cameras, lenses, and later - well - digital toys.

My latest acquisition was a DSLR with a full sized sensor. If you've been on this site long enough, you might remember me saying that a fs sensor was my biggest wish, and the ONLY way I felt video would ever look like 35mm. That was back around 2002 or so. Few people even understood what I was talking about.

Nevertheless -I think it will now be proven so. Time (as always) will tell.

But listen up... we are ALL pioneers in the hugest media revolution in the history of mankind. We are ALL "bleeding on the cutting edge". If we didn't have each other - man - I'd still be doing, well, I don't know what.

Thankfully, at the same time that the industry, the process and technology moves forward (in totally inscrutable manners) - the communication network has matched stride. These days when I have a techy problem I go directly to Google and then here (if G. doesn't have the answer) BEFORE I ever go even to the help menus of the programs themselves. Now that's amazing. And to be able to get (almost) immediate answers to a subject as esoteric as the vagarities of Vegas??? Well that's beyond science and into the realm of magic.

Anyway - I lost a good buddy today - to the ravages of old age. It puts one in a philosophical frame of mind, for sure. (So long Stan... I'll miss ya).

Ya know, life has been very sweet to ANYONE reading the Sony Vegas forum. We are among the most blessed of humans. We ARE the dreams that our forebears couldn't even IMAGINE, sitting around those campfires - only a short while ago. (Hey - there are still a heck of a lot of campfires burning today, in this world!)

Perhaps we are the beginning of the greatest advance in the history of humanity.

Perhaps we are at the end.

No matter which it is... these are certainly the best of times.

v

I've been doing this for ages. Even during editing if you don't NEED the RAM Preview setting it 32MB seems to cure a lot of problems. I believe SCS themselves were recommending this.
The only question is why the code isn't smart enough to do this dynamically. Would be one less thing for us to worry about as we work.

Bob.

Yikes...I did not know that. I thought the program released the memory reserved for dynamic ram preview once rendering to a file type started. Yes, it would definitely be great if the software did this dynamically for both rendering output as well as during timeline playback (as long as dynamic ram preview isn't in use on the timeline). Yeah, I guess there's still plenty for me to learn about Vegas Pro.

Steve

Great idea Bob... I hope someone picks it up.

...and "Living"... don't kid yourself - they ALL have their little quirks. Even the Flames and Smokes (which cost mucho dollars) have their little "kick the tires here to make 'er go). And of course, just about the time they work out all the kinks... there's new upgrade. Boy - if they made and released and upgraded cars in the same manner - there would only be about 12 very aggessive drivers left on earth.

But it's fun.... (except when you're on a deadline).

SCS have made Vegas Smart enough to down-res Preview if it is falling in fps.

Surely the same philosophy could be attached to Lowering Build RAM Previews for rendering? But that takes coding and testing? . . . . . And how much of this will be redundant once SCS has us all move to 64-bit where oodles of RAM awaits, and the development=time=$$ of 32-bit is less than attractive to the accountants?

Do I have a point?

Grazie

Well 1GB of RAM holds precious little HD preview at Best/Full so once I migrate to Win64 I can see me wanting to use lots of that to hold preview video. So releasing it when not needed would still make a lot of sense.

Bob.

Yes. - g

"...if they made and released and upgraded cars in the same manner..."

Looks like Toyota has started leading the way in that regard! A number of people are waiting for the Prius 2010.0a car hoping the bugs will be fixed. I'm going to hold out for the 2010.0d model.

: )

Steve

Bob sez: So releasing it when not needed would still make a lot of sense.

True, but it often gets used in the render, at least where the frame is in RAM and can be used for the final render. This is why some people report that their renders start out very fast and then slow down. the fast part is coming out of RAM.

As far as RAM preview space goes, it's always in use even if you didn't explicitly render to RAM because Vegas uses the space to stash frames as it plays. The only ways I can think of to stop it are to set it to zero, or to stop it during renders set vegas to not show progress in the preview window during renders. And I'm not sure setting it to zero is always the right choice.

It'd be nice to have yet another panel for vegas that shows CPU usage, memory usage, RAM preview usage, and had a slider to crank up or down the Preview RAM setting. A dashboard, essentially. (Add to that things like CPU load, temperatures, rendered frames per second, estimated completion time/date, a render pause button, save partial render and quit button, etc. We could build quite a list.)

Rob

"Bob sez: So releasing it when not needed would still make a lot of sense."

I been thinking for a long time that many crashes and rendering hanging up was related to preview ram management, mainly, the issue of fitting a compressed frame in the last remainder of the buffer but the buffer has just "short" of a few bytes. Since a compressed frames can vary a lot in size between each other frame, predicting the next "fit" can fall into the mathematical error "blackhole" of even/odd byte addresses errors that can also screw-up core memory caching.

Two changes fixed this for me. First I went into Preferences and unchecked the box to show a preview of the video as it was rendering. I believe that will free up a little more ram for the rendering process. The other change I did was to modify some of the Vegas files to allow it to access more than 2GB of ram, per a post in this forum by a former legendary (infamous?) poster named blink3times. But since you only have 2gigs of ram that solution won't work for you.

Hi Steve - I'm curious about your solution. I started another thread on this here:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=713162&Replies=3

But let me ask: I don't see a check box that allows me to display video previews while rendering. Am I missing something? Also, which files did you modify to allow Vegas to access more than 2GB of RAM (I have 6GB - Win 7 64)?

Thanks.

Peter: What is on the timeline. 1- What type of video 2 - What size JPG's if any. Also, can you play the output clip to the point where it crashed?

Have you checked into the prices of RAM lately? I just bought 8GB for my laptop for $275. Vegas 64 will use all of it if it needs to.

Peter: What is on the timeline. 1- What type of video 2 - What size JPG's if any. Also, can you play the output clip to the point where it crashed?

Timeline = .mov files from my T2i (1920X1080 24p H.264)
No jpegs
Yes, clip plays fine up to the point where the file stopped rendering.

I think I mentioned above, I am able to render 720 24p .mp4 files using Main Concept AVC that comes with Vegas without issue. It is only WMV 11 renders that are crashing Vegas.

I also ran the Windows memory diagnostic tool this morning thinking maybe I had some bad RAM, but it said no errors. The power supply that came with the computer is kinda weak/underpowered and I hear it labor while rendering my video files. Could that contribute to the crash?

OK - just tried to render the same project on a second computer and had the same problem, so it's not computer specific.

Let me ask: using .mov files from my Canon DSLR's (and Win 7 64 & Vegas 9e), should I install the latest version of Quicktime? I am running an older version of Quicktime Alternative on both my systems...

surely more ram helps but I wonder if this is a difference between NO preview ram and SOME preview ram?

rob

Peter: You say you can play the broken clip up to where it crashed. What happens if you remove the clip where it crashes and replace it with some else.

Try that. Maybe you have a filter or a bad clip in there. It worth a try.

What happens if you remove the clip where it crashes and replace it with some else.

Thanks. Thought of that. But: I'm not using any filters on this one (on another similar project I had a load of filters and it never crashed!). And it stops rendering at different points - it never crashes on the same timeline event (and the same project crashes in different places on two different computers....)

Peter: Hold "shift" and go "Options" and then "Preferences".
Click on Internal tab. Scroll down 80 - 90%.
See there "RAM preview limit" and the default is 1024. What is your set to?
Below that is "RAM preview limit (64bit) default 32,768. What is your's set to?

It's kind a strange that it's a "preview" setting but it affected my rendering when using Vegas 8. I haven't had it in Vegas 9

Scroll back to about 60% and see there "memory needed by Vegas" both for 64bit as well. What is yours set to?

just wondering while you mentioned it... what do you usually have your preview limit set to? I set it to 400...out of 1024.
Also how many rendering threads is common for a quad core machine?