Memory Issue

RCF_DV_Guru wrote on 1/13/2004, 1:07 AM
Vegas 4.0e
System: P4 1.3 / 1 GB Rambus Ram / FX5800

I have produced many projects to date and maybe this is a dumb question... actually I hope it is, and that there is a simple answer to it.

I have been running short on system memory for some strange reason all of a sudden. Picture this... I have 100 jpg pics that I am simply just adding to my project one by one. They are standard jpg's, but as I add them to the project my system memory drops dramatically... like 1 jpg file (5meg) eats up 100 meg of system memory. I have been using 'Ram Saver' to watch it happen before my eye's. Is this weird or what ?

And yes, after I add the 8th or 9th jpg, Vegas crashes... suffers an Exception, or words to that effect.

Comments

kevgl wrote on 1/13/2004, 4:14 AM
What is the OS?
RCF_DV_Guru wrote on 1/13/2004, 5:47 AM
XP Pro
farss wrote on 1/13/2004, 5:52 AM
Two things wierd going on here,
1) why is each jpg using up so much RAM
2) Vegas still should not crash, the need for more RAM should cause it to get paged to disk.

Sorry but beyond that I'm at a loss. I've put quite a number of huge stills (tiffs) on the T/L and Vegas slowed to a crawl but didn't die. In the end I dropped the res of the still in half and converted to PNG or I'd still be working on the thing.
JohnS wrote on 1/13/2004, 6:18 AM
I have been having nightmarish problems doing basically the same thing, only I get a memory error. My memory error happens most often when transitioning from a jpeg to an avi problem. I have attempted to email Sony, but you probably know what that leads to ... NOTHING.

I have done everything that I can possibly think of, including installing XP twice with nothing but Vegas running. I turned off all of my effects. I turned off hyperthreading on my machine prior to re-installing XP (it is a 3.06 with a gig of Rambus memory) twice. I've tried the freeware program FreeRAM XP Pro (it is a great little program, even though it didn't solve my problem. I've also copied all of my files into a new .veg file. I've configured my swap/virtual memory every which way you can think of. I've tested my ram. And on, and on, and on, and on. Needless to say, I have wasted literal days and days and days on this business.

I'm so @#$& frustrated right now with Sony and this Vegas product that I'll probably be checking out Premiere Pro when I get back next week from out-of-town business. I don't know what else to do. And, if you do any memory error searches, you'll find that we are not alone.

Best of luck.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/13/2004, 6:34 AM
Do your pictures need to be 5 meg? I’ve created videos in Vegas with 350+ jpgs on a P4 1.7Ghz with 512MB of memory and had no problems at all but I batch converted them down to 1.3 MB each (just enough to pan and zoom a bit). Just as a test, you might want to copy them all to another directory for safekeeping. Batch convert them down to 1-2MB each. Then load the project and see if this helps.

~jr
SonyEPM wrote on 1/13/2004, 10:04 AM
I'm assuming these jpegs came from a hi-rez still camera?

A 5mb jpeg, when opened and DECOMPRESSED to full rez inside Vegas (or Photoshop, or Premiere), is going to be ~100+ mb, so the memory usage you are seeing seems reasonable.

I tried creating a 5mb jpeg in my new copy Photoshop using a color ramp and noise, and to get to the 5mb size I had to set the image size to 7500x5600x150 dpi and then crank all the jpeg compression settings to max quality. It took 10 minutes to save. If I save this same image as a bmp, it clocks in at ~ 120 mb- huge! Multiply that by 100+ stills and you can see that its going to be pretty taxing on your system in general and on any app as well.

So: You really don't need your files to be this big, unless you are zooming in 20x on every single shot, which I doubt you are. Save them off as .bmp at 72 dpi, 2000 pixels for the long dimension (constrain the other dimension) and you should be fine- you'll be able to zoom in ~3x if needed, the images will in general be very very sharp. I can easily open hundreds of files like this in Vegas.

If you do need to zoom in more than 3x on certain shots, fine, save those at a higher rez but as a general rule your (current) source file size is total overkill for video.

One last- I tried loading 300 bmp files (2000x1000x150 dpi) in both Vegas 4.0e and Pr*miere Pr*. Especially if you have timeline thumbnails displayed, Vegas performs much better in all my tests.



RCF_DV_Guru wrote on 1/13/2004, 7:50 PM
Thanks Guy's. Help much appreciated.

I had a closer look at my photos... I originally scanned them at 1200 Dpi (7100 x 4704) 24 Bit Depth and so yes they are fairly large. I scanned them with Paintshop and then batch converted the whole lot from .psp files to .jpg

Once I batch converted then down a little more, the project was fine.

Thanks heaps for the help again !!!

Wayne (aka)
BillyBoy wrote on 1/13/2004, 8:17 PM
Check out this helpuful site that goes into lots of details and suggestions about scanning. What to do and not do.

http://www.guides.sk/scantips2/index.html#menu
ntltec wrote on 1/14/2004, 8:36 AM
Here is a very good web site that exapains why you do not kneed to scan a picture at a high res. if it is to be shown on a TV set....
http://www.guides.sk/scantips2/

Basically , due to the fact a TV has a limited number of lines to display an image ,the higher a photo resolution , the more pixels it will have so the TV will simple effectivly ZOOM into a portion of the picure equal to the numbe of lines and thus pixels it contains....

In other words a 4 meg picture will appear HUGE on a tv screen , not anymore detailed. The larger the DPI the effectivly the larger the picture will display on the tv set.... a 100k image would appear as detailed as a 4 meg, only smaller.......
JJKizak wrote on 1/14/2004, 8:57 AM
I have just completed a 33 minute slide show with 114 megs total amount of jpeg slides on timeline some of them 1.5 megs. most of them
450K. It was a bit sluggish so added another 1 gig of ram. It did help a lot but did not totally eliminate the video sluggish loading on some of the big ones but it did eliminate all of the sound playback hesitations.

JJK
RichMacDonald wrote on 1/14/2004, 10:08 AM
I just did a 70 min slide slow with hundreds of megs of png files. (300+ slides, each originally 4x6 prints scanned at 300dpi). And on a Pentium II 350 MHz with 256MB RAM). Sure I had some "issues", primarily a few seconds lag as each slide was reached in the timeline. And I had to edit the video and audio separately using muting, but look at my computer platform! No crashes or out-of-memory problems. The solution was pre-render.

I part company with those who say we should pre-convert our stills to the correct size. I'm always cropping or zoom/panning, and it would be a PITA to have to go back and re-scan/re-import those cases. Until I see the still in the preview window with the safe areas, I don't know how it needs to be crop/zoom/panned. So its a workflow issue for me.

Apart from the performance hit (once again, pre-render is your friend), the only other issue I can think of is the resizing engines of Vegas vs. YourStillsEditor. But if you set your project preferences to "best", Vegas does a great job. Nothing that would ever show up on screen, surely.

For serious performance anality, I suppose you could batch your stills into two sets: (1) Original, and (2) Resized for Vegas. Do your editting with (2), then replace that directory with (1) for final rendering. But you'll still be making cropping decisions with (2) *before* you actually get around to editting in Vegas. And IMHO that hurts far more than it helps.