Memory Management

Derm wrote on 9/21/2008, 10:59 AM

I am experiencing huge problems in Vegas 8 Pro (b & c) at the moment. Constant crashes and failed renders. I am in the middle of two big projects at the moment, niether of which will render. I am currently running with the idea that this might be a memory issue.
I have 2 gb installed. Can anybody give me a few pointers on the best way to manage memory in Vegas?
Thanks
Derm

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 9/21/2008, 11:52 AM

There aren't a lot of options that I know of. In Vegas you can:

--use a modest setting for Preview RAM. Not too big, not too small. Less than 256MB, more than zero.
--This probably isn't practical, but working with media types that don't use interframe compression might help. Things like HDV and AVC (a huge culprit) require a whole group of pictures to be decoded. For HDV that's 15 frames, and if you have transitions that's 15 frames from each of two clips, and if you have multiple tracks overlapping clips then I think the dependencies might cascade and you start to need a LOT of frames decoded for Vegas to render just one frame.
--Break up you project into smaller bits (save as, delete half of each, save, repeat)
--Remove unused clips (save as, clean out, save).
--I wonder if it's practical to frameserve out to another copy of Vegas which then does the encoding? Never thought of this before but this makes the source veg just output uncompressed frames and the destination project renders the uncompressed frames. Hmmm...you could even frameserve out to VP8.1...

Otherwise, from the hardware side of things, you could try popping one stick of ram out, then the other. Projects that use a lot of RAM and get it really hot might expose problems with the ram.

Those are just my thoughts on it.

Rob Mack

riredale wrote on 9/21/2008, 12:48 PM

Before doing anything drastic, I'd suggest you take the side panel off of the PC so as to drop internal temps significantly. You'll also probably be amazed at how much fuzz there is inside the case, so clean it out with a vacuum nozzle. If everything runs fine after that, you have a temperature issue.

If that doesn't work, remove one of the two memory sticks, making sure the remaining stick is in the appropriate slot for single-stick installations. If Vegas eventually crashes, swap the memory sticks. If memory is not the issue, then you start experimenting with other stuff.

I have found memory to be much more troublesome that I would have first imagined, and of course rendering really taxes the processor(s). If it's a heat issue, there are lots of things you can do down the road to fix that, once you get your current project finished.

rmack350 wrote on 9/21/2008, 12:58 PM

Yep, good first step. Set a house fan to blowing air into the case while it's open.

Obviously, breaking apart a project shouldn't be done until you eliminate the possibility of heat problems.

rob

John_Cline wrote on 9/21/2008, 1:41 PM

Using the nozzle from a vacuum cleaner can cause static electricity and potentially fry some of your computer's components. Using canned air or an air compressor is the preferred method. It is also much more effective at removing dust from the inner reaches of your box.

riredale wrote on 9/21/2008, 11:54 PM

Well, I guess one could use canned air, though I've always used the vacuum cleaner (too cheap to buy the cans). I don't understand why there could be static charges under "suck" mode but not under "blow." To date I've never had any issues, but that doesn't mean the process couldn't conceivably create a charge.

Also, I once made the mistake of blowing vigorously onto a motherboard with my own breath. The whole room was suddenly enveloped in a dust cloud that settled on every surface. With the vacuum method, nice and tidy.

John_Cline wrote on 9/22/2008, 12:53 AM

I live in the high desert of New Mexico and the air is quite dry, pretty much anything generates static electricity here. A large volume of dry air travelling through the plastic hoses of newer vacuum cleaners will generate a static charge and it will conveniently arc from the vacuum attachment on the hose to the grounded computer chassis. It happens a lot here.

Also "sucking" will only work if there is a way for the air to get "behind" the dust and pull it out. Blowing the air tends to force the air into nooks and crannies and forces it out. Yes, it does tend to create a dust cloud and, of course, this is best done outside or at least in the garage.

blink3times wrote on 9/22/2008, 3:45 AM

Are you overclocked?

I found that I could wind my Q6600 up pretty good, but if I wound it up TOO much it would still seem to work with Vista and otherwise take on the APPEARANCE of working fine.... and would crash on memory intensive programs.

megabit wrote on 9/22/2008, 7:10 AM

I second what blink has written. In fact, when I bought my first quad almost 2 years ago, I played with overclocking a lot and discovered that if I overdid just a little bit (especially with RAM timings), some torture tests would run OK, but Vegas 7 would crash on me!

BTW, Vegas 7 was my first application to take full advantage of all 4 cores, which made me very happy after spending over $1,000 for one of the first QX6700's in the world (most people were saying I would never use this much power).