Thanks John. This must be the largest/longest project I've worked on so it kind of stumped me. I do notice that when I first open this project, the memory fills up to about 463M. Being that I have 1.5G of RAM, it doesn't take it long (about a minute or two into the video) for the memory to fill and crash Vegas.

Just to make sure you and I are on the same sheet of music...I should to take the 17 min project, and segment it into smaller divisions (i.e. 4 smaller "projects" of roughly 4 minutes each), render those (as AVI or MPG1 or 2 files?) and then bring them back into Vegas as a "new" project and render all together.

Please let me know if this is whay you were thinking. Thanks!

Render the parts to the same format as your final project and then stitch them back together again in a 'master' project, unless of course you're not going to something like mpeg in which case use say the Sony YUV codec or render to uncompressed if you have the disk space to spare.
Bob.

How big are the photos? You only need less than a 1MP (megapixel) photo to look great. If you are putting 3MP or 5MP photos on the timeline, this is definitely your problem.

The general rule of thumb is, if the photos are larger than double you final output (e.g., 1440x960 for NTSC), then resize them to be double and you will see a dramatic decrease in memory usage. Twice the resolution of your final output leaves plenty of room for pan and zooming. If there is no panning or zooming you can even get away with using the same resolution as your output.

~jr

If you can use Vegas 5, go back to that version. This memory problem with still photos was introduced in Vegas 6. If you can't go back to version 5, then make sure you keep Vegas 6 up to date. I am sure that this problem will eventually be resolved. Here is the link to the update page (currently version 6.0b):

Vegas Update

In the meantime, the only thing you can do is to down-res your pictures. For NTSC SD DV (720x480), your pictures don't need to contain more pixels than this, unless you zoom in. In that case, multiply the above numbers by the zoom ratio (i.e., if you zoom in so the pan/crop box is 1/2 the size of the original in each direction so that it occupies 1/4 of the screen real estate, then you need 1440x960 pixels). I usually add a 20% fudge factor and keep a few more pixels.

If your photo editor allows pictures to be down-res'd via a batch facility, this won't take much time.

I too experienced this.
To solve the problem I split my project into Regions (1-5). Then joined them in another Vegas project for a Final Render.

I know, I know... workarounds suck! But heah... at least it will get your project done.

Thanks for all the suggestion guys! Yeah many of the photos and scanned document are probably larger than 1M...but many are also smaller (really low res). The client provided all the pix/scans so I'll certainly work at resizing the large ones where I can (I am doing quite a bit of "animation" on them).

I've also opted to render smaller regions, but I'm still only able to render about 60 seconds a crack (ARGH!). But being that the due date is fast approaching, I need to really keep moving forward (no matter how tedious the work).

I'm also planning on upping my RAM from 1.5 to 2.5GB since I've been getting more requests to do these types of productions (which is a good thing). They're not all that glamorous, but it's interesting and fun to keep trying/learning different editing/special effects techniques (no matter what the project is).

I don't know what do you use for your image processing, but IrfanView has nice features, including a very nice batch conversion tool.

Thank GARoss...yeah I didn't have any problems when doing something like this on Vegas5. I tried opening this project in V5, but it wouldn't open it...bumber.

Does any one have any idea when Sony will get this fixed V6?

I understand that Vegas cannot employ more than 2 GB RAM. However if you run several instances of Vegas then the extra RAM is very useful.