Nice long chat to Sony ...

Darren Powell wrote on 3/8/2008, 1:00 PM

I spent an hour on the phone to Sony in the US from Sydney Australia yesterday trying to find out what the hell was going on with the render problem.

I gave up on tech support after being on hold for 20 minutes costing me an effing fortune ... so I dialed Customer service, hit some random numbers for an extention I didn't know ... and got through to a human ...

Granted, this guy was VERY helpful ... tech support wasn't his department but he listened and started working on tracking down any information he could on the problem as I described it ... basically can't render jack-s**t in Vegas if your project is a big one ...

He called through to tech support and got a link for a 'known issue' which he read to me in detail ... basically if you try to render a large (whatever that is) m2t project ... the memory usage continues to go up and up until Vegas crashes. (There was no mention of Cineform ... of course ... but you can bet your boots the same applies to NEO projects etc. ) Yep, that's my problem ... I watch it every day in Task Manager ... sometimes I get to 100% ... most times I don't ... Vegas either disappears off the screen or I get 'sorry for the inconvenience ...

I asked if there was a fix on the way ... no infomation about a fix ... but this guy assured me that Sony were working on it ... then he apologised for the inconvenience on behalf of Sony ... which I thought was a very damn fine thing to say. Totally useless in relation to getting my film out of Vegas ... but whoever he was (wish I got his name) he was very very helpful.

So, that's the latest info I've been able to get from SCS ... they know that Vegas has memory issues ... and they reckon they're working on it ... but how long we have to wait to get a fix ... nobody knows.

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

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Comments

Darren Powell wrote on 3/10/2008, 3:46 PM

For my final mix I'm routing SFX to a bus, Dialogue to a bus, Music etc ... depending on which 10 minute chunk of the film I'm working on ... only so that I have individual level control over those tracks ... I still have lots of individual audio tracks ... why do you ask?

busterkeaton wrote on 3/10/2008, 5:47 PM

Just wondering about file management. Wondering if several nested projects with smaller track counts in each project would give you the same issues you are running into.

rmack350 wrote on 3/10/2008, 6:19 PM

I've seen other systems like 844X that would automatically render several video tracks as a unit if you had too many tracks in the project. Easy enough to deal with since it was more like a prerender and was very transparent to the user.

I've also read comments and criticisms of Protools and it's requirement to start rendering things out.

What other systems allow you to have this many tracks running, I wonder? What's comparable?

Rob Mack

Darren Powell wrote on 3/10/2008, 9:11 PM

I don't know Rob and busterkeaton ... but when a company starts advertising a product with 'unlimited audio tracks' ... someone's bound to believe them ... like me and q_vts ...

--------------------------------------

Superior Audio Control
Use unlimited tracks, 24-bit/192 kHz audio, punch-in recording, 5.1 surround mixing, effects automation, and time compress/expand. Apply customizable, real-time audio effects like EQ, Reverb, Delay, and more. Expand your audio processing and mixing options with supported third-party DirectX® and VST audio plug-ins. Use the Mixing Console for precise audio control. More about audio production

-----------------------------------------

Why are people scared to use 'unlimited audio tracks' ... there's the pitch straight from the horses' mouth ... anyway ... I don't think the number of audio tracks has much to do with Veg 8's rendering problems ...

D.

busterkeaton wrote on 3/11/2008, 5:50 AM

My point was that you were running into trouble with your project.
At that point, I don't rely on what the company advertises. I believe also with your project you were able to render all the video and then render all the audio and combine them later.

DGates wrote on 3/11/2008, 6:24 AM

With that many tracks, it sounds like someone's not being very efficient with their editing skills.

Laurence wrote on 3/11/2008, 8:28 AM

so I guess I.m pretty safe with my two tracks of video and two tracks of audio (music bed and V.O.) then... ;-)

JJKizak wrote on 3/11/2008, 11:12 AM

What was that song, "I'm a two track man", I guess I forgot the words.
JJK

VMP wrote on 3/11/2008, 2:10 PM

Posted by: DGates
Date: 3/11/2008 2:24:13 PM

With that many tracks, it sounds like someone's not being very efficient with their editing skills.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Or the other way around ;-).

VMP

Dan Sherman wrote on 3/11/2008, 2:48 PM

I love that screen shot v.
It shows me how much room I have to grow.
Good for you and Darren!
I'm adding ten more tracks to my current proejct, just 'cause I can.
With more to follow.
Efficiency, schmeficiency.
Lets go for a thousand tracks.
Render me Vegas Pro 8!!!
Chew me up and spit me out baby!!!
Back to reality and my 15 track project.
We're at 28 per cent after 4 hours of rendering.
Only nine hours to go for this 1:12 project.
Chomping away.
CPU running at 92-96 per cent..

VMP wrote on 3/11/2008, 3:02 PM

Good statistics Sherman !

Think of it as controlling all the sub ships with your mother ship!

You've got all the strings....

Now Imagine the impossible, with Vegas.

VMP

farss wrote on 3/11/2008, 3:13 PM

Can't believe we mixed a movie (thing shot on film) with only 8 tracks!
That was a physical limit. One of those was a looped atmos track. It really was a loop. Length of 16mm mag tape that went through the transport and into a bin.

No automation on desks back then either, you drove the faders from a cue sheet. Everything stayed in sync as one motor drove the projector, the eight playback decks and the record deck. The tape was sprocketed the same as the film so no capstan slip.

Suddenly I feel very old.

Bob.

rmack350 wrote on 3/11/2008, 3:53 PM

Better yet, BE Impossible with Vegas Pro 8.

;-)

Rob

Gary R. Brown wrote on 4/20/2008, 11:02 AM

I built a new quad core machine and created a reasonably difficult short HD piece to test it's rendering abilities (Differing from the HDV Rendertest which this stock clocked baby managed in 122 secs, and hopefully better with some tweaks!) However, I couldn't get my l'il test clip to complete rendering. I got the same issues mentioned here; Page file usage started to rise and then at ~86% ,bang, a crash. I found that the fourth QT HD file (.mov from Art beats) Seemed to be the issue. If I converted the clip out of he QT wrapper I found that I could stack three .mov files and all was well, but the fourth toasted me. So I think that the memory issue may just be an indicator of the problem which is really third party codec integration. IMHO
GB-)

Coursedesign wrote on 4/20/2008, 12:46 PM

With that many tracks, it sounds like someone's not being very efficient with their editing skills.

Effects-rich movies and TV series (for example Battlestar Galactica) commonly use more than 800 tracks.

But they are not doing their compositing in Vegas.

ushere wrote on 4/20/2008, 4:21 PM

ah, now i understand - every c/g character in 'mass' scenes has their own audio track. goodness me, the 'crowd' scene in ants must have had 10k+

strictly limited

leslie

Coursedesign wrote on 4/20/2008, 4:27 PM

Not audio tracks.

Video tracks.

CorTed wrote on 4/20/2008, 6:27 PM

Maybe 8c will address this memory problem....... I hope

Sab wrote on 4/21/2008, 7:26 AM

I would just like to add that I've had this problem on Vista and XP machines in VPro8b on SD projects that have 10-15 layers of video, stills and graphics with lots of track motion.

I'm responding to Nick's observation that it seems to happen mostly when 3rd party codecs are involved. Same result though, render keeps counting, nothing is really happening and Vegas is very difficult to shut down.

Same project renders fine in V7.

Mike

busterkeaton wrote on 4/21/2008, 9:24 AM

GB,

You should send that veg file into Sony Support so they can try see exactly what is going on.