Opening Project Takes Hours

MUTTLEY wrote on 2/7/2013, 4:37 PM

Gonna be a rough one to explain or remember each and everything I've tried so far but figured I'd post on the off chance someone has had this happen and knows a solution or any random suggestion that hasn't crossed my mind yet.

This only happens with one particular project, Vegas is running great on everything else. A fairly short one but pretty rich with effects, transitions, music, and tons of sound effects. The problem is that it hangs at 45% when opening it back up, to the point where I thought it wouldn't open ever, but if ya leave it in that hanging state long enough, 5 hours or more, eventually like magic it will fully load as if nothing ever happened.

I've tried a thousand different things already to no avail. I've loaded it on an external drive, tried on my laptop, same thing. I suspect that there is a bad piece of media and have gone to considerable lengths to try to figure which it might be. I would systematically take out portions, save under a new file name, close Vegas, re-open, would do the same thing. I have also renamed the folder that everything's in and force it to re-find all the assets, that didn't work. I converted just about every sound effect that wasn't wav to wav and replaced them in the project and that didn't work.

Now this is where it gets a little weird. I have a good number of folders organizing the tons of sound effects I have. I'm going off of memory here but if I recall correctly, I had gone through and renamed each folder one at a time and told Vegas to skip those missing bits instead of finding them. One folder I renamed and skipped Vegas popped right open. Obviously I assumed that the culprit was in that folder, however, I one by one changed the name of the individual sound effects that were in that folder, putting an X at the beginning of the name, and would re-open Vegas to try to isolate the the "corrupt" file I assume is there. When Vegas would say there's a missing file I told it to skip, it continued to stall on each and every one. Change the name of the folder their all in, opens fine, change the name of the audio files hangs forever.

I should also add that I made a new project and dragged and dropped all the literally thousands of sound effects onto the timeline, Vegas did that quick and painless, saved it and re-opened and opened without a hitch.

Right now waiting for it to open again, been over four hours. Thankfully I'm patient and not up against a deadline but sure would love to figure out what the problem is if only just to know.

- Ray
Underground Planet

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MUTTLEY wrote on 2/8/2013, 10:05 PM

Just got back to my computer and happy to say that it finally did open again! At least there's some degree of predictability in the madness!

Tom, not sure if this will work but your simplest question may be onto something, which I have to admit I initially almost dismissed entirely. The project has a lot of mixed media, primary footage being mp4 from my Sony PMW-F3, wav files, avi's from Fraps, png, mp3, jpg, and last but not least mp4's from a GoPro 2. The GoPro files are straight off the camera and I hadn't used their GoPro Cineform Studio to convert to avi. Even though I can drag and drop the mp4's into Vegas I'm wondering if that might be it. I just started converting so won't know till tomorrow.

If it does work it really won't make a lick of sense seeing as when I change the name of my sound effects folder and tell Vegas not to look for them it opens right up even though those GoPro mp4's are still in the project and on the timeline.

Anyway, not much left but to wait and see. Will update once I get those swapped out.

- Ray
Underground Planet

MUTTLEY wrote on 2/9/2013, 1:21 PM

Well, despite my being cautiously optimistic that swapping the GoPro mp4's to converted avi's might do the trick, no such luck. Grrrr ...

Only diff it seems to have made is that it now get's stuck at 46% instead of 45%, not sure if that actually counts as progress though.

- Ray
Underground Planet

nedski wrote on 2/9/2013, 2:49 PM

MUTTLEY, try this.

1 - Start Vegas 12
2 - Close the "Project Media" window
3 - Open your troublesome project

Does it open much faster?

4 - Open the "Project Media" window

Does Vegas go "Not responding" for a long time?

What you're experiencing is similar to what I've seen when opening a large project started in an older version of Vegas. No amount of futzing would make it open as fast as a project started in Vegas 12. I've have no solution yet.

Nedski

MUTTLEY wrote on 2/9/2013, 3:19 PM

lmao, that's pretty hilarious. Closed the Project Media Window and then opened the project and it loaded nearly instantaneous and without a hitch. With it open went to View > Project Media and Vegas immediately choked and went into "Not Responding" mode. I don't doubt that it will eventually snap out of its frozen state if left long enough but for the minor changes and tweaks I need to do on this one I am more than happy to forgo using the Project Media tab. It seems Paddy was on the right track with his question above but just needed to go one step further than changing it from thumbnails to details with the tab needing to be closed completely.

Since this is the exception and not the norm I have no problem with using a workaround, as I've stated this is the only project I've had a problem with. I can see that if this project wasn't as far along as it is it could be potentially much more difficult working without the project media tab but thankfully for this it's a non-issue.

That said I do wonder what it is about this particular project that causes Vegas and the Project Media tab to behave in this way when I haven't had any issues with much longer and more complicated projects.

Regardless, big cyber hug nedski, you nailed it! =)

- Ray
Underground Planet

nedski wrote on 2/9/2013, 4:54 PM

MUTTLEY,

Looking at your systems specs, our computers have only one thing in common, 8 GB of RAM, so I monitored the Windows Task Manager Performance graph.

When opening my old project, with the Project Media window open, the RAM usage didn't go up very much but only one of my processors four cores was was being utilized, only one!

When I opened the same project with the Project Media window closed all four of the processor cores were pegged for just a few seconds then the project loaded in a few more seconds.

I speculate that the Project Media window calls single a threaded sub-routine when opening projects and that it is choking (a technical term ;-) while trying to do whatever it trying to do!

I didn't submit an official bug report. Now that is a confirmed bug, could you?

Nedski

johnmeyer wrote on 2/9/2013, 5:30 PM

First of all, a big group cyber hug for nedski!! This is the sort of thing I remember from this forum when I first joined over a decade ago. Glad to see it's back. The CPU usage with/without the Project Media tab open is a very useful observation.

Second -- and this may be a red herring -- I wonder if disabling Media Manager (Preferences -> General tab) might also stop the slow loading. I have seen many reports of slow loading in the past that I seem to remember were tracked to Media Manager. I think those were solved long ago, but perhaps they have crept back. I don't use Media Manager, but I sure use the Project Media window a lot and would hate to do without.

Finally, I looked at the hidden preferences and used the filter feature to only see settings that had either "project" or "media" in the name. One thing I noted is that there are a lot of paths specified. It is still possible that, as was speculated in earlier posts, one of these paths no longer exists and Windows or Vegas is waiting, over and over, for some response from something no longer attached. One possible way to see whether this is so is to look at the Task Manager and enable the Read and Write columns (which are not enabled by default) and see what activity you get with and without the Project Media tab enabled.

Of course since you have a viable workaround at this point, further testing may be a wasted of time.

Geoff_Wood wrote on 2/9/2013, 5:42 PM

Your project Media window showing List, details, or Thumbnails ? Thumbnails could cause problems maybe....

geoff

MUTTLEY wrote on 2/9/2013, 6:04 PM

Excellent sleuthing Sir.

I can also further confirm that a single core was maxing out. I have a widget for GPU and CPU monitoring but though, I believe it was the second core that was pegged full and the rest not, I didn't make much of it.

The one thing I'm still a little perplexed about is that it seems to me there has to be at least one other variable in play, that being the one that makes the difference between a project being able to open or hanging for an indefinite period of time lasting hours.

To somewhat recap and summarize:

1) This is the only project that I have had this problem with (knock on wood),
2) The issue is not confined to this computer and was reproducible on my laptop even with a different file structure having used the "copy media with project" while saving the veg file and assets to an external drive.
3) Trying to open the project "as is" Vegas would freeze between 45-46% at the same time media appeared in the timeline and Project Media folder though all audio on the timeline read "Building Peaks."
3) Re-naming a parent folder containing wav sound effects and instructing Vegas to skip those files the project would load.
4) Renaming or removing sound effects in that folder individually had no effect and Vegas would freeze regardless.
5) Changing the view in the "Project Media" tab had no effect, Vegas would freeze regardless.
6) Disabling/closing the "Project Media" tab prior to opening the project allows the project to load properly.
7) Attempting to enable/open the "Project Media" tab after the project has successfully loaded causes Vegas to immediately go into it's frozen state.
8) Of note when project is attempting to load with multi-core processor and project media tab enabled one core becomes maxed out.

That seem about right?

- Ray
Underground Planet

rmack350 wrote on 2/9/2013, 6:35 PM

This is kind of killing me because I know I had this problem at one point and I don't remember how I dealt with it, but I'm sure it was about the same solution that Nedski came up with. I was having hangs at 47%.

The general gist of it is that Vegas does A then B then C while loading a project, and it's hanging at a specific task related to building the Project Media Window. Evidently, as Nedski found, this is a single-threaded process. Probably more to the point though is that Vegas can't move on until this job is done.

The things that come to mind here, and this is mostly voodoo, are that perhaps you have a lot of bins in the project media window, or saved smart searches, or perhaps the project media window is docked, or undocked, or on the wrong screen, or that this is a red herring and the issue is actually with the File Explorer window.

This is wild speculation and I'm probably trying to link weird things I've seen with this problem. I have definitely seen problems with Bins being saved from searches where the more bins you've saved this way the slower each subsequent bin creation becomes, and it gets slower exponentially. I suppose smart bins would also do this when you load the project.

I've seen this *sort* of exponential slowing in other programs where the application needed to build or verify a database and when you got past a certain number of entries it just slowed to a crawl. Similar to what Vegas does with bins. In that case part of the problem was that the database check was called twice in code so that it was trying to run twice at the same event. For small projects it wasn't noticeable when they did QA. The project had to get big to notice the problem.

Seemingly, renaming a media folder gets the number of media objects in your project down below a threshold.

There's also a possibility that I bring up from time to time. I've actually had this problem elsewhere but never in Vegas, which is that the total length of a file's path is too long. It's possible, and adding characters to a path or filename might be less productive than removing characters. But, again, I've never seen this happen in Vegas. Most likely this would be because a component in the application handles a pathname differently from Windows itself.

Anyway, food for thought.

Rob

nedski wrote on 2/9/2013, 6:38 PM

MUTTLEY,

I couldn't duplicate your #3(A?) "renaming a parent folder..." step. Vegas 12 still goes "Not Responding" for me.

Just checked what happens when closing (File... Close...) a troublesome project. Vegas 12 goes "Not Responding" and takes a few minutes to actually close the project. Still only one core being used.

I also tried modifying the Project Media window options, no improvement.

I'm kind of suspicious of those new features in the Vegas 12 Project Media window. "Smart Bins" and "Tags" are new to Vegas 12, they weren't there in previous versions. Could these be the source of the ridiculously long loading times? Is the Project Media code trying to add or figure out how to tag files? Is the new "Smart Bin" feature out-smarting it self? ;-)

Ned

Alex_Madrid wrote on 2/20/2013, 1:30 PM

Just browsing the forum here, but I had a very similar issue.
I still use the Media manager for tagging media files. I do this so that I can save the tagging info in the file for archival purposes. I would change to the new VP12 tagging solution if I knew that the info can be saved to the file. AnyHoo. After tagging the videos and saving the information to the file, I had these *.SFL files show up in my media directory. The next time I tried to open the project, it would hang nearly forever and even then sometimes not open.
My solution was to shutdown VP and delete any of these *.sfl files from my media directories. VP12 would then start and load the project just fine. You may look for any other strange types of files in you media directory(s) and remove them. But I would make a backup just to be safe.

I am sorry if someone has already mentioned this, I was just scanning the entries and this thread hit home with familiarity.

If anyone know of any good threads on the new tagging and bins in VP12 could you please post them.

Thanks in Advance.

MUTTLEY wrote on 8/6/2014, 11:28 PM

*sniff* ... it's happening again in V13.

- Ray
- Ray
Underground Planet

Steve Mann wrote on 8/7/2014, 1:24 PM

Mutt - have you gone to Resource Monitor to see what the Vegas process is waiting for?

Also, did you say "thousands" of media? Anything approaching 10,000? There is a limit of 10,000 GDI objects for any program in Windows 7, and if you hit that limit, the program freezes.

Here's a discussion of GDI:
http://www.robertwloch.net/2011/08/10000-gdi-objects-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody/

Here's a program from Microsoft that lets you monitor the GDI count:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

If you are approaching 10,000 GDI's, then there is a registry setting to let you increase the limit:

MRiver wrote on 8/25/2014, 6:18 AM

Hello,

I'm having exactly the same issue. SV12 is taking hours to open a new project.

I started a new workflow. I first created about 20 BINS where I added all the usable subclips that I need for my wedding video.

SV12 gets stuck at about 64% and was taking about 40min to open the project.
Now it's around 86% and takes 3 hours to open the project.

When I disable the project media, it opens the project straight away.

Did anybody found a solution for this annoying problem ?

Since 2 weeks I'm in contact with sony support, but they take like 48h to give an answer and nothing helped what they have suggested.

Steve Mann wrote on 8/25/2014, 7:23 AM

Muttley - have you used 'resmon' to see if the program is waiting for something?

MUTTLEY wrote on 8/26/2014, 9:38 PM

Steve, pretty sure it's no where near 10,000, all I know is that if Project Media tab is enabled pffffffttttt. Not sure how to use resource monitor to see what it might be waiting for? I enabled the Project Media Tab just to see what it says and in RM Vegas is red and reports the status as "Not Responding." Threads 68, CPU 23, Average CPU 23,40. On the right with the graphs it says "CPU 100%, Disk 100 KB/sec, Network 100 Kbps, Memory 100 Hard Faults/sec." On the drop downs Physical Memory only says 50%

Not that any of that means anything to me, just passin it on.

- Ray
Underground Planet

ushere wrote on 8/26/2014, 10:06 PM

try changing project tab to detail view. then try opening.

MUTTLEY wrote on 8/26/2014, 11:00 PM

Yea, that one don't work for me.

- Ray
Underground Planet

Steve Mann wrote on 8/26/2014, 11:21 PM

In resmon, right-click on the Vegas program object then on "Analyze Wait Chain". If you are lucky, there will be a process running that Vegas is waiting to complete before proceeding.

Or_Toltec_Tal wrote on 7/24/2016, 11:55 PM

FOUND THE BUG !!!!!!!!!

After A huge project I worked on won't open I made many experiment. I found it.

it turns out that if you have a Project with more than 28 bins (Project Media Tab) Vegas won't open.

Try this: Create an empty Project, Create 28 empty bins (Name them 1,2,3....28). Save. Close. Reopen.
Vegas Will hung or Will Not Open. (No Media At all In project, just many Bins)

Serious Bug !!
Hope MAGIX will fix this ASAP

Grazie wrote on 7/25/2016, 1:59 AM

After joining in 2009, David comes here, and his first and only post, is to give valuable, tried and tested results to an ancient, 2014 issue MUTTLEY had experienced. I'm stunned.

If there was just one, ONE reason, that MAGIX should and needs to treat this Forum carefully and ensure it gets transferred complete to its own servers, it's this single valuable response from David, aka "Nagual Vision". If we don't keep reinforcing the value of this Golden resource we will do ourselves a disservice.

For many reasons, NV, very well done.

Graham.

NickHope wrote on 7/25/2016, 2:50 AM

I have done some testing on this by creating empty projects with Media Bins in them and seeing how long they take to open. Projects always open snappily in VP10, no matter how many bins. However in VP12 and VP13 the opening time increases exponentially. It approximately doubles for each extra bin. VP13 projects with multiple bins open significantly faster than VP12 projects.

This is quite a dangerous issue. For example if I had a complex project and I decided to arrange the media into just 32 bins, it would take in the order of 2 days on my system for the project to open, effectively locking me out of my project.

If the underlying architecture means this can't be easily fixed, perhaps a warning could be given if creating more than say 16 bins, or perhaps the maximum number could be capped at 20.

Grazie wrote on 7/25/2016, 4:40 AM

What happens if Bins are Nested. Meaning, Bins containing Bins? Would this get over a seemingly otherwise bug?

PeterWright wrote on 7/25/2016, 4:43 AM

Important also to mention that it's completely possible to use Vegas without using Media Bins or the Project Media tab.

I've been using Vegas since version 3 and never use this option. Windows has a fine folder structure, and I use this to keep everything and import directly from there using the Explorer tab.