Okay, okay. I added the details on my system to my signature. I hope this suffices.

But my inquiry was more of a best practices when working with VMSP17 and I would think that would apply in general. For example, the best practices to manage a long timeline would seem to be independent of system capability.

Don't multitask, keep Dynamic RAM low except when needed, keep drivers current, use timeline proxies and intermediates, save and restart every two hours.

@Joe-Engel4655
Looking at your hardware and compare it to mine there might not be any problem to add very much heavy 4 K and long events to a timeline in VMSP 17, but who do you think will take a look at the result of the more than 10 hours project rendered to a file?
I show you what is for sure possible on a timeline filled with many ( +10 hours ) heavy 4K AVC and HEVC files made with my GoPro 7 Black and DJI Pocket cams

@j-v with your desktop or current laptop?

That was on new laptop, but on my desktop I see the same and because there are more and older files I loaded more than 14 hours of the same 4K AVC and HEVC sourcefiles from GOPro and DJI

Thank you both for your responses. j-v, I did not mean that I would make a 10 hour render. I meant to say that I might have 10 hours of source files from which I might whittle down to a 1 hour render. But I was concerned with both the capability of VMSP17 (204) to handle that kind of volume as one project (which you seem to indicate is possible with my setup) and also the capability of a reasonably experienced editor (not me) to effectively manipulate that amount of complexity and volume in a single project. In other words, what is best practice?

My practise has always been to sort first the files of a certain date, set them in their logical order and cut off the pieces I dont want to show and after that add the next ones and so on until I have a lenght that I want to show myself or others. In the past, everytime I saved the .vf under a number but today I use the " Advanced save" in the menu Tools to make a save every moment I want it to make automatic.
After I'm ready with the total amount for my project I start the rest of editing as color or other FX's, titles, sometimes accelerations and so on.

I was concerned with both the capability of VMSP17 (204) to handle that kind of volume as one project (which you seem to indicate is possible with my setup) and also the capability of a reasonably experienced editor (not me) to effectively manipulate that amount of complexity and volume in a single project. In other words, what is best practice?

Best practice is not to import all your footage into your project at once and than start editing, but use the explorer to drag just the clips needed in your project directly into the timeline.

Thank you 3POINT. That would work except that I have no idea in advance, what clips I need. I typically just have 20 4GB MP4 files all dated the same day different times. I was hoping I would not have to use a pre-Vegas application just to identify and prune the clips I want to assemble into Vegas.

It's the amount of clips imported into VMS that could limit editing, not their size.

I'm also wondering which action takes several hours and is worthwhile to shoot.

Regarding action that takes hours. These are "Action Camera" and "Dashcam" types of filming. Think of a time lapse 24 hour shot of a bird's nest with chicks hatching. Think of continuous filming of a mountain transit through a windshield. Now we have 300 Gigs of footage but maybe only an hour of really interesting stuff scattered throughout.

These are "Action Camera" and "Dashcam" types of filming. Think of a time lapse 24 hour shot of a bird's nest with chicks hatching. Think of continuous filming of a mountain transit through a windshield. Now we have 300 Gigs of footage but maybe only an hour of really interesting stuff scattered throughout.

That raises some questions about what format(s) are actually in these files, since many Asian budget cameras use unlicensed or old public domain codecs to cut corners. The thing that first made me suspect VFW is the 4GB chunks. Provide your source file properties please, and we may be able to give you some intermediate suggestions to cut your working file sizes by up to 90%, which will free up a helluva lot of memory for editing.

Also, if you can upload an actual, short camera sample to Drive or Dropbox, I'd be glad to play with it.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-how-to-post-mediainfo-and-vegas-pro-file-properties--104561/

That's probably my different way of shooting. I selectively shoot when I see something of interest and not shooting everything to look in post if there was something of interest.

3point: Yes, it is a very different way of shooting. And sometimes, 0n a road trip, we'll have no time to even look at the raw footage for 10 days. So imagine 10 days x 10 hours of continuous 1080p raw files to comb through for nuggets. That's why we have a 10Terabyte NAS.

Musicvid: Thank you. I will send you the Mediainfo scan when I can. But just to be clear, VMSP17 is working well with our new "Hot -Setup" PC and the MP4 files we shoot. It really works well. But I still get overwhelmed with the sheer volume of stuff and I visualize a timeline stretching out around the block. I am concerned that VMSP will just choke and die when I have several days of editing already invested. Hope that makes sense.