If there is one thing that confuses me about this problem, it's this:

Why are we crashing on "rendering" and not "playback/assembly".

It seems to me that realtime playback and preview "should" be FAR more resourse intensive then "rendering". I mean,...jeesh, The rendering process has the luxury of working and nibbling on each element in tiny "chunks". It can cashe back and forth all day long if it wants. It doenst have to swallow so much in a big bite. (so to speak)

it just seems to me that our resource problems "should" happen when doing all the REALTIME processes. does that seem like a logical question form any programmer's point of view out there?

Does the problem lie in the code of Vegas' rendering technique itself? Are the scripts looking too far ahead inside each project timeline as they render?

My projects almost always use about 1.5 gigs of RAM usage during rendering. Is that nesessary?

I dont know the answer, I'm just wondering out loud.

CT

My crashes have always seemed to revolve around the GUI hanging and renders either hanging or crashing (there is nothing like the whole Vegas magically disappearing without even an error message in the middle of a render). I do not think I have ever had a crash during playback, although I have had the play button get stuck down and the GUI appear to lock before the playback has actually started.

"Why are we crashing on "rendering" and not "playback/assembly"."

You guys with the problems should try a slightly different track.

Instead of sitting around belly aching about "vegas memory issues" that may or may not exist, you should get together and try to work out exactly what is common with your machines, workflow and anything else that you can think of.

I know that killing cores to a CERTAIN extent solves the problem. That suggests that cores are not the center of the issue but somehow eases the center of the issue

I also know that video cards always seem to sit on the fringe of these issues. My crashing stopped around the time I changed my video card. Serena had a pretty solid machine until she changed her video card... then she started complaining about those 'here and gone' kind of crashes. Now whether the card was the center of the issue or simply eased/complicated the center of the issue I don't know.

I know that these crashes act EXACTLY like a cpu oc'ed way too much or memory that's wound up too high. In other words.... BLINK.... one second the program is there, and the next it's gone. XP would do the exact same thing when I wound things up too high in the BIOS. In fact my vegas crashing was so bad at one point the odd time when it crashed it would take XP with it.

I run nothing special in terms of memory.... 8 gigs of kensington ddr2 at 667.... not the fastest in the world. So try going into BIOS and slowing your memory down a little and see if that helps.... maybe your memory is too fast for its own good.

These are just guesses mind you... but one thing I know for sure.... sitting around swearing at Sony and Vegas sure isn't getting you too far..... is it.

Blink, I do not know what it will take for you to eliminate hardware issues from the equation, but you are clearly incapable of accepting Vegas may have instability flaws. I mean, how can you talk about switching off cores? Are you suggesting that it is the processor that has the problem, rather than the code Vegas uses to utilize the cores? I mean we have been comparing notes on hardware here for over a year, and the one thing we have established with great consistency is that there seems to be no consistent brand or piece of hardware, no driver or custom chip, or version of Windows or service pack which produces these issues. People, including yourself, have been suffering a range of problems on a range of platforms.

Furthermore, it is completely unreasonable to continue to point at hardware issues causing software problems on a platform that makes very little use of hardware features beyond that of the use of standard overlays, and when so many of us can not replicate these kind of problems in any other software on these machines.

On top of that, I did not have anywhere near as many issues on version 6, when the capabilities of the software were supposedly lower and in theory I should have found I was having more problems. Everything points to fundamental problems with the Version 8 codebase.

I think people have to realise that Vegas 8 really has done a huge amount of damage to the platform's credibility across the industry. There were a lot of people that had versions 5-7 in their professional setup, even if just to trancode or make swift rough cuts. A lot of people dumped it at version 8 because it was just too unstable. It is now generally seen as a toy for nerds that like feeling smug for finding workarounds for broken software. The stupid bugs are a huge barrier to the spontaneous freedom of creativity it used to provide. I need the features implemented in the later versions, but I do not need them at the cost of loss of practicality in use.

Blink,..we all love Vegas. We are not on this forum because we hate using it.

With this being said; You can choose to believe anything you want. You can say these rendering problems are due to "solar flares" or "Global Warming" or even "Earths polar magnetic field shifts". In the end, I'm not going to say you are wrong. These are all valid mathematical possibilities.

Most of us believe that the problem will NOT be solved by "Intel", "Dell", "Western Digital", "ATI", "Kingston", "Logitec" or even the people that make my mousepad.

In the end, the problem will be fixed by SCS.

CT

And no,...I dont overclock.

"Blink, I do not know what it will take for you to eliminate hardware issues from the equation, but you are clearly incapable of accepting Vegas may have instability flaws."

First Robert, I have never said that Vegas ISN'T the problem. What I have said and maintain is that there is a sensitivity to certain hardware/software. Now whether that's Vegas's fault, a driver's fault. a mismatched memory fault... etc is anybody's guess.... and I WILL point out that both you and Cliff are as blind (or as right) as everybody else on this issue.

Now if you want to sit there with your hands under your ass and play the blame game then by all means go ahead and do so.... but it's not solving your problem is it.

You speak of consistency... well what IS consistent here is that there are MANY people running Vegas without issue, or at minimum with the odd work around... (as with any other program of this nature). Do you think this is just blind luck??? Interesting... every time this is brought up.... many people with no issues... you people with the problems overlook it, don't answer it... don't even address it... so WHAT is it... blind luck? Are we operating the program so IMPROPERLY that it just just happens to work right? Or maybe we just lucked out with a good program from a bad batch?Maybe our memory is just so completely freaky that it balances everything out?

YOUR problems however seem to extend further than I have seen or heard... with things like stuck play buttons, freezing GUI's and the rest of it. i didn't see anybody replying to this BTW: "By the way, is it me, or are the preview window size options broken in 8.0c?"

And the only credibility that gets attacked when you state unsubstantiated, unproven, unbackable, unfindable, unsearchable rubbish like this:
I think people have to realise that Vegas 8 really has done a huge amount of damage to the platform's credibility across the industry

..... is yours.
You're certainly welcome to speak of yourself..... but who the hell is "People..."and industry"???
===========================================================

@ cliff:

"Most of us know that the problem will not be solved by "Intel", "Dell", "Western Digital", "ATI", "Kingston", "Logitec" or even the people that make my mousepad."

You're the one with the problem... why would you expect any of them to fix it? If I unplug my cpu fan and my cpu overheats and shuts down... is that Intel's fault?

Ok,...so I took a look at the release notes for 8C.

I dont get it,...there is a very long, LONG list of bug fixes for problems I have never seen before on my PC! [gasp!] In fact, prolly 90% of the bug fixes that SCS has done to Vegas,..I (myself) have NEVER ever had with my machine. How dare a minority of people complain to SCS about these problems. How dare SCS waist time fixing them. AND,...how dare everybody for naming them "problems". Especially because Vegas never does those things on my PC.

All those (small numer of) people must be Vegas haters or something.

Take a look,..it's a very long list.

CT

Cliff... I'm not saying don't complain. You're pissed and you have a right to be. You spent good money on a program that you can't properly use.

What I'm saying is... complain to WHO exactly?.... blame WHO exactly?... blame WHAT exactly? What I'm saying is that there are those who are not having the issues you do... WHY?

There are some combinations that just don't work on some machines that DO work on others. I have a problem with Neo Scene. I have to run DVDa on a different OS than neo scene because I get a fatal error otherwise when opening dvda on the same os as scene. I know a few other people with the same issue. Why it is I haven't a friggin clue and I don't know who's fault it is but who cares... I can deal with it.

Sony's Picture Motion Browser won't install on my Vista OS. I haven't a clue why because it installs on other people's vista. So I run it on Window 7. Pain in the ass... yeah.... but it works. I have to assume though that it is something that I have done (or not done) because others are not having these issues.

You do what you need to do to get things working... point blank.

Blink,

your examples of things broken for you and not for others just makes me think about things people do to their computers out of habit. For example there are things I always do to my computer immediately after reinstalling windows - favorite interface tweaks, favorite firewalls and antivirus programs. So I can easily see myself setting up three or four machines and then finding that I have a problem that appears on all of those machines when the wind blows such and such a way.

What I'm getting at here is that certain people can have consistent problems because they do XYZ in the same way for every computer. I have friends who are very reliable when it comes to crashing any computer and all I can think of is that maybe they don't wait and take a breath before doing the crashomatic-voodoo-that-they-do. It's sometimes just that subtle a difference that allows me to use the same software and do the same thing without a crash.

I think video rendering presents problems to hardware that you just won't see in most other applications. A render can keep your computer running at full bore for hours or days at a time. It's not so terribly surprising that Vegas could just completely crash dead in that time.

The problem is that, as a product, Vegas needs to be able to keep a render running "forever" if it has to. This means to me that if memory is a problem for anyone at all then SCS needs to address it in some way, maybe with more conservative policing of memory use, maybe with better error handling, maybe just social engineering to keep people from hanging themselves by their own actions. Probably a combination of things.

Rob Mack

It doesn't seem that confusing to me. During playback, all Vegas really needs to have in memory is the one uncompressed frame it's showing right now. It can discard it when the next frame comes up.

Of course, your preview RAM settings allow Vegas to keep more of those frames in memory before it has to throw them away, but they're still pretty simple chunks of data.

It gets more difficult if you have 15 tracks of some long GOP media all somehow compositing together because then I assume Vegas will have to get the entire GOP of each event under the cursor. Lots of memory usage there but it still only needs to create one uncompressed frame to show you.

A render could get more complicated since you now have to render out to a more complex codec. Anyway, if it's true that playback never suffers the crashing problem then it seems like rendering out as uncompressed would be an answer. Then you could take the output and render that to whatever the final output is supposed to be. (to my mind Satish's frameserver does this without actually writing the uncompressed AVI file to disc, but I gather that it has limitiations for people)

Rob Mack

the reason why I think Vegas is having memory problems stems from my observation of the PF usage: When I batch render multiple 2-min. segments, the PF usage starts at around 800 MB, but each new render starts with PF usage higher than the one before until Vegas crashes (stops rendering - no CPU usage) - with the PF usage by then typically between 2 & 3 GB. Then I restart Vegas and the whole process starts again. This happens on my Q6600 OC'd to 2.7 gHz (but with memory well below its limits), and on my old P4, which is in no way OC'd (but, admittedly, it may render longer before a crash). Once when I saw the PF usage get up to 3+ GB (on my old P4), I got a hard crash with BSOD and had to reboot.

On the other hand, I cannot remember having problems rendering the resulting collection of 2-min. segments out to one long Cineform Intermediate. . . simple projects like that, even though 2-hours long, whistle right along. I can't help but wonder whether the folks who have no problems rendering from Vegas perhaps are rendering simple - albeit long - projects with few video/audio tracks and few FX.

Or perhaps short projects with lots of FX? I recently had an especially difficult segment that I pulled out and put into its own .VEG so that I could work on it without all the clutter. I was so surprised when it rendered without a hitch on the very first try, before I had cut it into smaller segments or otherwise modified it in any way. For some reason, Vegas seems to reliably render even the most demanding material in a small project. , ,

There's definately something seriously wrong with this 8.0c version, I've been having the same nerve wrecking crash issues you guys all seem to have!

The strange thing is however, that when I export the entire project that has these issues on my I7, 6 gigabyte brandnew computer running Vista 64 bit, and bring it to my older Intel core duo E6850 with only 4 Gigabytes of RAM, also running 64 bit Vista, it is more likely to render completely without issues. I'm pretty sure re-installing the entire system doesnt make any difference, I even installed a clean version of Vista Business 64 bits to test, its still crap.

I also wonder why the hell my I7 CPU is only 20% working during rendering and so is my RAM and Harddrive, so what is the bottleneck ???

Being a IT professional, my best estimate would make me conclude 3 things so far:

- There are serious problems with this software because we all are having the same trouble, crashes, random halting of rendering without any errors and even crashing during editing.
- The software probably doesnt have a clue how to use the resources that are available on a high end system, both in previewing and rendering would be my conclusion
- The specific hardware one is using proved to make a huge difference in the crash stability. Its rediculous to have to say this but the amount of crashes is considerately higher on my best system, for reasons totally unclear.

In my opinion this absolutely does not mean it's the hardware's fault , software should run on common available hardware, esp. since Vegas Support does not want to make ANY recommendations on what hardware you should use. (I know because I asked them and they even made me buy faster hardware because the only thing they could say was that the Graphic card didnt matter that much, that it all comes down to CPU/RAM etc , which someone else from support later stated was not always true , too bad I already invested 1000 euros in a superfast extra system...)


All and all, even if I don't work on million dollar projects (YET ;) it's still causing my creativity to suffer in a very unpleasant way.
We should be dealing with making beautiful creations, not with how we can get our project to not crash within 30 seconds after pushing the render button...


So here is my workaround tip for people that have to meet deadlines on million dollar projects:

- Buy 10 completely different computers with different hardware installed, and install random Vista versions on them
- Install Vegas 8.0c on all of them
- Export your entire project to a folder and import that on all computers
- At least one of them is likely to be able to render your project.....

Of course this is a cynical joke but my 2nd computer helped me to render a troublesome project on more than one occasion!

>> In my opinion this absolutely does not mean it's the hardware's fault,
>> software should run on common available hardware

When blink and others say it is hardware they do not mean that it your choice of hardware that is the problem, the issue would be faulty hardware. From the symptoms that are reported, and I do not see them since I no longer try to use Digital Juice clips on my 8.0c time line, are not hardware problems. They are problems with Vegas. Why does it only happen to some, hard to know, could be a lot of reasons. If the bugs in Vegas were consistent and on all systems, SCS would have nailed them down a long time ago. That's the nature of hard to find bugs.

One thing I wish blink would stop wheezing about though is that this must be hardware related. It must not. We know this for various reasons but the most obvious one is that we see this in Vegas, and not in other areas. I run software on my PC that taxes my hardware a lot more than Vegas can. It doesn't crash my PC nor does it crash it self. I run a Digital Juice party on my time line and Vegas goes falls over more or less instantly.

Hardware issues would show up in various guises, they would not be consistent, and they would not only affect Vegas. Even if Vegas is the trigger, assuming Vegas was doing stuff none of your other software was, it would effect other software on your computer. By far the most common result of a hardware issue is what old Unix geeks would know as a kernel panic followed by a system shutdown, clean or not. Blue Screen of Death to us Windows folks. That is not what we are seeing, and BSOD reports with Vegas are rather uncommon. So it is not a hardware issue. Same goes for drivers.

Hardware or driver issues
- Blue Screen of Death
- Complete system lockup
- One application seems to affect other apps

Application issues
- Application behaves badly

On a modern system, for a software developer, this is obvious. The problem is that blink is a fanboi. He also has extremely limited knowledge of how computers in general operate and more so when it comes to windows. He does not, for example, know what virtual memory is, and why an application running in protected mode (all applications today unless you are on Windows 98 still) can not possibly gain access to another applications memory and mess with it. He will however speak forcefully about these things and fight tooth and nail to defend SCS.

For the rest of us, Vegas took a turn for the worse with 7.0d and it hasn't been properly handled since.

I have gone through a number of acquisitions in the software industry. I know what happens to development teams after acquisitions. It is frequently not good. That is why so many software acquisitions run into serious trouble. Vegas is a great platform for editing, and I seriously hope we'll see the trend reversed with Vegas 9, or even 8.0d if there ever is one. If the trend is not reversed we'll see some interesting developments over the next two or three years.

Still, Vegas is, for me, the best editing platform. I hope it lasts.

"For the rest of us, Vegas took a turn for the worse with 7.0d and it hasn't been properly handled since."

7e actually and this is the ONE thing I will agree with you on Terje. 7e is where avchd import/edit was added.... and that's when all hell broke lose. I remember 7e.... it was bad enough so that I had to return to d

Things did not get back on the track for me until about 8b... and with 8c... pretty bloody solid... the only battle for me is rendering avc at 1920

So there is nothing else you can agree with in Terje's post apart from that one thing? He wrote a very sound and logically reasoned post, with a good knowledge of computer development and systems, and you dismiss all that? You do not even try to address it, you just dismiss it? Is that not arrogance?

One of the things everybody here is forgetting is the autmatic IRQ selection stuff in the operating systems. Sometimes 6 items will be piled up on one IRQ and God knows what the operating system is doing to make this work simultaneously. You can't really select IRQ's anymore and this could be a huge factor in Vegas working flawlessly or not. As I recall in the old days if your video card wasn't on one IRQ Vegas just would not work. So what kind of super algorithim did Bill come up with to pile up 6 pieces of equipment on one IRQ? It sounds like to me that the OS samples one then shuts it off, samples the next then shuts it off, blah blah blah saturation computer stuck.
JJK

If IRQ was the issue, then the question should be, what on Earth is Vegas doing that no other program is doing to trip it up? In reality, as far as I am aware, IRQ is not really an issue these days. Although it did use to be such a huge nightmare, especially on Windows 95.

IRQ is not the issue, not for an application developer. As you say, not relevant since Windows 98 and the real-mode world.

"So there is nothing else you can agree with in Terje's post apart from that one thing? He wrote a very sound and logically reasoned post, with a good knowledge of computer development and systems, and you dismiss all that? You do not even try to address it, you just dismiss it? Is that not arrogance?"

Terje has an opinion.... he's allowed to express it. I am allowed to disagree. That does not make arrogance... it instead makes individualism. Arrogance is more about believing you are so important that your opinion is in fact...... 'fact'

Yes, right well I don't see what the difference is here.

>> he's allowed to express it. I am allowed to disagree

and some opinions are based on knowledge, research and other things. Yours are mainly based on ignorance. Some opinions have value others have none. Most of your opinions on technical matters about computers are based on ignorance.

"and some opinions are based on knowledge, research and other things."

And what marketing departments "STATE"... of course you don't know too much about this do you.