Prevent Vegas from using too much RAM

Kvarkmeister wrote on 5/7/2018, 12:55 PM

Hello there,

I have composed a large project with about 8 (3 or more are usually inactive, so 5 at a time) tracks with video effects and such, and was successful with a few crashes. Now, I am trying to render it. The first few seconds of the video (which take minutes to render already) don't have very intense effects so the rendering went through well in that part. At this point, Vegas is already eating up 97% (!) of my RAM, but since I usually render my videos while the PC is idle, I don't mind it.

But when the more intense parts come in, the Windows message comes up and says I am low on memory and Sony Vegas Pro has just crashed, halting my render. I am trying to render in high quality MP4, so I think the problems start from there, but since I don't mind waiting a multitude of hours to render a four-minute video, I thought: "Isn't there a way to make the renders less RAM-intensive and make them slower, so I can actually get the video done?".

So I Googled and I found that others are able to render seperate tracks of their video and make them smaller for Vegas to work with, so the rendering naturally becomes less intensive. But since I have 8 tracks, I don't have the time to come and check the PC to render them separately. I wish it to be done in a single session. Plus, doing that would reduce the video quality further down the line.

So, does anyone know how I could circumvent this crashing issue without having to reduce video quality? I am getting a headache for experimenting for hours with no positive results.

The output I use is Sony AVC/MVC with the settings being:

Audio: 320 Kbps; 48 000 Hz; 32 Bit; Stereo; AAC
Video: 59,940 fps; 1920x1080 Progressive; YUV; 26 Mbps
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1,000

 

Comments

vkmast wrote on 5/7/2018, 1:09 PM

---Sony Vegas Pro has just crashed, halting my render.

Can you specify which version? "Sony Vegas Pro" points to a Sony/SCS version (#13 and earlier).

Kvarkmeister wrote on 5/7/2018, 1:13 PM

---Sony Vegas Pro has just crashed, halting my render.

Can you specify which version? "Sony Vegas Pro" points to a Sony/SCS version (#13 and earlier).

Version 14.0. Silly me, I was used to calling it Sony Vegas.

OldSmoke wrote on 5/7/2018, 1:19 PM

At this point, Vegas is already eating up 97% (!) of my RAM

And how much RAM do you have and how big is your pagefile?

Proud owner of Sony Vegas Pro 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 & 13 and now Magix VP15&16.

System Spec.:
Motherboard: ASUS X299 Prime-A

Ram: G.Skill 4x8GB DDR4 2666 XMP

CPU: i7-9800x @ 4.6GHz (custom water cooling system)
GPU: 1x AMD Vega Pro Frontier Edition (water cooled)
Hard drives: System Samsung 970Pro NVME, AV-Projects 1TB (4x Intel P7600 512GB VROC), 4x 2.5" Hotswap bays, 1x 3.5" Hotswap Bay, 1x LG BluRay Burner

PSU: Corsair 1200W
Monitor: 2x Dell Ultrasharp U2713HM (2560x1440)

Kvarkmeister wrote on 5/7/2018, 1:23 PM

At this point, Vegas is already eating up 97% (!) of my RAM

And how much RAM do you have and how big is your pagefile?

Oh, sorry, I forgot to add these. I have 8gB RAM, and by pagefile do you mean the VEG file (685kB)?

OldSmoke wrote on 5/7/2018, 1:32 PM

At this point, Vegas is already eating up 97% (!) of my RAM

And how much RAM do you have and how big is your pagefile?

Oh, sorry, I forgot to add these. I have 8gB RAM, and by pagefile do you mean the VEG file (685kB)?

8GB is not a lot to be honest and depending on your source files, can make live difficult. By pagefile I mean the virtual memory file that Windows uses. What are your source files like?

Proud owner of Sony Vegas Pro 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 & 13 and now Magix VP15&16.

System Spec.:
Motherboard: ASUS X299 Prime-A

Ram: G.Skill 4x8GB DDR4 2666 XMP

CPU: i7-9800x @ 4.6GHz (custom water cooling system)
GPU: 1x AMD Vega Pro Frontier Edition (water cooled)
Hard drives: System Samsung 970Pro NVME, AV-Projects 1TB (4x Intel P7600 512GB VROC), 4x 2.5" Hotswap bays, 1x 3.5" Hotswap Bay, 1x LG BluRay Burner

PSU: Corsair 1200W
Monitor: 2x Dell Ultrasharp U2713HM (2560x1440)

Kvarkmeister wrote on 5/7/2018, 1:54 PM

At this point, Vegas is already eating up 97% (!) of my RAM

And how much RAM do you have and how big is your pagefile?

Oh, sorry, I forgot to add these. I have 8gB RAM, and by pagefile do you mean the VEG file (685kB)?

8GB is not a lot to be honest and depending on your source files, can make live difficult. By pagefile I mean the virtual memory file that Windows uses. What are your source files like?

Yep, it's not a lot, but as I mentioned, I thought that rendering doesn't need to be so intensive.

The pagefile is 17 671 mB large.

My source files are mostly PNG images (0.5 to 3.5 mB in size), an AVI file ~20gB (which is the most demanding of the files, but I have used larger AVI files before and I have had no problems rendering videos with them before; this just gave me an idea to reduce its size, but I am trying to keep this one the least lossy as possible) and some generated media (mostly texts).

john_dennis wrote on 5/7/2018, 3:02 PM

"The pagefile is 17 671 mB large."

If Windows manages the pagefile (which is normally hidden), it varies in the ranges as indicated in the Virtual Memory setting.

Kvarkmeister wrote on 5/7/2018, 3:17 PM

"The pagefile is 17 671 mB large."

If Windows manages the pagefile (which is normally hidden), it varies in the ranges as indicated in the Virtual Memory setting.

I am not familiar with the this, in fact. What are you hunting at, if I may ask?

OldSmoke wrote on 5/7/2018, 4:23 PM

"The pagefile is 17 671 mB large."

If Windows manages the pagefile (which is normally hidden), it varies in the ranges as indicated in the Virtual Memory setting.

I am not familiar with the this, in fact. What are you hunting at, if I may ask?


Windows creates a pagefile or swapfile which is used to add virtual memory to your existing actual system memory (RAM). Any process that is parked, will use the virtual memory to free physical RAM aside from other stuff that goes there. It used to be that the virtual memory file is 2.5x the physical memory, I am not sure how Win10 now calculates it. I am sure a better IT professionals in this forum to explain it and I may have blundered it here and there?

Anyways, with 8GB and even a 17GB pagefile you are still not "rich" on available memory which for larger projects which can be an issue. Also, if the drive your pagefile is located is already 75%-80% full, the system, Windows and other processes will slow down too as swaping information between RAM and your pagefile becomes more and more difficult.

I have 32GB on my editing system have manually limited the pagefile to the minimum required hence forcing Windows to use as much physical RAM as possible.

Proud owner of Sony Vegas Pro 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 & 13 and now Magix VP15&16.

System Spec.:
Motherboard: ASUS X299 Prime-A

Ram: G.Skill 4x8GB DDR4 2666 XMP

CPU: i7-9800x @ 4.6GHz (custom water cooling system)
GPU: 1x AMD Vega Pro Frontier Edition (water cooled)
Hard drives: System Samsung 970Pro NVME, AV-Projects 1TB (4x Intel P7600 512GB VROC), 4x 2.5" Hotswap bays, 1x 3.5" Hotswap Bay, 1x LG BluRay Burner

PSU: Corsair 1200W
Monitor: 2x Dell Ultrasharp U2713HM (2560x1440)

fifonik wrote on 5/7/2018, 5:00 PM

May be this is true for some cases (I red that high-res png images could be an issue, some plugins that I just do not use could be resource expensive as well). However I have never had low memory issues while rendering with Vegas 13 64-bit when I had 8GB RAM (now I have 16GB, no such issues as well). Never see Vegas memory usage higher than ~3GB. My projects are relatively simple: m2ts (mostly), avi (rarely), jpg (very rarely), Titler Pro, pan/crop, neatvideo, mercalli 2/4, color correction, color match, curves, levels, sharpen. That's almost it.

Camcorder: Panasonic X1500 + Panasonic X920 + GoPro Hero 11 Black

Desktop: MB: MSI B450M MORTAR TITANIUM, CPU: AMD Ryzen 5700X, RAM: G'Skill 32 GB DDR4@3200, Graphics card: MSI RX6600 8GB, SSD: Samsung 970 Evo+ 1TB (NVMe, OS), HDD WD 4TB, HDD Toshiba 4TB, OS: Windows 10 Pro 22H2

NLE: Vegas Pro [Edit] 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22

Author of FFMetrics and FFBitrateViewer

Kvarkmeister wrote on 5/7/2018, 11:18 PM

May be this is true for some cases (I red that high-res png images could be an issue, some plugins that I just do not use could be resource expensive as well). However I have never had low memory issues while rendering with Vegas 13 64-bit when I had 8GB RAM (now I have 16GB, no such issues as well). Never see Vegas memory usage higher than ~3GB. My projects are relatively simple: m2ts (mostly), avi (rarely), jpg (very rarely), Titler Pro, pan/crop, neatvideo, mercalli 2/4, color correction, color match, curves, levels, sharpen. That's almost it.

Yes, complexity is the keyword.

Kvarkmeister wrote on 5/9/2018, 2:28 PM

I'm starting to lose my mind, I simplified my project about two times and the thing still keeps crashing.

john_dennis wrote on 5/9/2018, 3:08 PM

Please state your Vegas Pro build. Some memory management issues present in early builds of Vegas Pro 14 were fixed in later builds. You should be on 270.

Kvarkmeister wrote on 5/9/2018, 3:26 PM

I will check tomorrow, but there's no hurry, since I have just made a work-around which fixed my memory issues. I found out I was able to sum up a lot generated media into one PNG file, to save up space. This may not always help in the future, though. Thanks for all your co-operation!

I have been acting a bit impolite, because of the frustration and hurry, so I owe you guys an apology!