project came to a halt

raimunde wrote on 11/27/2007, 6:40 AM
I have MS 4, build 42, and have made many projects faultlessly but my current 1 hour movie is stuck half way through with an error message "system memory low". I have a custom computer for this type of work, plenty of space on all drives, 1.5 Gigs free space on RAM and now on this project I cannot even view it without this error message popping up. Under details I read the following: cxAlloc=1331,cyAlloc=1360,cBuffersAllocated=0. After this there is a list of 31 items beginning with ESP[00etc]=etc etc. Is this a windows XP problem or a MS problem? How to solve it? I should also say that the half hour project so far consists of small segments pieced together from longer video clips. I am desperate to get this project finished due to a deadline. Thanks for any help

Comments

MSmart wrote on 11/27/2007, 7:57 AM
One thing to try that worked with another video app that would hang is to select everything on the timeline, copy it then paste into a new project. Or simply do a Save As to create a new project.

What happens if you create a loop region of half your project then render just the loop region (if VMS4 has loop regions). Then try the other half.

Do a Save As to create a copy of the project, delete half of the timeline, render to an AVI file, Ctrl-z to undo the delete, then delete the other half and render it. If it works, put the 2 AVI files into a new project to combine them.
raimunde wrote on 11/27/2007, 2:43 PM
Thank you for your reply. I tried all of the methods you prescribed without success. What happens is that instantly I attempt to do anything at all to the project I get that error message and the project seizes and even shutting down the project takes eons of time. As I mentioned, the half hour I have so far is composed of 6 to 10 second extracts from much bigger clips. Is this system overload? Should I delete what I have done (an enormous amount of work has gone into it so far) and start all over again after deleting the project? What puzzles me is that I have made many movies so far without a hitch and now this!!
MSmart wrote on 11/27/2007, 7:51 PM
What changed on you computer? Did you install any software recently that may be conflicting with VMS4?

What format is the video? MPEG or AVI? What format are you tryingto render to?

You may try copying small blocks of video at a time to a new project and render it until it fails. Maybe an piece of video got corrupted.
raimunde wrote on 11/29/2007, 6:40 PM
I did as you suggested and tried to figure out what I might have done differently to cause the project to halt and I found the solution to my problem!! I noticed my problems began when I had entered a whole bunch of stills which were large TIFF files. Even though the manual says you can use TIFF files for stills apparently this causes problems as the application cannot handle Tiff files- at least on my computer. The minute I got rid of them and changed the files to JPEG and reduced the file size a bit all my problems disappeared and I completed the project with no problems at all. Apparently my computer reacted to the TIFF files as a "low memory"error. I appreciate your help MSMART.
MSmart wrote on 11/29/2007, 6:55 PM
There you go. Had you mentioned the photos in your original post, then we would have gotten to the bottom of you problem sooner. Large photos (file size) have been a problem in VMS that was resolved in either v7 or v8.

I don't know your situation, but I would recommend upgrading to v8, many improvements.
raimunde wrote on 12/2/2007, 7:26 AM
Thanks for your help. I plan to purchase an HD camera soon and my Vegas upgrade will be to the latest Pro version available at that time. In the meantime MS will do nicely for the time being with my SD work.
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 12/2/2007, 9:32 AM
Resizing your photos in your photo software to a size under 2048 X 2048 pixels may solve your issues. If you have a large amount of images, use irfanview to do a batch resize.