RAM Question

vicmilt wrote on 4/19/2010, 11:28 AM
Winxp pro
q6700 processor
Raid 0 drives
2 Gig RAM
Vegas 9.0c

Seemed to have hit "the wall"...

am trying to edit my usual way - 2 copies of Vegas Pro - one with a lot of potential source files, the other with the finished edit.

Ordinarily I'd just search, find, select and copy on the "source" edit, then paste into the "finish" edit.

Have cut thousands of hours like this.

I do NOT run any other programs - in fact there are no other programs mounted on this computer.

Now I'm messing with NeoScene conversions of 1920x1080 conversions from my Canon 5d mov's.

The "edit" Vegas continually is freezing with no real action taking place. About 4 or five tracks of sound and one track of video is all - maybe 40 seconds of timeline.

So - to fix this mess and get back to work...
Will more RAM stop the incessant crashing?
How much?
Will a move to 64 bit help?
Do I need Windoze 7?
Other suggestions?
Work is at a halt and I hate that.

And (also) what setting should the preview monitor be at?
I thought that at these high resolutions, "Best - full" worked best because there was no further processing required. Is that correct or not?

Some of you guys are experts in these areas - I turn to you for assistance and advice.

Thanks,
v

Comments

backlit wrote on 4/19/2010, 1:30 PM
It's hard to tell Vic. Adding 2 more Gig certainly would not hurt but I don't know if will help either. I've had similar symptoms with flaky media storage such as a hard drive in the early stages of disc failure. You could check that by moving the media to a different drive and seeing if the problem persists.

To check your RAM usage, you could pull up your task manager in XP and take a look at the two iterations of Vegas in the processes tab and the performances tab. Also, if you're out of RAM the system will be paging so check the page file. You can look at it in real time in the Windows Resource Monitor. I think XP has that...

Sorry, no answers but perhaps a path to some...

David
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 4/19/2010, 1:50 PM
2 more gigs of ram is cheap, I'd do that, no brainer.

64 bit and windows 7 is helpful in some ways, but not necessary.

preview should not be set to best full, it should be set to preview auto or preview full.

Good introduces extra work in a better scaling method, and Best further still introduces more work with even better scaling.

When rendering you should use Best if going from HD to SD, or if using a lot of stills, but for the act of previewing, just use preview full, it reduces the preview quality slightly, unless scaling in which case you'll see jaggies/aliasing on the edges quite a bit. It won't be there in the render as long as you're using best for the render when changing resolutions of media however.

If maintaining the size and not scaling or using high rez images, just render at good, which is identical to best but doesn't do the extra work for scaling (which isn't necessary when you're not scailing from HD to SD or using High rez stills and doing Pan Crop).

Dave
fldave wrote on 4/19/2010, 2:01 PM
Check your Dynamic RAM Preview options on the video tab of the main Vegas preferences settings.

Seems to me that Vegas snags that amount of RAM just in case you call for it. So if each instance is allocating 800MB of RAM, then you have just eaten up 1.6GB of your 2GB RAM. So it leaves little else for XP to run with. Sounds like your system is busy swapping RAM out of the on-disk RAM.

Lower each to 127-255 or so, close Vegas out, then restart your instances of Vegas.

See if that helps a bit.


Then again, the new Neoscene "may" be doing something new, I don't have that yet.
vicmilt wrote on 4/19/2010, 2:18 PM
Well, I lowered the Vegas RAM setting to 200, raised the "page file" to 3000 (have no idea what that is - well sort of...), changed preview to "Preview Auto" and defragged the HD's. (I actually think in this case the defragging had a lot to do with the success - it had files with over 5k fragments) - BTW I have used and recommend Raxco's Perfect disc for defragging - very fast and elegant.

It's all working now - do I dare upgrade to 9.0d??
(If it ain't broke don't... yada yada - but some reports seem to be that it's running faster (I like/need that) - others that it's loading super slow - what do you all hear?)

I'm just at the beginning of the project, so no losses there, but what's the latest scoop?

v
farss wrote on 4/19/2010, 2:52 PM
When I hit this problem I lower Preview RAM to say 32Mb. That has more impact than anything else. Defragging probably doesn't hurt but it can in theory at least make matters worse.
If using secondary preview make certain video card drivers are up to date. Contrary to popular belief Vegas does use some GPU acceleration.
I'm still running V9.0b. V9.0c caused major grief with large complex projects and long periods of nothing happening and crashing. Switched same projects back to V9.0b and problem was gone. Not game enough to try V9.0d, V9.0b is working OK and I'm in the midst of a big audio project. One tip though. The later builds do seem to gobble up more RAM no matter what you try. For long / complex projects it can pay to split projects into reels.

If you've got a lot of audio tracks convert them to multichannel wave. This helps keep everything together and they playout with less disk activity as the audio streams are interleaved i.e. the disk heads move less.

Shouldn't you be using NeoHD?

Bob.
Steve Mann wrote on 4/19/2010, 8:36 PM
Page File is a chunk of contiguous disk that Windows uses to swap data from RAM to allow another program to use the RAM. This is why more RAM would help. Ideally, you would never use the swap disk space. When you do, the applications running will slow to a crawl and the disk I/O light is flickering non-stop.

You may only be running one application, but the PC is running dozens of other applications, each requiring some RAM. Not a lot, but it adds up.

Add all the RAM that your PC will hold. It can't hurt and will likely help. (Crucial.com can 'scan' your PC and tell you what RAM you can buy). Make your swap file (AKA Pagefile - Microsoft changes the name with each release of Windows) static. Set the min and max values to the same. If you are hitting the pagefile, making it static will help the performance slightly because Windows won't have to adjust the size.
TeetimeNC wrote on 4/20/2010, 4:06 AM
Vic, I would think you aren't getting much advantage from your quad core runing with XP and just 2 GB ram. General recommendations are 2GB per core. If 9.0d 64 bit proves to be stable, I would consider moving to Windows 7 64 bit unless you are dependent on 32 bit plugins. I did some benchmarks on 9.0b that showed 64 bit on a 6GB quad PC to be considerably faster than the 32 bit 9.0b. But 9.0c 64 bit has been unstable for me. I haven't tried 9.0d yet.

/jerry