Red preview screen and render crash

Tech Diver wrote on 5/15/2006, 9:01 AM

My latest project on astronomy and the Hubble space telescope requires me to work with some fairly large still images (6000x4500 pixel JPG). The reason being, I have to pan while being zoomed far in and then zoom out to show the vastness of various nebulas and galaxies.

After working for just several minutes, my preview screen becomes solid red and I am unable to continue with editing because all images that I access also are red and Vegas suddenly terminates without any messages. Sometimes this also happens during rendering, but I get the message to the effect that "Vegas has encountered an unknown problem" (I don't recall the precise words).

I am fairly sure this is a memory-related issue since I am not doing anything differently from projects in the past other than using large images. I have cut the memory usage to half by reducing the images to 4000x3000 pixels but the problem still occurs. In fact, I have also reduced my VEG file down to a single large JPG file with pan/zoom and it still happens regardless of what image I might use. If I start Vegas without doing any editing, I can successfully render my project (so far). I searched the online knowledge base and previous posting but have not found any reference to this issue.

Note the following settings on my system:
RAM 1 GB, Disk 250 GB
Paging initial size 1536 MB, max 3072 MB, recommended 1534 MB
Vegas dynamic RAM preview 0 MB (because of WAX plugin)
Win 2k Pro with SP4

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 5/15/2006, 9:46 AM

Vegas can usually accept 3 or 4k jpegs but it is a large swallow. I don't know what the limit is. But Vegas does funny things when running out of memory like blank white preview, etc. You would think one picture would work ok. After you do some panning you are sucking up resources in bigtime fashion. What is the duration of the picture set for?
JJK

Tech Diver wrote on 5/15/2006, 10:28 AM

My durations are typically 15 seconds. Are you saying that the longer the duration of the pan/zoom, the more RAM and/or virtual memory is consumed? Aren't the preview images calculated on-the-fly rather than buffered?

Xander wrote on 5/15/2006, 1:30 PM

This may not mean anything, but have worked with 12 M pixel images from my Canon 5D without any issues. I usually work in .png format and not .jpg. Only time I have seen red in the timeline preview was when working with .mpg directly on the timeline. Audio would go out of sync when that happened. Use the default Vegas RAM preview setting and have have 2 GB of system RAM - Pentium 840 D processor.

Tech Diver wrote on 5/15/2006, 1:42 PM

I can easily convert to PNG format with Paint Shop Pro. I'll try it and see if it makes any difference. As for the default Vegas RAM preview setting, I have to override that and set it to 0 because the WAX plugin requires it. But I will play with that as well.