Self-saving with VMS12

Birk Binnard wrote on 10/1/2012, 1:36 PM
Editing combinations of HD video, single stills, and some rather huge panoramas with VMS12 for several hours a day I find that the program crashes a few times a day at seemingly random intervals.

The good news is the auto-recovery system seems to work well, but I found a way to improve it: I shortened the default time VMS uses to make auto-backups. Here's how to do this:

1. Hold down Shift when clicking Options/Preferences...
2. This adds the Internal tab to the list of Preference tabs. CLick the Internal tab.
3. Type "save" in the Show only prefs containing: box. This will display a list of things you can change.
4. I changed msAutoSaveIinterval from 300,000 to 150,000 which means that VMS will create an autosave twice as often as normal (from every 300 seconds to 150.)

This way I can lose at most 150 seconds of work which is usually something I can easily reproduce. The change does not seem to affect VMS' overall performance at all.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 10/1/2012, 1:53 PM
You could also try rendering your timeline regularly or, even better, working on your video in short segments and then combining the finished pieces in a larger project.

The problem is that, in mixing formats, you're challenging the program to continually create soft renders of all of your work -- which means that it can't just play your video, it has to create it as it's playing it. And that's a lot of stuff to keep in your RAM and a lot of opportunities for the program to choke and stumble.

Rendering your timeline regularly, matching your project properties to your video as much as possible and working on your complicated projects in short pieces means that the program is more often working with finished video -- and it will reward you with much more stability.
Birk Binnard wrote on 10/1/2012, 2:10 PM
I understand your advice, but my nature is to work the way I want, not change my methods to suit the internal requirements of a particular piece of software. The idea of splitting my projects (typically about 20 - 30 min. of video/stills/panoramas) and pre-rendering them is just abhorrent (not to mention both tedious and time consuming.)

It's much more time-efficient for me to recreate the last few seconds of work following a crash than it would be to break up a project into a bunch of small pieces.

I'd be a lot happier if VMS didn't crash at all, but since it does the use of it's crash recovery method seems to work best for me.
MSmart wrote on 10/1/2012, 6:03 PM
And regardless of what version of VMS you have, how often the auto-save is performed or how complex your project is, ALWAYS do a Save As periodically to give your project an incrementing version number. This way, if the crash recovery doesn't restore your project or the project file becomes corrupt for whatever reason, you can go back to an earlier version of your project.

Maybe you already do this, but if not, it should be standard practice.