Serious bug in Vegas 5?

BillyBoy wrote on 3/13/2005, 8:16 PM
Been working on a longish project. As always, I save it roughly every ten minutes... just in case. Well, I apparently had one of those just in case moments.

I start up Vegas, it says it can't load the project, asks if I want to instead load the backup. I say no thanks, knowing I always save the project as the last thing I do before walking away to do something else, so the last best copy is what I saved, not always what Vegas makes as a backup..

So instead of using the 'backup' version I go to the folder where the veg file is and tell Windows to use open with...specifying Vegas. I know this works, done it countless times.

This time Vegas comes back with can't launch Vegas, not registered. OK, I say to myself, lets locate the backup instead. I find it, it starts to load, but Vegas hangs, stalling at 1% of audio peaks loaded. Try a couple times, same issue. Have to use Task Manager to exit each time, Vegas hopelessly hung up.

So is all lost? No. Here's a trick that will load a .bak file Vegas is hanging on.

1. Use Windows Search to locate the Vegas backup file.

2.Go to command prompt, use rename command to change the file extension from .bak to .veg.

3. Exit command prompt and then use open with the doctored "backup" file you just changed the file extension on.

This will restore the project. At least it has every time I had to resort to it.

The question is why can't Vegas open its own backup or Veg file sometimes and no error is reported until you try to open the project again.

Comments

ezway wrote on 3/13/2005, 8:30 PM
Yes, I too have lost work of late, I will bring it to their attention tommorow with a phone call. I thought it was only I.
Best Wishes,
Marty
Grazie wrote on 3/13/2005, 10:44 PM
Me too! I had this on my last long proj. Had to resort to the BAK too! Never ever done this before . .. I thought it was me. But yes, hmmm...

I'm listenning to this thread . ..

Grazie
SeaJohn wrote on 3/13/2005, 11:09 PM
Happened to me once a couple of months ago too. I was pretty scared for a few minutes until I got the .BAK file to load successfully.

It seems like I remember that Premier keeps a running cycle of 5 backups. Maybe Vegas 7 will adopt a strategy like this.
farss wrote on 3/13/2005, 11:33 PM
I also had something a bit odd happen, upon opening a Vegas project that I'd closed a few minutes earlier Vegas informed me that the last project wasn't saved correctly and would I like to recover from the backup. I said NO as I knew it was saved correclty and all went well from there on in but if others are having odd things happen it is some cause for concern.
Bob.
Rednroll wrote on 3/13/2005, 11:54 PM
I had something similar happen to me back in Vegas 3.0 and I believe Vegas works the same way today. I was working on a project that had many edits and it was on my laptop. I too, especially when there's a ton of edits that are involved will save regularly. Although, Vegas does have an autosave feature. I'm not sure if this is the same problem you're experiencing or not but when you're dealing with a lot of edits it takes more system resources to run that project. If it's a long project like you described, you probably have done quite a few edits creating many events with crossfades...etc. So when you close the project out and then try to reopen it, Vegas will hang because your PC has run out of resources to open it. Luckily in my instance I had earlier found a bug in doing this project and emailed Sony the .VEG file. They sent the project file I sent them back to me, which was at an editing instance where I was still able to open it and I didn't have to start over from the start. It doesn't seem to matter the amount of media files you have, but has to do with the amount of edits and number of events that are in the project. I had to break my project up into five seperate Vegas projects and then render each and then make a final composite project to finish this project on my then 900Mhz laptop. Your solution would be to transfer the project to another PC that has a faster CPU, more RAM, etc. In the future if you're working on a project that contains a lot of edits or starts approaching a lot of edits, I would instead of doing a "SAVE" and overwriting the previous save, do a "Save as", this way you won't shoot yourself in the foot and edit yourself to a point where you can no longer open the project.

Ahhh...yea. Here it is: http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=19&MessageID=188934

You see I had this project that was only 5 media files 39 1/2 minutes long, but had 3,912 events where I basically edited myself into a hole that I couldn't get out of.

So was there a lot of events in this project you were working on?
farss wrote on 3/14/2005, 1:48 AM
Well in my case the .veg file was getting pretty big but it was on a dual Xeon system with 1GB of RAM. However I had maybe 200 stills at 3kx2K res and around 6 tracks of video. Only happened once so who knows. I do lots of Save As thingies for obvious reasons, not just in case the .veg file goes bad but also because I'm fiddling with project settings a lot.
One thing that does seem to release a few resources is turning off thumbnails and waveforms. It'd be good maybe if you could turn these off individually.
Bob.
apit34356 wrote on 3/14/2005, 4:36 AM
noticed similar problem awhile ago. size of veg file vs memory. Was using large number of keyframes and large number of video+stills(2kres). deleting and modifying keyframes(masking) was a kiss of death if you exceeded 20+ changes on a single clip. Increased memory and swap file space and it lower the number of failures. Still, I do my large projects in small groups to avoid performance issues and major D..... Vegas still rules.....
FuTz wrote on 3/14/2005, 4:46 AM
Happened to me too and even if I saved the files regularly during editing, I re-opened using BAK. Just to be sure I didn't miss anything, once opened, I checked my last VEG saved file too and compared. Every time...
craftech wrote on 3/14/2005, 5:15 AM
Well,
Here is the traditional scenario:

1. Release a new version
2. Add new bells and whistles
3. Virtually everyone on these forums will buy it no matter what.
4. Get annoyed because the problems that have permeated Vegas 2, 3, 4, and 5 STILL aren't fixed and a set of NEW ones are appearing in Vegas 6.
5. Wonder why the old problems weren't fixed.

John

BillyBoy wrote on 3/14/2005, 8:00 AM
Ain't that the truth! In fairness to Sony's excellent programming staff, Microsoft has yet to fix thousands of coding errors in Windows, some going back to Windows 95... or earlier.

Some further info. I didn't have a system crash or lock up, prior to and after Vegas acted up. Just Vegas locked up. Everything was fine and I still had a bunch of system resources and free RAM. What's kind of curious is I did nothing to "fix" this issue other than change the file extention from .bak to .veg. So since nothing in the file changed, only its extention, why couldn't Vegas open its own backup, but could open the same exact file if renamed to .veg? It must do something different or extra if it tries to open a backup file.
JJKizak wrote on 3/14/2005, 8:31 AM
All experiences I have had with V5 dumping out with a large file (very few) when rebooting the saved file number would come up after openning V5 and then it would say to save it again to the proper file name. Never any problem with this and by the way it is caused by not enough memory.

JJK
DGates wrote on 3/14/2005, 3:13 PM
That's just great. I *finally* upgrade from 3 to 5 (due by UPS tomorrow), and I hear this. Bit of a letdown.

BillyBoy wrote on 3/15/2005, 6:30 AM
Vegas 5 is light years ahead of version 3. Just one filter; Color Corrector, is worth the upgrade price, but of course there is lots more in the upgrade.