settings for Vegas 7 in an older PC

Laurence wrote on 9/12/2006, 11:12 AM
Vegas 7 looks pretty cool but it crashes on me maybe once every five minutes or so. I sort of remember going through this with Vegas 6 until I changed the settings so that it didn't try too much multithreading with my single P4 core.

What would be the best settings for an aging computer such as mine: a 3.06 P4 with 2 gig of RAM.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/12/2006, 3:10 PM
Aging????? HAH! That's about 3 generations newer than my desktop (866MHz P3) and i still run Vegas all the time on it. Haven't installed 7 yet since i'm away during the week, but i've run 6 on it for weeks at a time (literally, without exiting Vegas) without crashes.

Take a look under Options / Preferences / Video / Maximum number of rendering threads. I set that down to 1 on my desktop and things were a bit faster. It didn't crash at the default of 4, but it was slow.
Grazie wrote on 9/13/2006, 12:14 AM
Hah! "866MHz P3" Luxury!!

We still use abacus, in t'middle of rood; while being whipped all day and night with haddocks; getting up t'work 4 hours before we go to bed!

Hah! "866MHz P3" Luxury!!

Chienworks wrote on 9/13/2006, 5:19 AM
Grazie, my good chum, you don't know luxury until you write your own NLE for the Apple //gs using Applesoft basic and 65816 assembly language! Oh yes, those were the days! 4 bit (16 color) video stream with a frame size of 80x50* and a whopping 15 fps. I had enough storage on my 800KB drives for almost 25 seconds of uncompressed footage. Ah yes, those were definitely heady days of marvelous creative production. Who could ever want more?

*Note the 16:10 semi-widescreen format, even back 18 years ago! How progressive i was!
Laurence wrote on 9/13/2006, 6:41 AM
For SD, my system just flies. HDV is a struggle though. Unfortunately, after seeing HDV, regular SD footage looks kind of like it came from a webcam though...
Jonathan Neal wrote on 9/13/2006, 7:37 AM
I don't know if there is a whole-lot you can do to improve the Vegas 7 running power. You could strip her down to almost nothing and then add what you need. Of course, you'd have to put it back the way it was if you wanted Sony support.

First off, Vegas 7 only requires 5 files to run, as opposed to the 300+ files that are installed. You'll need to keep vegas70.exe, sfs4rw.dll, sonymvd2pro_xp.dll, vegas70k.dll, and Sony.Vegas.dll. Everything else is feature. If you really wanted to, you could delete it, but BE WARNED, you will lose features. For instance, you want to be able to open files right? Heh, you might want to keep FileIO Plug-Ins then. You want to use any of the effects, they are located in the Video Plug-Ins folder. Of course, you could find out filetypes and video plug-ins you want to keep an delete the rest.

Second, in Vegas, hold down the SHIFT key while you go into Options > Preferences.

Under the General tab, turn off:
Automatically open last project on startup
Animate video frames in trimmer
Create undos for FX parameter changes
Show progress in Video Preview Window while rendering
Enable Windows XP Theme support
Enable Media Manager (requires restart)
In General, turn on:
Disable popup animations

Under the Video tab, change the Dynamic RAM Preview to use less than a fifth of your available memory, or lower.

Under the VST Effects tab, remove the link to your VstPlugins directory

Under the Internal tab, remove the Value's for Insert Effect 1, Insert Effect 2, Insert Effect 3, and Insert Effect 4, and Standard Transition 1, Standard Transition 2, and Standard Transition 3, as well as MRU Transition 1, MRU Transition 2, MRU Transition 3, and MRU Transition 4.

That should clear out just about anything you're using in Vegas. Next thing would be to disable services in Windows. It would take me too long to tell you all the services you could disable, but depending on your machine, you can usually disable a lot. Windows normally runs with a 300+ MB memory commit charge, but you can bring it down to 40+ and still have most of your functionality, including printers and internet and all that kind of stuff. To access services, right-click My Computer and select Manage. In the window that opens up, goto Services and Applications + Services. There are all your services, and they're all labeled as to which ones are running and if they are on automatically.

Have fun, I hope this post wasn't too useless.