v6.0b hangs during render

GreenMartian wrote on 6/14/2005, 6:47 PM
I 've read elsewhere in this forum about v6.0 hanging up during a render. I've come across the same problem. I try to render an eight minute photo slide show with audio track and simple fade through as MEPG-1 with default template settings and it starts rendering great and then it hangs at a different point each time, usually around the 7000 frame area and at the beginning of a transition, but at a different transition each time. I can copy & paste the slide show in v5.0 and render with same settings with no problems. In v6.0b the render hangs and the timer keeps on ticking just like a Timex watch. Additionally, I can render a small selected loop area that includes the frames where it hangs, and I don't have any problems. It just hangs when I try to render the entire file.

Comments

cyvideo wrote on 6/14/2005, 7:18 PM
GreenM ~

Have a look at the posts under 'Vegas 6 render problems'. Check some of the comments there it may give you some clues. A few of us are running into render stoppages on V6 and are looking for answers. Do something for us and let us know the results. Open Task Manager select the 'processes tab' then the 'mem usage' tab to try and get Vegas somewhere near the top of the view list and then start your render. Just let us know if the memory usage starts to climb up and up without stabilising. If this happens and the end result is a 'hung' render post back and let us all know.

If this is what happens and you close the hung instance of Vegas it will appear that V6 has closed. The problem is that in our render hangs Vegas appears to be closed but we still see V6 as an active process consuming vast amounts of memory. The fact that there are quite a few of us with render problems in V6, problems that didn't exist in V5, leads me to believe that there are 'bugs' present in the re-write of the render engine in V6. As I say post your results as it may help in leading to a better understanding of the issues involved with these continuing render problems.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney
GreenMartian wrote on 6/14/2005, 8:56 PM
I tried to render again watching the "processes." It did hang again with 79% complete at a different spot at the beginning of a transition. The memory usage bounced around between 70,000K and 125,000K and stopped at 83,790K. The virtual memory was rising continuously from 283,000K to 1,240,516K and stopped there when Vegas hung. I have to use "Task Manager" to shut down Vegas when it hangs like this. Nothing else works.. I've got a minimum setting on the computer of 1536MB virtual memory with a maximum of 3000MB. Just for fun, I'm going to try another render with the virtual memory set higher.
GreenMartian wrote on 6/14/2005, 10:24 PM
Tried a second render watching "processes" again. Vegas froze at 74% complete at different location again, but always at the beginning of a transition, just an eariler transition this time. The memory usage bounced around again from 50,000K to 175,000K and ending up at 45,000K. The virtual memory peaked at 1,301,288K when Vegas froze. Very close to the same virtual memory usage of 1,340,516 on the previous attempt.

I read on the forum elsewhere that someone has tried to blame excessive processor heat buildup for the Vegas render hangups.

I guess I'll call tech support in a day or two when I have an hour to waste. But I'll bet they have to provide a fix for this.
StormMarc wrote on 6/14/2005, 11:30 PM
OUCH! I just got bit! 4 hour render to a new track as an AVI and it hung and just kept ticking while to time remaining went to zero. It was at about 89%. It was a slide show using JPEGS which was also crashing periodically during editing. With the program frozen the page file showed 1.46 g. (I have 2 gigs of ram).

Incidently I had worked on the same project previously in V5 with no problems. The only other thing out of the ordinary was that I was using the film look plugin on a track level. Also I just noticed the prerender folder was set to the system drive.

Marc
jrazz wrote on 6/14/2005, 11:45 PM
I use to use Studio 8 from Pinnacle (back before I knew any better) and their user forum was nothing more than a work around forum for bug after bug. One thing that I did learn on there was that if you have problems with render hangs, try to first render to an Avi file or cut up your project into pieces and render to Avi each piece and then render them together as an avi. Once you do this, then try the mpg1 format you were going for.

I have made several slide shows with Vegas 6.0a and 6.0b with no render problems. I save all my pictures in .png format. I do not know if that makes a difference, but you might want to try converting your pictures until sony comes up with a fix.
cyvideo wrote on 6/15/2005, 12:57 AM
Hmm! Guessed as much... something broken with V6b render engine.

A job I had which kept hanging part way through the render finally finished rendering once I set the 'preview RAM' setting back to 16Mb. Previously it was set at 1Gig. Something not right here for sure. Sony advise not to have this setting too high as, quote,

'If you reserve excessive amounts of RAM for your RAM cache, performance may decrease'.

Now that this job is done and out of the way I thought that I would try some experimentation. Setting preview ram to 64Mb and re-rendering the job I watched 'mem usage' in Task Manager go to .907 Gig and it used between 50 and 100% CPU overhead. This is with the process priority set to normal and affinity set to dual processor for V6, which is standard. This particular job took 25.61 minutes to render. Wherever I used Scot Moore's SMLuminance plugin the processors dropped to around fifty-percent CPU overhead, understandable, as this plug doesn't support multi threading.

Next I did a 'select all’ and copied the timelines into V5d and did exactly the same render with the same 'preview ram' setting of 64Mb. Still using the same process priority and affinity settings as above and this time the 'mem usage' maxed out at .375 Gig. CPU overhead ranged between 50-60%. The maximum hit was 60%. The interesting thing is that this render completed in 20.41 minutes. Fully 20% faster in V5d when compared to V6b. This tells me that something is not correct with V6's render engine.

I have also had a couple of situations now where I had Task Manager open while editing and just watched as the memory usage climbed up and up til finally V6 hung. This was whilst I had 'preview ram' set to 1 Gig to get some decent length previews. I haven't monitored 'mem usage' whilst editing with 'preview ram' set to a low figure yet but I will be trying that as it may be a work around for the time being til Sony can fix the problem.

Shame! It's back to V5d for now. Hope Sony fixes it soon!

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

ForumAdmin wrote on 6/15/2005, 7:45 AM
What kind of systems are you running (specifically, are these HT and or duals)?
Shane Jensen wrote on 6/15/2005, 11:29 AM
Finally, I'm not the only person with render issues in V6.0b. Maybe now we'll get some action. I've had these issues with V6.0, V6.0a, and now the latest.

When rendering hangs for me the clock doesn't keep ticking. Everything stops completely and says the reason for the error could not be determined. Very frustrating. Sony has some major issues with all the versions of V6 so far. I hope they fix this quickly and come out the new version ASAP. These are problems that I DID NOT have in V4.

My thread about my problem. http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=394930&Replies=11
AndyMac wrote on 6/15/2005, 4:05 PM
I have suffered similar render problems whereby an MPEG 2 render gets almost finished then hangs and the system grinds to a halt - I'm on an Athlon 3000+ system, so HT can't be blamed.

I'm looking forward to a fix soon - it's caused much grief.

Andy Mac
GreenMartian wrote on 6/15/2005, 5:03 PM
It worked for me. I set the "Preview Ram" back to the default of 16MB and the rendering completed without any problems. That was the only change I made. I had changed it to 200MB hoping it would help me, but why it caused v6.0b to hang during rendering is beyond me. I have v5.0 "Preview Ram" set to 60MB and it renders okay.

This sure sounds like a bug to me. I hope they come out with a fix.
JJKizak wrote on 6/15/2005, 5:09 PM
Originally Sony said that Vegas takes the ram that it requires no matter what you have set in the ram preview. Evidently it still works ok when the default is set to 16 but it chokes the system if the setting is like 1 gig. I have choked it with the setting at 16 with a project that was 1 hr long and full of stuff after about 8 hrs of editing. I was pushing it pretty hard.

JJK
johnmeyer wrote on 6/15/2005, 5:50 PM
I don't know whether these hangs have anything to do with what was reported in this thread in the past few days (and which I experienced first-hand myself):

Render Hang Problem

All of us were rendering (I think) to AVI, not MPEG-2 files, but at least half a dozen all reported that the render hung at one point. At first it looked like the render had simply slowed WAY down, but I let mine run for several hours, and it hadn't progressed even one frame, and Vegas had become unresponsive, so I think it was truly hung.

Here's a link to the test file we were all using:

Render Test File

Sorry if this doesn't relate to the render hang that is the focus of this topic, but on the off-chance it does, I thought I'd include it for Sony.

Lance Lenehan wrote on 6/29/2005, 8:07 AM
I know that others have posted on this subject, and I have followed some of the advice given here. This post is my contibution to the experience that others seem to be having also.

I have a very large project (1hr 40mins) that is a mixture of DV and still images. There are 180 images, ranging in size from about 2MB to 40MB. Some (not all) go to 4000 pixels and more across. We need the resolution, as some images are zoomed (ie vegas event pan/crop is used extensively in the project).

The PC has 3GB of RAM and is a 3Ghz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading, about 300gb of storage with approx 20-30gb free on all drives, running WindowsXP SP2, Vegas 6.0b, and DVD architect 3.0a.

I have the seen the identical issues described elsewhere. After a period of rendering, the render just stops. If I watch the performance graphs in the task manager, the page file usage just grows and grows (it increments in 10, 20, even 100MB increments as the render reaches each new image). Once the page file usage reaches about 1.27GB the render halts (however the Vegas progress indicator is still counting away). If I attempt to cancel the render, I get a message idicating that a background process is running and that I should cancel that. That doesnt work either. I have to shut down Vegas from the Processes tab in task manager. The render consistely stops in the same location (almost to the frame).

It is not a heat issue, as the PC continues to run just fine. I can click on buttons, and run other apps.
Adjusting preview ram setting made no difference either.
I tried the suggetions of reducing the pixel width of images and using png and rendering to AVI instead of MPEG2.
Changing images from JPG to PNG made no difference for me.
Rendering to AVI instead of MPEG2 made no difference.
Reducing the pixel width did make a difference, but it just post-poned the inevitable, the render still hung, but now just further down the time line. Once it reaches that 'magic' page file usage figure, it hangs.

I am unable to reduce the size of all the images, as we need the resolution to perform extended zoom-ins on the images. I have thought of separately creating a zoomed image in photoshop and using that instead (thereby by passing the need for the 'large' resolution image to cover both the wide and the zoomed shot, but with 180 images to play with, thats a lot of work, and I'm happy with my pans and zooms as they are.

For now, I am going back to Vegas 5.0 which did not exhibit this problem at all, regardless of image size.

It seems to me that the memory management is holding onto the RAM it needs for rendering an image, even after the image is no longer being processed. As each image is processed, the RAM used goes up up up. Maybe its more complicated than that.

Looking forward to a prompt resolution from Sony, but dont want a rushed fix pushed out at he risk of breaking other things.

Thanks for your time,
regards Lance.
-----
Lance Lenehan
Lannistoria
Sydney Australia
JJKizak wrote on 6/29/2005, 8:18 AM
With 4000 resolution stills I usually have to render about 10 or less at a time to avi then sub the avi on the timeline in place of the stills. Then remove the stills from the project. This frees a ton of memory for the final render. Also have to watch for the "squigglies" with that high a resolution.

JJK
vitalforce2 wrote on 6/29/2005, 9:09 AM
I too am a render orphan. Vegas 6.0b, P4 at 2.53 single processor. Rendering MPEG-2 files. BUT I CAN'T GO BACK TO V5 because my flippin' bleedin' project is a nested timeline.
fflowers wrote on 6/29/2005, 6:57 PM
May I join the club? It looks like I have the same problem. I tried to render a 10 second sample project (chienworks-vegas3d.veg) with 17 tracks. I started it an hour before I left for work. I checked it when I got home more than 12 hours later, and it was hung. I was doing distributed rendering though. My main machine had 2 threads: one at 51% CPU and 1 at 49% CPU. I had to kill everything with Task Manager.

This happened before I read this post. So, I didn't capture how much RAM was being used. But, the 2nd machine was sitting at 203,232K and still climbing for vegSrv60.exe on a 1 Gb laptop. My main PC has 3 GB.

I just upgraded from Vegas Movie Studio. So, I've never tried v. 5. But, it doesn't look good when a 10 second video hangs and won't render in over 12 hours.

Incidently, my Video preview setting as at the default of 16 MB. So, the suggested solutions of lowering it to 16 won't work for me.
AndyMac wrote on 7/9/2005, 6:30 AM
I *really* think it's time we had an official response to this problem.

Sadly I don't get enough time to drop by the forums as often as I'd like, but whenever I do, there are folks complaining about the 'Render Hang' problem, yet it seems like there's a dearth of replies from Sony.

Forgive me if I've missed something, but I'd love to know if there's at least a workaround... and preferably a fix.

Andy
johnmeyer wrote on 7/9/2005, 11:05 AM
Forgive me if I've missed something, but I'd love to know if there's at least a workaround... and preferably a fix.

Most of the problems reported in various threads center around using a large number of high resolution still photos. The workaround that has been posted -- and which works -- is to reduce the resolution of these photos. This can be done in PhotoShop or any other photo editor. You should reduce these to something slightly above your video resolution (720x480 for NTSC DV, for example), but adjusted for any zooming (if you use pan/crop to zoom in so the pan/crop box is 1/2 the X and Y size of the original, then you should reduce the resolution of that still photo to only 1440x960 so, when zoomed in, there are still 720x480, or more, pixels). One additional benefit of this approach is that you will have fewer artifacts on your stills (which result from subsampling), your render will proceed more quickly (fewer pixels to process), and the playback on the timeline will be faster.

In a future release, Sony could perhaps provide a feature that would look at the maximum zoom on each still photo, and provide a way to quickly create proxies for each picture at the optimal resolution, prior to rendering, so that you could have all these additional benefits. Just a thought.
JJKizak wrote on 7/9/2005, 1:21 PM
That's a pretty good idea.

JJK
Widetrack wrote on 7/9/2005, 7:51 PM
I'm getting render hangs in an hour-long project with lots of stills and a little DV footage too. I thought I could at least print to tape before my machine melts from too many brute-force reboots. (Task manager won't shut it down when it hags, so I hit the reset button. ugh.) So I'm prerendering in 8-minute segments and am right now on file "88 of 115" in section 2. Trying to pre-render the whole thing hung up too. I'm actually not even 100% sure Vegas will use these pre-renders when I tell it too print to tape--I never used pre-renders before.

I'm wondering if a workaround would be to render smaller MPEG2 segments, then connect them later with a utility I found a couple of years ago (MPEG Connect, I think) that stitches multiple mpegs together). Of course, it would be nice if Sony fixed the problem on their end.

As far as reducing the size of the stills in Photoshop, I'm wondering how much this will affect the image quality. I've already seen a similar project pixellate when shown on a big-screen TV. I don't really get the relationship between:

Pixels in a still image: pixels in a frame of DV (let alone other formats): pixels on a NTSC screen.

I haven't noticed ordinary broadcast programs pixellating on a big screen, and would like to know how they do it.

Will report on how the segmental pre-rendering goes.
AndyMac wrote on 7/10/2005, 4:01 AM
>Most of the problems reported in various threads center around using a large number of high resolution still photos.

I'm having render 'hangs' on DV projects with no stills at all, so it's not not that alone, although it might excacerbate the problem.
Seems to be worst when rendering to MPEG2.

Andy
johnmeyer wrote on 7/10/2005, 9:44 AM
Are you using the "Min and Max" fX? I was able to duplicate a hange when using that plugin, but only under certain circumstances.
Widetrack wrote on 7/10/2005, 1:18 PM
Well, As those of you with a greater understanding of selective prerender than I had yesterday knew, using it did nothing to help me render my project.

I've done all the ram setting and HT disabling and watching Vegas suck up RAM in Task Manager as everyone's mentioned.

I have to thnk Lance is on the money when he said, "It seems to me that the memory management is holding onto the RAM it needs for rendering an image, even after the image is no longer being processed. As each image is processed, the RAM used goes up up up"

This exactly describes the situation here.

All the workarounds only serve to do renders small enough so the individual machine doesn't run out of RAM, but they don't address the problem that Vegas is slurping it up and not letting go. Some recent posts suggest it doesn't specifically have to do with stills, either. Stills just tend to use more RAM than video.

My project has over 150 stills with lots of heavy zooms, so I need hi res images. And the project is nested so there's no Vegas 5 option for me.

I'm supposed to deliver this project to a TV station tomorrow on tape and I have no idea how to do it.

ANYONE got any suggestions? I've never been left in the lurch by Sonic Foundry / Sony yet, and I hope it doesn't happen here.

AndyMac wrote on 7/10/2005, 1:45 PM
>Are you using the "Min and Max" fX? "

Just colour correction (HSL, curves, contrast, etc.) on a 3 camera shoot; vanilla DV, nothing fancy. A 1 hour project rendered straight to MPEG2