Vegas 6 and the XP paging file

vitalforce wrote on 6/25/2005, 6:46 PM

I'm running Vegas 6b on a Dell 8200 desktop, P4 at 2.53 on a 533 bus, with 512 MB of RAM. Win XP Home, SP1.

I've now tried four times in four days to render a 90-minute nested timeline to an MPEG-2 file (DVD Arch. 24p video stream). Each time the rendering just halts on a random frame after 41 minutes, 51 minutes and 60 minutes respectively. No error message, it just quietly hangs and the program doesn't respond. However, as an experiment I found that I can open anything else while the hang is sitting there and any other program runs fine.

The goal is to create one long file, not one that pauses between chapter changes, because the DVDs it's going to be put on, are going to be submitted for review by some major film festivals.

I looked at my System Properties/Advanced and saw that the CPU was under 10% but the paging file graph was full to the top, represented as 1.8 GB.

I recently read here that Vegas 6 may gradually fill up the page file and then that stops the presses. I note that I can enlarge the page file to a max of 4096MB.

The question is: How to render a big MPEG-2 file that's going to be about 5300 MB?

Comments

vitalforce wrote on 6/25/2005, 10:18 PM

Follow-up to the above issue several hours later: I rendered the remaining 'half' of the project with no problem but will post again if I can later render the whole 90 minutes with a max page file at 4096 MB.

Wolfgang S. wrote on 6/26/2005, 12:47 AM

We have found a similar issue with m2t material - also here the size of the paging file climbs up dramatically, until Vegas 6 (but also Vegas5) crashes.

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=399441&Replies=0

jetdv wrote on 6/26/2005, 4:46 AM

What is your ram preview setting on?

vitalforce wrote on 6/26/2005, 6:10 AM

I have RAM preview set to zero which I'm told is a compatibility tweak needed to make the full version of Boris 7 work as a plug-in.

johnmeyer wrote on 6/26/2005, 9:01 AM

Do you use the min/max plugin?

[r]Evolution wrote on 6/26/2005, 9:43 AM

As a workaround (I hate workarounds... it should just work) I would break the project up into halves. Render the first half then the second. Maybe you could just seperate the two as Regions then render Regions.

Go back in and connect these two Regions and render them out as one big file.

fwtep wrote on 6/26/2005, 10:05 AM

It might not be a RAM thing. How much free space do you have on the drive you're rendering to? I've noticed that I need at least twice as much free space as the final file will need. (Although it might be tied to where your temp files are. Mine are on the same drive as I'm rendering to, so that's probably why I need so much space.)

I feel your pain about having it take so long to find out that there's a problem and so long to test various causes. For my movie I had it rendering for several days and then it failed at about 98% finished (this was V4).

vitalforce2 wrote on 6/27/2005, 4:19 PM

johnmeyer: Not sure what you mean by the min/max plugin.

fwtep: I have about 65GB free on an internal, second Seagate drive, but I do have the temp folder on the same drive. All the same, the free space after the rendering is 65GB even with the temp folder. I have one more drive bay free inside my Dell--tempted to stick another drive in there but a little worried about heat. I have some firewire drives coming in thru PCI card though--that's where all the source footage is.

I did render the project as two 45-minute MPEG-2 files (and upped the max paging file to that 4096MB limit--lots of room on the C: drive) but sad that I can't slap the whole thing on a DVD. I had to pick one spot where there's a fade to black with no sound under it, and that's the DVD chapter break.

But one can't base his creative decisions around the limitations of his tools. Although--imagine Dali with Maya. Seriously though, I'll soon have to hand off the movie to a sound designer and he's asking for "one long Quicktime file" to use in his ProTools setup.

I am starting to get the impression (guess this is a little unfair to Sony on a forum) that V6 has no under-the-hood feature which keeps it from consuming the whole page file and provoking a "crash" (frozen program).
.

fwtep wrote on 6/27/2005, 4:39 PM

Do you have that much space available on your temp drive?

vitalforce2 wrote on 6/27/2005, 4:54 PM

Hope we're not talking about apples and oranges. In Vegas preferences I set the temp folder on my second EIDE drive, a 160GB Seagate. That's what has 65GB of space left.

Liam_Vegas wrote on 6/27/2005, 6:26 PM

If (as one of those dreaded work-arounds) you want to render the project in sections... then you need to render to DV AVI format. To maintain the hightest quality (mainly in the color space) you would choose the Sony YUV codec.

Workflow is as follows
1) Create Regions on your timeline
2) Render each region to DV AVI (click the custom button... Video Tab /Video Format choose "Sony YUV Codec")
3) Load all the component AVI's back into a fresh Veg/Timeline
4) Render the entire timeline now to MPEG2

I'm making an assumption here that when you do the final render (encode actually) that you will not encounter the same problem as you had before.

The advantage to rendering to AVI in any case is that if the render fails for any reason... you still end up with a partial AVI file. You can load that back onto the original timeline and then continue rendering from the point that it stopped.

vitalforce wrote on 6/27/2005, 9:20 PM

I once before resorted to DV-AVI rendering but didn't think about using the YUV codec. I guess I'll try that (sigh).