Hey Steve:

I thought I was the only Vegas 6.0a user with this problem! Hallelujah! I thought something was wrong with my computer! I even sent this problem to tech support via e-mail.

I have an 80 minute documentary chock full of stills in the pan/crop mode. And YES, my renders freeze at about the same point in the timeline. The clock continues to click but the render stops and the picture freezes. Also, when I click CANCEL RENDER the software freezes up and I have to perform a CTRL-ALT-DEL just to exit the program. Vegas 6.0a also freezes up on me when I move around the timeline alot during normal edit sessions causing me to have to, once again, close out the program using CTRL-ALT-DEL. More often than not, I have to re-save the project because I get the diolog box that warns me that Vegas was improperly shut down.

I never had this problem in Vegas before and I have been a loyal user since version 3.0!

Believe me when I tell you, I had, within the past week, formatted my hard drive three times and re-installed Windows XP Home with all the accompanying drivers and the SP2 update. I also re-enstalled Vegas 6.0a directly from the Sony website to make sure I got the latest version.

Well, I finally did get to finish the documentary for a client and here's how I did it, after many failed attempts:

I rendered small sections at a time (sometimes not even that working until the second and third attempts) then pieced the indivual sections together on a new timeline, re-named and re-rendered it (because for some reason Vegas would not let me print to tape from the timeline-- another issue, perhaps?) and printed to tape through the capture/print to tape dialog box.

I have 2GB of PC3200 DDR ram and I've changed my page file from 0 to 4000 mb. I am using a RADEON 9800 Pro 3d graphics adapter on a Pentium 4 3.0 gHz machine. I have four hard drives with the program files on my C drive and all captures on a separate, 250 gb hard drive.

But heck, us Vegas users should not have to do it that way! We should be able to set it to render and go about our business while it renders without problems all at once. If somebody gets the solution to this problem, please e-mail me at Invfraudguy@yahoo.com? I will do the same if I get an answer.

Thanks

Don't know if this will help but the only time I had that problem is when I used a fixed bit rate on my renders. Once I went to variable, the renders worked out fine.

TomG

Ok guy's, here's what's happenning. The reason the V5 project doesn't work in V6 is that V6 pushes the living crap out of the processor. For instance:
1hr 6 min project (V5) pushes the processor 55to 98 % and takes 4 hrs to complete with a processor temp of 131F.
1 hr 34 min project (V6) pushes the processor 86 to 100% and mostly 100% and takes 2.5 hrs to complete with a processor temp of 142F. In other words the processor is humping big time. Any bad fan, high room ambient, high processor temp in limit will cause the render to stop and the clock still ticks. If you are rendered into a memory limit sometimes you will also get the same indication. I had one render stop at a frame count of 109,700 and at that point was the beginning of a still with a velocity mesh that was concealing a black frame. The black frame was not visible until the mesh on the upper track was moved. I then rendered all the complex stuff to avi and substituted it in the timeline and removed the original stuff from the project to knock down the memory usage.B When an action is performed in V6 with the memory close to being sucked up everything goes ga ga crash hang when the intiated action tries to comply. It's like sticking Batman in the huge clock gears and everything crashes. My personal opinion is that 4 gig of ram will do wonders for V6.
P-4, 3.4, 800 buss, 2gig ram, Intel P875, SATA 500 gig, and 250 gig of SCSI drives. 6300 rpm fan on processor, about 6 fans in cabinet all blowing outward with the exception of the front fans which suck inward.
Room air conditioner on max (71F) with outside temp at 60F.

JJK

Mr. JJK:

Believe it or not, my Intel WASP motherboard will allow me to upgrade to 4 gb of ram. Can you briefly convince me to make the $460.00 expenditure to buy 4, 1 gig RAM slices by explaining how increasing RAM will offset CPU cooling problems?

I'm thinking the money would be better spent on fixing the cooling problem. Any PC where the CPU cannot run at 100% indefinately is a very suspect machine. Is the CPU overclocked by any chance. I've heard of systems being sold down here that were overclocked but the purchaser didn't know they were.
Bob.

This was posted by resident Vegas expert Ed Troxel on DV Info (DVInfo.net):

<<Vegas 6 is designed to use multi-processors better and, therfore, provide better rendering times. However, that also means that the processor will be working harder than before and, therefore, generate more heat. Unless you can keep it cool, that could lead to problems.

If you look at your RAM usage while rendering, you'll notice the demands are fairly minimal. Increasing RAM will not show you significant improvements. For example, if I upgraded from 256 meg to 512 meg, I might notice a little. If I upgrade from 1 Gig to 2 Gig, I probably wouldn't notice anything at all.>>

Does this make sense? Also, my computer is a Gateway purchased directly from them. I don't think anyone messed with overclocking the CPU. When I render, my CPU graph shows that it is working at a consistent 100%.

The only time I've found I needed more RAM for was dealing with HiRes stills.
But it may well not be an overclocked PC, question is, how good is the cooling?
Even with a very big heatsink and plenty of fans one critical thing is getting the heat from the CPU chip to the heatsink. There's not a large area that has to move around 100 Watts of heat. If the heatsink isn't fitted properly the chip can get very hot even with the best heatsinks. Assuming you've got plenty of cool air blowing over the heatsink, next thing is to check how well the heatsink is fitted.
Bob.

JJK,

I think you hit the nail on the head in. Saturday I tried to export a 60 sec AVI to WMV, it gets to a point and the render stops, but the time "keeps on tickin' tickin'..."

I tried to lower the thread count, changed RAM settings, and turned OFF hyperthreading on my p4 3.06 1 GB ram machine. Nada!

Vegas 5 spit it out in 5 minutes and was fine.

I hope this gets fixed soon.

jkrepner: if you set the thread count to 1, can you render?

Options>preferences>video>maximum number of rendering threads = 1

I tried it set to 1 on Saturday, and it hangs towards the end of the render. I'm not in front of that machine now, but I can send any additional info to you later today if need be.

Thanks for the reply.

Jeff

H DiMA:
I'm sorry if I intimidated that more ram will cool the processor. More ram has nothing to do with cooling the processor as far as I know. More ram will help to keep you from running out of ram during the render process. But added cooling will help. keep in mind the Intel board that I have will not handle 4 gig of ram (875) as it will indicate 3304 and raise hell with the sound card. I had to pull out 2 gig to get the board to work properly. I would check on maybe the New Egg
review forum to see if there are any problems with adding more ram on your board before you bust the bank.

JJK

This might sound dumb, but here goes: Would I actually be cooling my processor if I removed the side cover and ran a room fan blowing towards the motherboard? Or, are we talking adding a liquid cooling system?

The easiest thing to get is the 6000 rpm fan and heat sync for the processor for about $25.00. The standard processor fan is 3000 rpm. there are more exotic ones available, and you can add extra small fans in your case if there engineered for extra fans or you can open the case and have a gigunda fan blowing into the machine. You really only need the cooling power during rendering as the processor temperature will coast all day long at about 106F or lower doing normal work.

JJK