Vegas 64 bit still a speed demon (that crashes).

Sebaz wrote on 10/18/2010, 9:17 PM
I like Vegas 10 quite a lot. The stabilizer is great, the ability to read timecode from the SDHC card, etc, etc. But just as in Vegas 9 64 bit, the new version crashes a lot. In 5 hours of working with it, it crashed 7 times. Doing what exactly? Just by hitting the space bar to play the timeline. The event under the cursor can have a filter applied or not, it doesn't really matter. It's absolutely random.

Vegas 10 32 bit, on the other hand, hasn't crashed on me at all since it was released, working on the same project, with the same footage, in the same area of the timeline, doing the same things.

Before the usual people start bashing my system because it's overclocked, I'll inform you that after the second crash in V10 64 bit I went into the BIOS and set all the CPU values to default. So with the system at stock speeds, I still got 5 more crashes.

Then I went back to the BIOS and set the values to the previous overclocked settings, and ran V10 32 bit for 3 more hours, with no crashes at all, again, working in the same project, same footage, same area of the timeline.

Also, this is all in a brand new installation that dates back to yesterday, which I did because I bought a 1.5 TB drive and I wanted to put the system on the 1 TB drive I already had. So this Windows install is totally fresh, with barely any software on it yet, and no previous versions of Vegas to mess up the current one.

I just think it sucks that being Vegas almost excellent when it comes to user interaction and features, we still have to use it as a 32 bit app hacking the exe file to let it use over 2 GB and having to go into the internal preferences to let it use more than the 4 default maximum threads. It would be great if Sony made the 64 version as reliable as the 32 bit one.

My guess is that the bugger here is that FileIOSurrogate.exe file that Vegas 64 uses but Vegas 32 doesn't. If the name correctly implies that Vegas 64 uses that executable as a link to read and/or write files, I don't know why it is there. I don't see any other 64 bit software needing a 32 bit executable to be able to load and save files, but I could be wrong about what this file is for.

What I'm not wrong about is that Vegas 64 is still not stable, and I hope Sony makes it stable soon, because there are some advantages when using it. There are some filters such as Saturation adjust that on V10 64 bit I don't need to render to playback in real time. In quality Best and Full, it just plays at 29.97. As well as many others. But the same filters on V10 32 bit play with hiccups, even going down to Preview Full.

Now, before some of you start firing your bullets at me, check it out for yourselves. Load a project in Vegas 10 64 bit and work with it for one day. Then count how many crashes do you get.

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 10/18/2010, 9:26 PM
"Load a project in Vegas 10 64 bit and work with it for one day. Then count how many crashes do you get."

Been working in Vegas Pro v10-64bit ever since the day it came out. ZERO crashes.
reberclark wrote on 10/18/2010, 9:52 PM
I bought Vegas Pro 10a 64bit a few days ago. No crashes.
ushere wrote on 10/18/2010, 10:26 PM
+1 - no crashes

and, that's with an ungainly 45min mass of (client) crap on the tl - m2t, avchd, wav, mp3, png, jpg, gen media, oh, and a couple of mov bkgrds.
cohibaman#1 wrote on 10/18/2010, 11:21 PM
The only incidences of Vegas crashing was rendering, when I updated Cineform Neo Scene to the latest version. I let the installer install to the default location which I thought would be Win 64 bit program files, but instead installed to programs files(x86). After some investagation I reinstalled the Cineform program, and directed it to install to right program files. Everything has been good with no more crashes.
farss wrote on 10/18/2010, 11:58 PM
A quick Google of "fileiosurrogate.exe" certainly shows a lot of users having issues with it. Then again people tend to latch onto one thing on the web so that may mean nothing.

My best suggestions are:

1) Test your RAM thoroughly. The most obvious difference between the 32 and 64 bit version of Vegas is the amount of RAM you are using. That you find the 64bit version faster indicates to me that you're using a lot of it.

2) The easiest way I've found to crash Vegas is to get impatient with it. Hit play and nothing seems to happen so you hit it again and again and then crash. Wait. Sometimes Vegas seems to go off doing something and if you keep proding it it goes south.

3) Consider that your power supply might not be upto the task.

4) When you're reporting such issues more details would help e.g. number of events, type of media, number of tracks, length of project, external preview etc.

Bob.
daryl wrote on 10/19/2010, 7:00 AM
Vegas 10 64 bit, fast, smooth, love the new features, ZERO crashes, not even a little glitch. Running on an i7 system with 12 G ram, win 7 pro.

NO complaints whatsoever.

Steve Mann wrote on 10/19/2010, 7:06 AM
I upgraded the day V10 was available and switched *in the middle of a project* (that's how confident I am in Sony Vegas). Zero problems and very pleased with the improvements.

This includes one project with 32 racks, lots of NewBlueFx and some Sony fx, lots of event pan/crop, track motion, three cameras of HDV and a 13-hour MP4 encode.

No problems.
Sebaz wrote on 10/19/2010, 7:47 AM
1) Test your RAM thoroughly. The most obvious difference between the 32 and 64 bit version of Vegas is the amount of RAM you are using. That you find the 64bit version faster indicates to me that you're using a lot of it.

I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic in Extended Mode and it came out without errors. The memory is 16 Gb of G.Skill PC 10666 (purchased as a kit for better compatibility)

2) The easiest way I've found to crash Vegas is to get impatient with it. Hit play and nothing seems to happen so you hit it again and again and then crash. Wait. Sometimes Vegas seems to go off doing something and if you keep proding it it goes south.

Bob, I know what you mean, but in this case this happened just by placing the cursor at some point in the timeline and just hitting the space bar one time, not repeatedly. It also happened by clicking on the play button in the Vegas GUI.

3) Consider that your power supply might not be upto the task.

I doubt that's the case. It's a Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W which at least when I bought it, was one of the best, and at 850 W, more than enough for my system.

4) When you're reporting such issues more details would help e.g. number of events, type of media, number of tracks, length of project, external preview etc.

This is a pretty simple project so far, since I just got it started. It has 4 video tracks and 4 audio tracks. However, the area of the timeline I'm working on now has video and audio in just one video and one audio track. Oh, and a second audio track for music.

The media is AVCHD from two Panasonic AVCCAMs, and HMC40 and HMC80, which record in what they call PH mode, 21 Mbps average with 24 Mbps maximum.

The external preview goes through a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card I just got. Just in case I will work with Windows Secondary Display for a few hours to see if that changes anything, which I would hate because with the Int. Pro I'm finally able to preview interlaced video the way it's supposed to be and not that mess of fields that you see when you preview that way. But if it turns out that it's the card, then I will return it. But keep in mind that I've been using this card in V10 32 bit and no crashes have occurred.

Still, I'm pretty sure this Vegas' problem, since starting with 8.1, all 64 bit Vegas versions have always been very crash prone. I still remember working with 8.1 and 9 64 bit and it would crash just by scrubbing video in the trimmer, and this was HDV video, not even AVCHD.
Former user wrote on 10/19/2010, 8:36 AM
I installed Vegas on release day and started a new project with it. Like several mentions here, I'm working with what can charitably be described as "ungainly" material - VOB's dragged to timeline (to build a click track for a band playing live to a video), editing Quicktime on the timeline (output from AE) for compositing, assembling 12 tracks of audio into a (way too busy for my taste) commercial for a radio client. Used portions of several Vegas 9 projects into a nested monstrosity that has saved me a ton of time, for a montage of a bunch of work for a client who wanted a demo reel.

While I still have VP9 installed, I haven't had to go back to it. I'm happy to report that on my i7, 12GB RAM, my biggest problem is that my flippin drives are filling up and I'm going to need to do a transfer to a bigger drive for my root drive (500GB is nearly full...and there's only software on it - stupid VST instrument plugins and their massive audio libraries - (shakes fist in air)).

Wait a minute...why am I apologizing for VP10 stability? So far it's a great experience. If this keeps up I'm going to move over to VP10 exclusively in a couple of weeks (still cautious, but cautiously very optimistic) .

Oh, and my previews are much better. The behavior of the preview window settings is much more predictable (re: works as advertised). So there.
Marvin_Herbold wrote on 10/24/2010, 9:02 AM
VP10 also crashes for me. I had VP9 and it never crashed. Upgraded to VP10 and now it is crashing once in a while. It often does not exit cleanly (crash on exit) and thus my preferences are not saved. It crashed on me when I imported a .veg file as media that itself had a lot of references to video files.
Former user wrote on 10/24/2010, 11:11 AM
Sebaz,

I can understand your frustration, but since you have been having scrubbing problems back to 8C, I would look somewhere other than vegas. I used 8C-32bit for years with no scubbing issues. I did not use 9, I am using 10 now on Windows 7-32 bit with no scrubbing issues.

If I remember correctly, and I may be wrong, at one time someone pointed out that scrubbing problems could be related to the video card/drivers. You might just check that out.

Dave T2
Sebaz wrote on 10/24/2010, 3:47 PM
Dave, I don't think I had issues with 8.0c crashing on scrubbing. I did with 8.1, and then with 9 64 bit, but less.

As an update, I reduced the number of render threads in the preferences to 12, and it crashed once or twice working on the same project, which is a substantial change to one or two crashes per hour the first day.
srode wrote on 10/24/2010, 5:53 PM
Why more than 8 threads?
Sebaz wrote on 10/24/2010, 7:07 PM
I don't know, I think it's supposed to be twice the amount of cores your processor has, in my case it has 6 cores so I set it to 12. I would have to run encoding tests to see what number of threads works best.
GuidingLight wrote on 10/24/2010, 7:59 PM
I did have lots of crashes and preferences not being saved during demo mode and mainly testing out the 3d features, using windows 7 64bit. Wasn't sure if was demo that was doing it then thought well it shouldn't since its same as full version, but since buying license and unistalling earlier versions of Vegas Pro and DVD Architect I haven't had it crash since, so I'm thinking maybe earlier venisons were causing the problems.
Alf Hanna wrote on 10/25/2010, 1:26 AM
Given the large amount of folks editing fine, I would go back to your system. Something there is likely to be the problem. Let us know how your Black Magic tests turn out. My bet is that it's that. I'd make sure overclocking is off until you figure out what's causing this situation. It's just another variable that could be at the core of this, or not.
Andrew B wrote on 10/25/2010, 1:33 AM
V10-a 64bit for the last week on a multicam project using HDV, XDCAM EX, Windows Media and .png files. Project length 2+ hours. Using various plug-ins and the stabilizer on quite a few clips.

No crashes or glitches.

I also find that I am able to continue working in V10 faster than other versions if I jump to another program and then back to Vegas.

I am usually running Outlook and a web browser or two at the same time I am running Vegas (sometimes Photoshop CS4 as well).

System is an i7 (8-core) Alienware M15 laptop with 6GB ram.

Andrew

disclaimer: I did find what I think might be a bug in the stabilizer plug-in (see my other post), but this did not cause a crash or any downtime in productivity.
cold-ones wrote on 10/27/2010, 8:13 AM
Many, many crashes here with v10 both 64-bit & 32-bit. (FWIW, I went to v10 quickly because of the number of crashes on my previous Win XP setup using v9.0e 64-bit--but at least with v.9 the 32-bit would often work where 64 wouldn't.)

I installed v10 on a brand new computer, Windows 7, Intel chips, NVidia, 16 GB RAM, etc and have suffered ever since. I should say that simple projects work fine, but most of what I do is a bit more complex. Currently, I have a 30 minute program shot in HD (primarily XDCAM EX) that defies all my attempts to render it. But I believe I've identified one thing that greatly increases the chance of crashing for me: nested Vegas files.

In my current project I have 4 nested files: CG, animation, music & F/X, and edited multicam footage. It's impossible to render out my project with all these nested files in it---it crashes, time and again. I'm forced to render the nested files out as movies and use these movies to replace the nested files in my timeline. This negates most of the advantages of using a nested file. (For some reason, the small CG file is the one that chokes Vegas shortly after it appears on the timeline.)

(I've also tried replacing movies within the nested files with different types of proxy movies, didn't help.) The 64-bit version just stops in mid-render & resets the current frame number to 0 and hangs. The 32-bit gave me a low RAM error message yesterday before it stopped. Watching the 64-bit version during render the RAM stayed relatively constant around 4.5 GB, so there was plenty of RAM available to it. I was hoping to throw enough RAM at Vegas to keep it happy, but that isn't working for me.

I use nested files in every substantial project because of their flexibility and simplicity. I wish I didn't have to give them up.