Vegas 7e crashes/freezes using hi-rez .JPG or .BMP

RichardDT wrote on 5/16/2007, 4:05 PM
Just recently upgraded to Vegas 7e from 5 and attempted to use it to create a video with a mixture of customer supplied .jpg and .bmp still images with DV video clips. However we experienced countless and regular program 'freezes', system hangs, exception errors resulting in Vegas crashing and even full system restarts. This would occur during normal layout, editing and even during rendering. It would always seem to happen with a certain group of scanned image files, when playing or rendering the session. Long story short, I transferred all the files and attempted to continue the project on 3 additional PC's over the weekend (so we could not contact tech support) with the same types of crashes and freezes on all machines in an attempt to finish the product in time for use by the client. Very frustrating and we were too far along to start over using Vegas 5 which, looking back now we should have done since I have not been able to recreate the problem on the old release.

The only unusual thing we thought could possibly be causing a problem was that this group of image files were scanned at a fairly high resolution (ex. 5863x7484, 5972x4179, 3031x5536), on average, 4500x3000, when compared to all the rest of the images. So we deleted them all from the project and everything was perfectly fine after that, albeit the customer wasn't completely happy with us having to delete an entire section of the video.

Of course, looking back in retrospect, if cooler heads had prevailed and we would have realized in time that we could have resized the images in Photoshop and solved our problems, then it wouldn't have been so bad. My question is this, is there some unknown limitation that Vegas is placing on image resolution size? If so, why isn't it well documented that way, or else 'you will crash the program'? I don't believe 3500x5000 resolution is all that unreasonable if we wanted to zoom way in or do panning across the image. Anyway, their technical support person I spoke to after the fact was less than helpful in coming to any sort of resolution with the program abnormally ending or freezing up, just that it should be well known that all image files should be resized or cropped down to 720x480 before using them in Vegas or else you may run into "problems". Wow, what a solution!! We had nearly 400 images for this project. That's a lot to ask in my opinion, let alone this is not documented anywhere.

Anyway, I've been a long time fan of Vegas for a lot of years, but this whole experience has left me wondering about Sony's software development and debugging processes after my experience with their technical support. Anyone else experience something similar to this?

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 5/16/2007, 4:31 PM
Well, one thing that helps is to pump up your memory to 4 gig. Next set the ram preview to 16 megs. Then take the sections of your 5000 x 5000 jpgs and render them to avi then substitute each section in the timeline while deleting the stills from the media manager. This will relieve the memory demands of the large jpgs. Then you can render the entire project no sweat.
JJK
John_Cline wrote on 5/16/2007, 4:59 PM
High resolution stills eat up a lot of RAM in Vegas. The freezing is usually Vegas running out of RAM and then having to use the vastly slower page file. As JJKizak pointed out, adding more RAM and turning down the memory set aside for RAM previews will usually do the trick.

I had an HD project in Vegas a couple fo years ago that used nothing but a series of 12,000x3000 panoramas with zooms and pans on each one. It simply would not render until I added more RAM.
RichardDT wrote on 5/17/2007, 3:19 PM
JJK and John, thanks for the suggestions. Attempts to perform any sort of render with these files whether to AVI or MPEG2 results in exception errors and a program crash every time. The machine I thought would give me the least problems is a powerful dual CPU with AMD 2.8 ghz Opteron quad core with 4 GB system memory, but that was not the case. It crashed as easily as the others which leads me to believe it is a lack of program robustness/stability or memory management in this latest Vegas software version since I haven't been able to recreate it in Vegas 5.

I did go back to the original session and hi-rez files and changed RAM preview to 16mb on the 4gig Opteron machine. I then pressed Play from the beginning and it crashed after the 7th or 8th image. I'm at a loss what to try next.
nolonemo wrote on 5/17/2007, 4:10 PM
Unless you need large images because of panning/zooming on the images, I think you would end up with better image quality downsizing in Photoshop (you could create a droplet and automate the process) rather than by rendering down large stills to 720x480 with the mpeg codec.
Spot|DSE wrote on 5/17/2007, 4:20 PM
Richard,
Just had a reasonably similar issue with a mix of HDCAM, XDCAM, HDV, and big stills on the timeline.
Setting render threads to 1, setting RAM to zero, and being sure the images were no larger than 2K in hor/vert, and it all rendered as expected.
JJKizak wrote on 5/17/2007, 4:45 PM
If you don't want to downrez the large stills you will have to render them in 7 or 8 picture avi segments (that is all that can be rendered with your present project as you have stated), substitute the 7 or 8 pictures with the avi, then delete those individual stills from the media manager. Then render the next 7 or 8 pictures and sustitute them, etc until all of the large stills are complete and the individual stills are deleted from the media manager. Then reboot to reset the paging file.This will relieve the memory load and then you can render the whole project. It is time consuming but it works.I make sure that all the panning and such are completed before rendering to avi. Otherwise you have to get those stills down to 2000 and follow what Spot says.
JJK
blink3times wrote on 5/18/2007, 6:51 AM
I would say that OVERALL (not just with large jpg's), 7e seems to be less stable than c or d. I have had more crashes for different reasons with 7e then I have EVER had with 7d. In fact I don't remember crashing with 7d!?

I've got a new mobo/cpu coming...will try with that, but I may just roll back to 7d if the crashes continue.
Spot|DSE wrote on 5/18/2007, 6:55 AM
Definitely not good, no doubt.
I've discovered that by keeping my RAM at no more than 512 seems to keep me stable. The *only* crashes I've experienced thus far, have been on an extremely long timeline, all HD in various flavors, with dozens of images in one short section. It continually crashed in the short section, even after I resized all pix. Resetting my RAM and setting threads to just 1, made it possible to render. Render time didn't increase as a result of just one thread. Perhaps this could be better documented, but it worked well for me. Half a day of trying to render the project was fixed with one small change in Prefs.