I’ve just been going through this problem. Solved it for one render. living in hope for the next one.

Here’s a partial compilatin of all the suggestions I got from some of the great Vegasians on this forum. I’m going to post a complete one soon.

Ultimately, though, I think my problem was either a antivirus program I’d forgotten was on there kept starting a scan or update or something every 8 hours or so.


High probability of helping (IMHO)

• Turn off all antivirus programs
• Turn off Windows update
• Turn off all firewall programs
• Set your Dynamic RAM allocation to 64
• Set audio device drivers to Windows Classic Wave drivers
• Make really big still images smaller, esp if your render hangs while rendering one.
• Render al .MOVs to AVIs and swap them in your project
• Render all .TIFs to PNG or jpg and swap them in your project
• In the View menu, uncheck the "waveforms and frames" item.
• Make your preview window really small
• Turn off any other background processes you can figure out how to turn off that won’t kill your computer.
• Keep your machine cool. If in doubt, put a fan on it.
• Click your hee…no, wait. That’s something else.
• Make your Page file bigger and put it on a disk other than the OS disk. (No
figures available for how much bigger. Suggestion came from back in the
days when disks were measured in Megabytes.
• Reduce large stills to something slightly above your video resolution
(720x480 for NTSC DV, for example), but adjusted for any zooming.

Lower probabiltly of helping (IMHO)

• select "disable multicore render for AVIs". This may not help, and won’t affect mpeg renders in any case
• Use a computer with an Intel chips and Intel board
• In Preferences, select "Disable multi-processor AVI rendering,"
• Set the number of rendering threads to “1” (although “2” worked for me too)

Best of luck.

Found the other thread. Thank you.
Problem solved. Thank you sony techs.
We lowered the render threads to 2 and the dynamic ram to 512.
I also changed my Windows CACHE to a larger amount. It was pretty small.
Rendered that section separately and replaced it in the time line.
Worked great.
The section had a photo floating on a DJ HD background. Large file. I lowered the photo size and it seem to help.
Thanks guys,
Adam

Yes,...these settings are where the problem lies.

I found that 512 megs reserved didnt work several times,...then increasing it to over 1 gig did. Then on other projects, the 1 gig settings didnt stop the crash and a 64meg setting did!

It's been a crap shoot for me. I simply would start at 512,..if that crashed, I shoot up to 1 gig, if that crashed, I drop down to 256. I'd just keep doing that untill I found what worked.

CT

oh,...sometimes 2 CPU threads would work, but mostly I'd have to drop to 1.

4 threads almost never works for me on my Q6000 Quad

Are you experiencing an actual crash, or is Vegas just hitting the page file hard enough to make it seem unresponsive?

Two seperate affects happen:

1.) Render begins, Vegas calculates estimated end time and countdown begins along with render. Windows task manager displays even RAM usage and high processor usage. Render meter gets to a point and holds (let's say 49%) and task manager shows CPU usage drop to idle. Countdown clock reaches zero and render never finishes or progreses at all. (you can leave it that way all night with nothing even budging untill you force a kill process)

2.) Render is cruising along like normal and suddenly closes Vegas...bang! App closed without warning.

Scernerio #1 is most common for me.

CT

BTW building projects are silky smooth and playback in preview 100% nice! (never have problems previewing at any resolution quality)

CT,

Do you get these render problems when rendering to BluRAy or DVD - or on both?

I found out that 8.1 redered all my problematic 8.0c projects just fine, without any workarounds!!

The downside is that plugin support is non-existent, othervise I would stay in 8.1

I never had problems rendering to DVD with 8.0d or 8.0c, but I have render problems in 8.0c when rendering to BluRay formats...

"High probability of helping (IMHO)

Guys, while I agree all the above are sound advices, and may help with some machines/projects - I've a gut feeling the real culprit is elsewhere.

I have never had to disable my antivirus (AVAST - free, recommended!), or get rid of any background processes (I need them, as my Vegas workstation is the only PC I use in other work, too - and this requires constant Internet availability, and the most recent updates to the system, etc.).

Yet (I'm knocking the wood now) I have never had any crash or stalled renders problems, using Vegas 7, 8.0 through 8.0c through 8.1...

Am I just lucky, or what?

"Am I just lucky, or what?"

Probably.
Software today is more complex than I really want to know about.
This is an interesting read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)

Not that I comprehend much of it but I can see how the wheels can fall of in ways that seem familiar.

Bob.

"Do you get these render problems when rendering to BluRAy or DVD - or on both?"

Most of my projects are 1080i and I get the render crash when I render to Cineform.avi, AVCHD or Sony YUV

Doesn't seen to matter what codec I render to.

CT

Just want to clarify that I HAVE sucessfully rendered all of my projects.

It just just meant that I had to drop my core threads to 1 and do allot of playing around with memory settings. (3 different projects required 3 different settings to be sucessful and it took a few days to find the right settings combination for each)

I never had this problem with my old dual core. This only came when I upgraded to a new Dell running Quad (Q6600)

"I've tried 3 times now and every time Vegas seems to stop rendering around 49% to 51%. It still looks like Vegas is working but I don't see any Frames going by under the preview window and the scenes are not changing in the preview window. It's a 32 minute video and it's taken 3 hours now for it to go to 49%"

I have had this happen - in Vegas 3, and here's what I did to fix it.

Go to the "project media" tab and click on "Remove All Unused Media from the Project" (The lightning bolt icon).

Removing the unused media is part of my workflow now and I've never seen the problem again. Try it and please let me know if it fixes your problem.

It would also be very educational (next time you stumble over this) to know how your system behaves if you render the same project to DVD (compatible mpeg2).

Christian

I've been contributing to the last 2 threads on this forum regarding rendering, but now it seems that this is the active thread. I've done absolutely everything mentioned herein except, perhaps, making sure that I have invoked "Clean project media" (I routinely do this anyway, but sometimes I may forget to do this immediately prior to rendering). I also have been turning off another handfull of processes not mentioned (nor do I consider them worth mentioning - I can't see that doing so helps).

I'm currently rendering versions of a 1 hour, 40 min. project to Cineform intermediate 1920i so that I can make DVDs from it with TMPGenc, or, for other collaborators, MP4s to play on their computers, etc. I've been successful always with my old 3gHz P4 on an Intel 875 - at least always when I set it for multithreading in bios and then set rendering threads in Vegas to 1, or else resetting the bios to eliminate multithreading (with Vegas threads still set to 1) - but swapping the harddrives and waiting a couple of days for it to crank to the end is a drag; and once out of at least a dozen tries with my Q6600 on an Asus P5B. (All of my successful renders include putting a checkmark in the box for "Disable multi-processor AVI rendering.")

My most recent failure involved all the successfull settings except changing the number of threads to 2, up from 1.

Last night at 8pm I tried again on my quad, this time again with rendering threads set back to 1, but with Windows firewall turned on (previously I had turned off my Comodo firewall, and hadn't allowed the Windows firewall to replace it while rendering). This morning, I saw a failure mode that I hadn't seen before. Instead of the frame counter frozen at a certain number in the preview window, the frame counter was gone and an error message said something to the effect that "Vegas rendering has encountered a problem. The cause could not be determined." Oh, yes - one other change: I had enabled media manager.

I hope to try again tonight, with media manager off. OM...OM...OM........

Folks,...it "seems" to me that these render crashes are only happening with Core 2 Quads?

Let's help Sony out here. Are these render problems happening to any Core 2 Duo's or even P4 single core CPU's?

CT

It has been a year since I stayed up for three days trying to find a fix for Vegas crashes. If I remember correctly, it had to do with a memory problem. Do a control -alt-delete before your next render or while you are working and watch the PF usage. When the page file memory maxes out- Vegas crashes. I also noticed that this was happening to a lot of Quad core machines. The other factor was the Canon XH-A1, Vegas has a problem with it. I had reported this to Sony with a lot of detail last year. I was hoping build C would help, but it sounds like there are still problems. The long work around that I came up with was to break video up into sections (new Vegas projects) and then render the smaller segments of the video out to avi's and then stitch them together in a new project. For some reason the number of clips in a project made a difference (refer to memory problem). In short, it could be a number of factors.

I just completed my second render in a week of my 34-minute program directly to MPEG 2.

Didn't have to disable multiprocessor rendering, and even set the max rendering thread box to "2". I did set the audio drivers to Classic Wave Drivers, but I really think the culprit was the antivirus software launching itself automatically and blowing things up.

Added a couple more entries to the list of possible rendering solutions from the old days. See above.

Thanks again to all.

I have had render problems galore since I got a quad core.

I am working tonight on a project that I have sucessfully rendered before. I made some substantial color correction changes and I have tried rendering it 4 times now but all have crashed.

My usual tricks of increasing and/or lowering preview RAM are not working. I have even dropped to 1 CPU thread and still crashed.

I just switched multicore threading "off" in the BIOS and I'm now trying teh render again. It now only shows "two" processors instead of the usual "four" in task manager.

My page file usage is holding steady at 1.87- 1.96 gigs.

So far so good. Hope this one completes.

Oh,..here are the current facts:

Intel Q6600
3 Gigs of RAM
XP 32 bit
Vegas 8C
512 Preview RAM
1 process thread set
AVI multithreading disabled
BIOS Multicore disabled

Project is 1080i. Project is 32bit float color depth. All AVCHD footage and rendering to Cineform.avi

CT

Hi,

This starts to become a nightmare! 8.0c running on Vista 64 and a quad core and rendering AVCHD material - aarghhh... I have not been able to render a single project yet out to BluRay 1920x1080i (PAL) with this combo. This is the latest result:

Sony Vegas Pro 8.0
Version 8.0c (Build 260)
Exception 0xC0000005 (access violation) READ:0x24 IP:0x6B30DE
In Module 'vegas80.exe' at Address 0x400000 + 0x2B30DE
Thread: ProgMan ID=0xAF4 Stack=0x4B2D000-0x4B30000
Registers:
EAX=258e5498 CS=0023 EIP=006b30de EFLGS=00210202
EBX=0473e390 SS=002b ESP=04b2d914 EBP=00000003
ECX=00000000 DS=002b ESI=26017368 FS=0053
EDX=26198cf8 ES=002b EDI=046d87b0 GS=002b
Bytes at CS:EIP:
006B30DE: 8B 41 24 FF D0 85 C0 74 .A...t
006B30E6: 0B 83 C5 01 3B 6C 24 10 ....;l
Stack Dump:
04B2D914: 258E5498 257C0000 + 125498
04B2D918: 26198CF8 257C0000 + 9D8CF8
04B2D91C: 0136FE28 01270000 + FFE28
04B2D920: 26198CF8 257C0000 + 9D8CF8
04B2D924: 00000000
04B2D928: 8004E00A
04B2D92C: 00000015
04B2D930: 00000008
04B2D934: 00000006
04B2D938: 00000000
04B2D93C: 046D87BC 04640000 + 987BC
04B2D940: 006ACE5E 00400000 + 2ACE5E (vegas80.exe)
04B2D944: 26198CF8 257C0000 + 9D8CF8
04B2D948: 04B2D95C 04A30000 + FD95C
04B2D94C: 00000000
04B2D950: 0B7709E8 0B3E0000 + 3909E8
> 04B2D960: 006B5338 00400000 + 2B5338 (vegas80.exe)
04B2D964: 26198CF8 257C0000 + 9D8CF8
04B2D968: 04B2D9C8 04A30000 + FD9C8
04B2D96C: 00000005
04B2D970: 4865E00C 48230000 + 42E00C
> 04B2D998: 004F050F 00400000 + F050F (vegas80.exe)
04B2D99C: 0000025B
04B2D9A0: 00000000
04B2D9A4: 0000025B
04B2D9A8: 00000000
> 04B2DA10: 0058EBE1 00400000 + 18EBE1 (vegas80.exe)
04B2DA14: 0000000B
04B2DA18: 04B2DA28 04A30000 + FDA28
> 04B2DA1C: 33BC6077 33BB0000 + 16077 (mcplug.dll)
04B2DA20: 00000000
> 04B2DB58: 00450082 00400000 + 50082 (vegas80.exe)
> 04B2DB5C: 00560095 00400000 + 160095 (vegas80.exe)
- - -
04B2FFF0: 00000000
04B2FFF4: 00527950 00400000 + 127950 (vegas80.exe)
04B2FFF8: 00AE7AB0 00400000 + 6E7AB0 (vegas80.exe)
04B2FFFC: 00000000

Access violations within the program module itself - can that be blamed on someone else than SCS?

Believe me, I have tried to remove unused project media - actually all tricks mentioned in these forums - no luck.

Ironically 8.1 works perftectly. But I need my few important plugins - they are not aval for 8.1.

The project fails ate the very beginning 182 frames this time. Well before any plugins (that worked ok in 8.0b) are involved.

This IS spooky, for me 8.0b was more stable than 8.0c.

Any suggestions? I'm stuck... :(

Christian

As I have said before, you have Vegas and something else (software or hardware) trying to access the same block of memory. To solve the issue you need to strip the computer down to as little as you can. Turn off EVERY service you don't need... EVERY program, Disable and remove as much hardware as you can and I would start with that sound card.

Run vegas again and see if that clears it up. If yes then start adding things bit by bit until you find the culprit.

Thanx blink, have done that already. Actually, Vegas according to my experience, NEVER suffered from other than slight but measurable speed penalties, if there are lots of other processes running... not denying that some other people might have problems here... But again, if the program works without these processes, the original problem still might be in Vegas...

I think that I have proved that the problem is in Vegas 8.0c. since I FOUND A WORKAROUND that works on ALL my problematic projects I tested do far. Thanx CLiff for the hint :)

My problematic projects render out perfectly - if I set the NUMBER OF THREADS FROM 4 TO 1. Haven't still tried other values.

The down side - the project takes 4 times loger to render, but it at least renders!!!

So, I think its a total waste of time and effort to fiddle further:

- 8.0b rendered my project without a problem
- 8.1 renders my project without a problem
- 8.0c with ONE thread only renders without a problem

BUT 8.0c with all 4 threads enabled CRASHES on most of my AVCHD renderto out to Bluray.

Remember - the same project, the same computer, the same settings. There IS seriously something wrong with 8.0c and AVCDH. No wonder you blink have been "loud" about how "lousy" AVCHD is...

There is nothing wrong with AVCHD, I get SUPERB quality (actually better results than with HDV) and the editing is very smooth on my fast PC. However, 8.0c fails to render if I use all 4 cores on my QX9650 (Vista 64). What the heck is going on here?

My conclusion is that 8.0c IS broken and SCS must really now concentrate to get this fixed - ASAP. What do you think about my conclusion, in the light of the proof I provided ???

Christian

PS: I would use only 8.1 if it would not be fore the lacking plugin support. I like Vegas very much, I'm not pushing it more than what it should be able to handle, nor should it push ME more than I can handle. I have lost now two days of effective work hours - just experimenting to find a workaround.

Agreed... And for what it's worth, I found this site for optimizing XP for audio performance:

http://www.audioforums.com/resources/windows-xp-optimization.html

...but there shouldn't be any reason that most of the tweaks wouldn't apply to video processing applications as well. Digital media processing is digital media processing, to some degree.

Anyway, these tweak have really stabilized my quad core machine. They may help someone else, so I'll post the link here. I believe that I've also seen a similar page for tweaking the Vista OS as well.

TB

Morning update!

Ladies and gentlemen,...IT RENDERED!!!! (WAHHHHOOOOO!!)

It woke up this morning and the file finished!

The only difference between the several failed attempts was shutting down the CPU multithreading in my BIOS!

It had no problems after that.

Whew,...that was a close one.

My "quad core" is now a "dual core",...but hey,...at least it renders.

Anybody with a Quad,...go to the BOIS and disable it, then try your project again.

I think I'll stay Quad for building the projects, then reboot and shut down quad and reboot for rendering.

Sony,...do we need to wait for a full "letter" upgrade? (i.e "D") or can you guys do something you rarely do,..release a "hot-fix" patch?

CT

I had the same problem with release 8a and 8b.

The patch for update 8b corrected the issue. Now that I updated to 8.c. The red frame of death is back. Where can I get Version 8.b back so I can apply the patch again.

I am getting every tired of the crashes. Weeks of wasted rendering time.

HDV
Canon XH-A1