vegas 9 and firewire stability - freezing

arbory wrote on 1/5/2010, 3:19 PM
i don´t know if anybody has noticed this before, but vegas 9 seems to be more unstable as previous versions while previewing over firewire with a dv cam.
i am (ab)using vegas since v4, and did a lot (i mean really a lot) output over firewire:
i have been performing hundreds of hours visuals as VJ using vegas - with looping, FX, multiple tracks - editing and rendering footage on another vegas instance while running the other instance in realtime, outputting visuals on big projections. In hazy and from big PAs vibrating environments and clubs.
Most of the time in DV, but with the increasing CPU power also mpg2 and xvid stuff.
i started with a Celeron466 in 2001 which gave a smooth DV-videostream over firewire with a dv-cam (connected after two firewire harddisks in chain on the same bus) over hours until now with a macbook C2D.
Later i produced videos for dance performances (up to over an hour) , and triggered them live from vegas to certain cues, sometimes also altering the scrub rate and jumping in time, etc....

Vegas was always super stable, i had much confidence in it.
I think in all these years i can count crashes on a few hands, and sometimes it was not vegas which crashed - instead the firewire popped out or the harddisk died or the laptop mainboard burned.....

since i have upgraded from V7 to V9 it is a different story. For all realtime visuals and live performances i can not use V9. Not that it freezes often, but compared to V7 (which hardly never crashes) very often.
First i thought it has something to do with my xp x64 which was never officially supported by SCS, but then i had the same issues on the laptop (xp with 32bit vegas). On this system i have only Vegas, quicktime, DVDA and PS, a few tools like Vdub and video converters. No network, no virusscanner - as minimal as possible for live video.

Vegas freezes sometimes when previewing over firewire, especially when working on FX like color correction or media generators during playback.
Then I have to kill it in the taskmanager.
i tried also 3 different DV cameras, 2 computers and different cables.

Not this super stable system i was used to, sometimes after 1 hour - sometimes after 5 minutes - freeze......


Comments

ushere wrote on 1/5/2010, 4:25 PM
thoughts:

a. is your cpu free of dust?

b. are all your seatable cards (incl ram) seated properly?

leslie
rmack350 wrote on 1/5/2010, 5:07 PM
Although Vegas gets good comments in places like CreateDigitalMotion, I think you're the first VJ I've seen post here. Most users here aren't using Vegas the same way you are.

I'd go back to V7 for your shows. You're probably stressing Vegas in ways most editors don't.

Definitely put in a support tag with SCS if you can nail down something specific. If they have any sense at all they should take an interest in what you're doing. By all rights you ought to be a one man crash factory :-)

Aside from that, yes, you should blow out dust, reseat boards, and maybe try not to run firewire chains.

Back when you and I were were using Vegas4 I'd run into a lot of dicey firewire gear that'd cause all sorts of trouble. It seems to me that running daisy chains ought to be just increasing your chances of an unwanted glitch.

I also not that you're running Vegas from a Mac, so you must also be running Windows via bootcamp. Has this setup run well in the past?

Rob Mack
Grazie wrote on 1/5/2010, 7:21 PM
Rob? I'm getting freezing of timeline Preview too. It lasts for about a dozen or so seconds, but it is most definitely there. A bit less now I have my SATAII setup and Snap-In drive bay working with the 3gbs access. But this in turn could be camouflaging what I feel is a newly acquired ongoing struggle that Vegas is having to keep up with me. I didn't or wasn't aware of this happening in V7 - And I definitely ain't no VJ!

I am truly hoping it will be fixed.

Grazie
farss wrote on 1/5/2010, 10:58 PM
You could try reducing the amount of Preview RAM you have allocated.

Bob.
arbory wrote on 1/6/2010, 8:07 AM
thanx for the anwers

I know, i have been stressing vegas very much in the past and abused this nice programm for VJ performances and even for stage videos.
In Nov09 i was playing the whole night (22h-6h) with V7, without a single crash. at the end i had dozens of mixed files (DV,mpeg2, xvid, jpgs) dragged into the timeline, a coupe of tracks some FX on events and video output and a second instance of vegas open were i edited and rendered clips during playing the other one.
I like the flexible way Vegas works, i can edit things while playing video loops, and make masks and try things out for a video projection during rehearsals. the FW output is 1:1 what you get, even if you burn a DVD afterwards (which i often play with my Pioneer VJ-1000)

fw daisy chains were not really a problem in the past, hardisk with the oxford chipset have been running rock solid - other were not like all the combined usb/firewire chipsets
now i am using only usb2 HDs, FW is only reserved for the video output

this can´t be a hardware issue, because V7 runs as it should on the same systems with the same DV cameras.
As said V9 freezes sometimes, and like Grazie said - sometimes it freezes also only for dozen of seconds, to continue then again. but most of the time when it freezes for me - it freezes comletely, and only if i have FW preview enabled.

So i will stick to V7 instead for a while for playing over FW
rmack350 wrote on 1/6/2010, 11:45 AM
a newly acquired ongoing struggle that Vegas is having to keep up with me.

Hah! I once predicted many years ago that Vegas would have to keep up with the user base when they all got really good at what they were doing. That's you! :-)

Are you seeing the "....." on the playback speed readout on the preview panel?

Rob

rmack350 wrote on 1/6/2010, 11:48 AM
You could probably search through this forum for some old firewire complaints. It's kind of sounding like they reintroduced an old problem.

Rob
logiquem wrote on 1/6/2010, 2:11 PM
V9 was a nightmare regarding firewire monitoring.

V9c completly solved the problem for me.

Bastien