Vegas and instability

entilza72 wrote on 12/18/2012, 7:20 PM
Hi gang,

Long time Vegas user (since v3). Just on the tail end of what would have to be the worst VP project I've ever worked on in terms of instability. It crashes everywhere - on loading, on playback (roughly 1 in 5 timeline playbacks will crash the application), and always on render. (running VP11 - but this isn't about version 11, this is about all versions of Vegas).

I bought but never moved to 12 due to stability issues (ironically).

All of my crashes with this troublesome project are fixed by loading the project as a nested file inside a new clean project and rendering from there. 100% successful all of the time. Playbacks are solid (not that it helps me edit without crashing). Renders always work.

I got to thinking: this "workaround" has been around for many versions. Every VP project I work on that's longer than 2 minutes ends up going this way in various degrees. Why is it that my playbacks crash when using the file "native", yet when it is nested inside another project it is fine? What is different about nesting files?

Why is it that the longer the project, the more frequent the crashes? Is it project complexity? Or perhaps its a growing corruption in the file based on the number of times its been saved/used/whatever? And how is it that nested files can fight through this?

With such a stark contrast of 100% failure for native use vs 100% success for nested use, surely this bug is easy to track down? Why is it still with us years later?

My hat goes off to Vegas on one level - it's ability with multiple file formats, aspect ratios and resolutions in the one project is fantastic, and it has to be pretty hard making a stable product that supports the wild landscape that is PC drivers and codecs.

But this instability is killing me. Ignoring the hours (days?) spent rebooting, I'm living in fear that today may be the last day I can make effective changes to the project file.

Ent.

Comments

riredale wrote on 12/19/2012, 1:40 AM
What file types?

I work with stone-age-simple MPEG2 (HDV), never any issue with stability.
ritsmer wrote on 12/19/2012, 2:11 AM
Really sorry to hear about all your troubles - but for what it's worth I can say that it is not a general problem in Vegas.
For the time being I am editing full HD AVCHD to Full HD MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 at bit-rates about 30 Mbps or higher. Also doing some Quicktime movs using the Alpha channel - for hours every day - and without any hick-ups what so ever - and with real-time preview.
Using Vegas 11 with GPU assist ON (cheap Nvidia 450 card) and also with some 200 MB of Preview RAM set.

All this even running on a Mac Pro computer...

Having such a super stable editing platform one learns to identify bad media when it pops up now and then - and so I have seen i.e. a single piece of AVCHD recorded with a below freezing inside camera with an exhausted battery - and when that very piece of media was in the middle of my 30 minutes timeline I could not even preview the project from the beginning.
Funny thing was, however, that if it was the only piece of media on a new TL I could render it to another format - then replace it in the real project - and voila: project stable again.
entilza72 wrote on 12/19/2012, 3:59 AM
I've never worked with AVCHD source, and thinking back, my "instability days" started at around the time my source media stopped being Standard Def MPG2 files.

Typically my files will be MOV containers - Arri Alexa 4444 pro res files, EOS files. I know there's a long history with Vegas and MOV files so a while back I used Cineform's NeoScene to convert the EOS files to AVI - but that only put off the crashing until the project grew to even more complex.

Recent updates (since V10) have seen MOV's work much better native - but cineform or not, all complex projects end in crashing and dropped frames or blank shots.

I'm certain some of this is some kind of memory issue, although my 12 GB of tripple channel RAM rarely sees 40% in use.

I also can't identify a single piece of media that may cause troubles. Troubles don't appear to announce themselves definitely, but they do appear in every single complex project I do these days. They just start a little - a random shot will result in flashing or a black rendered shot on some renders, and shift or change to another shot on other renders. Then a few days later assets start to turn up as "red" in preview and black on render for some sessions then not on others. Then renders never finish or crash. Then the timeline starts crashing. The more complex the project, the more problems.

The instability follows between PC upgrades (completely clean installs, new hardware including video and sound devices) though I've never had the luxury of having an upgrade in the middle of a project to see if the crashes persist identically.

Anyway - the main thrust of this post was not to have a moan (although I've done plenty of that - sorry) but was to query: if the nested project solution is so well known among the users who do have trouble, surely this can be replicated by SCS and the causes trapped. It may not fix all of my problems (timeline crashes, red media on some sessions) but it will fix a significant and repeatable one.