Vegas Just Gives Up....

hazydave wrote on 5/5/2007, 8:13 PM
I'm running into a weird situation in Vegas 7. I'm rendering a film, about 1:20 worth of video. The source video is primarily Cineform HD and HDV MPEG-2 files. The timeline being rendered contains two Vegas 7 project files, which in turn reference the Cineform and HDV sources (along with numerous stills, most at 6Mpixel and 8MPixels, JPEGs from digital SLRs).

Late this week, I was working on rendering both MPEG-2 for DVD and WMV for WMV/HD from this timeline. I was running low on time, so I killed off the WMV/HD render, and the DVD render finished, though it seemed pretty long compared to what I'm used to from Vegas 6. So I restarted the WMV/HD render Friday afternoon, and also stared up a WMV for web render, from the same source but on a different computer.

Now the weirdness... as of Saturday AM, these seemed to be moving along fine... the WMV/HD render hit 12%, the web video at 24%... not stellar, but nothing suspicious. Now, I get here at 11PM, and the WMV/HD render's only at 13%, the web render at 26%. Stranger still, the Widows Task Manager shows Vegas at 572MB working set, but it's not consuming any CPU time (both cores are essentially at idle). Same on the laptop -- Vegas is still counting off seconds 'till we're done, but it's not doing any work.

What's the deal here? It looks like some secret background process or some-such has just up and died, but didn't bother to tell Vegas, and Vegas didn't bother to ask. I haven't done enough work in Vegas 7 to know for sure if this is a typical failure mode, but I've never seen anything like it before (and I've been using Vegas since the "Vegas Pro" audio-only days... ).

-Dave

Comments

busterkeaton wrote on 5/5/2007, 10:36 PM
It's the photos. PNGs are best for Vegas. Also do you need the photos at 6 or 8 megs? That is several times higher res than HDV, you only need resolutions that high, if you are really zooming in on the photos. If you are not, I suggest sizing them down.

I would break the sections involving a lot of photos into smaller veg files. Then render those out and piece those renders to the final output. There have been other threads involving lots of large photos causing issues, You could search the forum for and see if there are more specific solutions.
JJKizak wrote on 5/6/2007, 6:18 AM
I usually keep my jpegs not much over 500K if possible. Some photos at 150K are sharp as hell if they are done right. You are punishing that poor computer trying to render those projects and even 4 gig of ram would be sticky.

JJK
vitalforce wrote on 5/6/2007, 10:31 AM
Long shot P.S. but this may also be overheating your machine.
blink3times wrote on 5/6/2007, 1:38 PM
Maybe something... maybe nothing, but I just got finished tracking down a similar issue. Sometimes vegas would just plain stop rendering with no tell tail sign... other times it would just shut down on render. It took a while to track it but it turned out to be a weak mem module combined with a bit of overheating.
teaktart wrote on 5/6/2007, 3:09 PM
"...turned out to be a weak mem module combined with a bit of overheating"

I'm having problems today too including an external drive that just won't get recognized not matter how many times I've unplugged and replugged it in, rebooted, etc

I also had a memory dump and some extremely slow processing. I'm curious how you determined you had a weak memory module as I've been having problems lately that make me suspicious its memory related. I also notice that the computer is putting out a lot of heat at times and the temp reading is up a 41 C

Anything you can suggest to help me troubleshoot?
(yes, I opened it up and there is no obvious dust/pollution inside the case)

Thanks,
Eileen
blink3times wrote on 5/6/2007, 6:39 PM
"I also had a memory dump and some extremely slow processing. I'm curious how you determined you had a weak memory module as I've been having problems lately that make me suspicious its memory related. I also notice that the computer is putting out a lot of heat at times and the temp reading is up a 41 C"

Absolutely nothing more than trial and error.... ALOT of trial!!

When I have problems and don't where to begin, I usually pull and unplug EVERYTHING that is not needed for a bare bones boot up. Then I start adding things one by one with lots of play time in between. FINALLY... when I put my third mem module in and started working it, funny things started to happen.
hazydave wrote on 5/6/2007, 9:39 PM
> It's the photos. PNGs are best for Vegas.

Obviously, JPEGs will take more time than PNGs for processing, but if the processing stops, that's clearly a bug, not a feature. I should add -- this timeline, pretty much the same, rendered without any problems under Vegas 6, with no unexpected slowdowns.

> Also do you need the photos at 6 or 8 megs? That is several times higher res
> than HDV, you only need resolutions that high, if you are really zooming in on the
> photos.

Yes, I pan and/or zoom every photo. And oddly enough, I have a few shorter pieces that are all photos, no video, and render without any problems. If the photos are the actual problem, this may be a clue to the nature of the bug.

Thanks for the pointers.
hazydave wrote on 5/6/2007, 9:42 PM
- I usually keep my jpegs not much over 500K if possible.

Actually, during rendering, the size of the JPEG shouldn't matter much, since Vegas is working on uncompressed graphics, not in the compressed space.

- You are punishing that poor computer trying to render those projects and even 4 gig
- of ram would be sticky.

I don't think so.. again, the working set for the Vegas process never goes over 600MB, and I do have 2GB of RAM, another GB of VM (but there's never any thrashing... I'm not getting close to memory overload).
hazydave wrote on 5/6/2007, 9:45 PM
- Long shot P.S. but this may also be overheating your machine

Nope... this is a machine I integrated myself. I have a 120mm CPU fan with large copper sink area, and two 140mm case fans. Nothing unusual. I have routinely run long video renders, CAD jobs, and other multi-day, full-on-CPU work on this machine without incident.

And if the machine really did overheat, or memory error out, that would affect the whole machine, not just Vegas.
hazydave wrote on 5/6/2007, 9:50 PM
> "...turned out to be a weak mem module combined with a bit of overheating"

> I'm having problems today too including an external drive that just won't get
> recognized not matter how many times I've unplugged and replugged it in, rebooted,
> etc

I don't know how he specifically found the bad module, but there are ways. There are number of fairly details memory tests that can sometimes find faults not always obvious in normal code. You can usually spot overheating by enabling the temperature monitoring built-in on most modern motherboards.

As to your external drive, the best bet is to try it on a different system -- you want to at least figure out if it's your PC or your drive (or possibly even firmware in either). Not that you can necessarily do anything about it, if it's a genuine failure, but at least knowing where the problem lives is the first step toward fixing it.
hazydave wrote on 5/6/2007, 9:56 PM
Oh yeah, also the fact that this didn't happen, ever, in Vegas 6, and it's now happening on both my main PC and my laptop, with this timeline and Vegas 7, tells me it's not the hardware.

I tried a simpler render, just rendering one of the two project files in the final project (output to CineForm HD), and Vegas 7 just crashed, after a day-and-a-half... that's the first all-out crash I've ever had with Vegas during a render since I started using Vegas Pro...

Last fall, I rendered this several times, including a supersampling downconversion to 24p, without incident, in Vegas 6. In fact, I'm pretty tempted to re-install Vegas 6 and give it a try, though I suspect they changed the .veg format, as usual, and so that won't get me the last two weeks changes.
busterkeaton wrote on 5/6/2007, 10:02 PM
You should send the veg files to the Sony enigneers and see if they find something.
hazydave wrote on 5/6/2007, 10:36 PM
One thing that was seen by me as weird, which I didn't see in Vegas 6, was that, sometimes during a render the system would NOT be running at 100% CPU, even when the render was progressing.

I've played a bit with that, and it seems to be real, and based on something of a surprise -- it seems that, under the right circumstances, with HD rendering to CineForm in particular, I'm actually get HD bound, not CPU bound.

Maybe some of this can be attributed to the supposed faster MPEG-2 decoding in Vegas 7, I'm not sure. But it's provable.. CPU peaks back at 100% when I hit JPEGs, but on the raw video, which is essentially unchanged, I'm seeing 40%-50% use. When I target the other disc (both are arrays, the source is a 3-drive RAID0, the target now a 2-drive RAID 0, both SATA), the peaks and rendering speed increases a bit. So this really looks like drive speed limitations, not CPU.. it's been a long time since that was the case on anything interesting (ok, CineForm is only so interesting compared to the WMV/9 I'm actually after, but I'm trying to figure out how to get this to render to completion in any way possible).
hazydave wrote on 5/7/2007, 6:08 AM
Ok, so I re-ran the first half of the film as a CineForm HD render. The last time I tried this, it took 4-5 hours to complete about 20%, then proceeded to crash sometime in the next 8 hours.

This render, from one disc array to another, took 2:20 to complete. It sure looks like the previous case was essentially running at disc seek speeds. This is a good thing.. one big reason is clearly that Vegas 7 is so much faster at processing MPEG-2 than Vegas 6, that disc I/O never had a chance to catch up. Between the Cineform HD input, MPEG-2 input, Cineform HD output, and all those 6Mpixel and 8Mpixel stills, I was torturing the disc array. In fact, while I'm not sure about the crash, I can believe that the "total stop" of rendering could have simply been a failure in the array driver, not Vegas itself. That's also a good thing.

It's just been so long since the CPU wasNOT the limiting factor in any interesting job, I was unprepared for this. It's also good to know (at least for my style of edits) that huge JPEGs aren't any kind of issue (sure, a bit slower than lower resolution JPEGs or less compessed formats, but a pretty minor thing compared to the overhead of video, as long as you've got enough memory).

I just figured I'd close question here, in case other folks come across this in the future. To optimize rendering, you really want to go disc to disc, particularly on a fast PC (mine is still on the borderline of "fast", I think....).

-Dave
MTuggy wrote on 7/8/2007, 8:25 AM
I'm not so sure this isn't a Vegas bug. With 7e, I have had a number of projects now that I cannot render in full 1080 HD WMV files. They lock up after about 5 minutes and rendering stops. The projects render fine as DVD qualtiy MPEG2's. Something is up here that wasn't a problem before with the HD WMV files which I have used exclusively for most of my HD rendering since they first came available. I am running a test now of rendering to an m2t file to see if this is a problem. Also, the same error has occurred now on both my main PC and a new ASUS laptop I just bought.

Mike
sean@oregonsound.com wrote on 7/8/2007, 11:01 AM
I also have been having rendering problems this week on a project that is all stills and audio with a substantial number of effects, rendering to MPEG-2. Sometimes it would simply stop rendering frames while the clock continued counting, sometimes it crashed Vegas, all at different spots in the timeline. I finally got it to work by moving the project to an external firewire drive and rendering to the unused space on my system drive. Although I had plenty of space on the other drives I had tried to render to, your mentioning of intense disc access makes me wonder if contiguous space on the rendering drive is an issue.
blink3times wrote on 7/8/2007, 8:00 PM
"I'm not so sure this isn't a Vegas bug. With 7e, I have had a number of projects now that I cannot render in full 1080 HD WMV files."

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I'm 99.95% sure it's a 7e bug.

7d was solid as a rock... it rendered anything I threw at it. Then I upgraded to 7e... well, crash, crash, crash crash.

Went back to 7d... solid as a rock again.
busterkeaton wrote on 7/8/2007, 8:27 PM
Did you send the veg to the Vegas support so the tech people can look at it.

That will help them figure out if they have something up with 7e.