I'll join in as one of the problem children and you can read some of my render error message dumps in other posts. I've sent these to Sony but don't expect to hear back.

I too was an upgrade sucker as I had V4 years ago, but went to VMS6 as I missed an upgrade cycle. VMS6 was rock solid but I needed more tracks for some stuff I wanted to try + it looked soooo good and the update version was out, so figured it was stable.

Now the "Pro" version 8.0a crashes on the same stuff it's little brother did with ease. I've even downsized the JEPGS to 720x528 as was suggested elsewhere.

Missed a chance over XMAS holidays to show a 24 min family video I was working on. But people have planes to catch vs hoping the "Pro" will decide to produce a render.

Wake up Sony, you aren't doing things right!

I'm really wondering if a lot of these problems are related to quad core computers. On my quad core Sony Vegas 8 is unusable. It crashes constantly, most of the time with the dreaded BSOD, and usually gives a memory access violation error. Interestingly, on my single core computer Vegas 8 is fine and I haven't yet had a single error or problem rendering. Hmmmmm.

I don't know if this actually makes a difference, but I had a similar issue with my dual core system while running a different application. I was told to go into task manager in the processes tab......right click on the application (in this case Vegas).......Set priority to high and under set affinity check just one dedicated CPU.

Very simple to try and undo if it makes no difference.

Joe

Thanks everyone for discussing these issues! It's really driving me nuts but, yes, I upgraded for the new mixer and pro titler and then started building my feature film ... (looks great by the way... if I do say so myself ... www.thesilentwomanmovie.com ... if you're interested ... ) ... then the problems with Pro 8 started.

I'm really curious about the possiblity of the problem being quadcore boxes ... my supplier sent me out a brand new (even faster) quadcore just before Christmas and Vegas behaved very badly on that machine too ... so it's not machine dependent ... didn't think to go for a dualcore ... or single core to test. MIght be the way to go.

Maybe I'll switch off the secondary cores in BIOS and see if that works ... I tried Bob's idea of taking out all the RAM and cleaning it etc ... even plugged a piece in each channel ... then swapped the other two pieces to the second channel and tried that too ... Vegas was the same in both instances ... so I've ruled out corrupt memory. I do have mobo sata at the moment ... but I have a RocketRAID card I could try if I get desperate to rule out the RAID config. Matrox assures me that the RAID is healthy etc etc.

Anyway, it's not looking good ... I'll definitely try out your idea Joe of the priority thingo ... looks interesting ...

Was really looking forward to trying out the 32 bit colour stuff ... would probably look great if it worked. Oh well.

Otherwise I hear they're doing interesting research with deep fried RAM chips with chicken salt ... might make all the difference.

Is it possible that the Vista support in Vegas Pro 8 has made the software unstable on 32 bit machines ... isn't Vista heading towards being a 64 bit OS? I haven't really been taking too much notice of where Windows is going because XP Pro SP2 is running fine for everything else I do ...

Anyway, it's another late night here in Australia ... 11:09pm already ... can't keep this up for too much longer to keep my client happy ... just render ... come on ... just render ....!!

Cheers and thanks again ...

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

There's another possibility. Vegas doesn't do well at handling corrupted data. I've had mildy corrupted .veg files crash Vegas and I suspect others are having issues with alightly off m2t files.

If you have lots of tracks try turning off all but one and turning them back on gradually.

The other approach is to split you project up into regions and render each part to see if you can find a specific area that's causing the problem. The simplest approach is to start by splitting it in half and then half of the offending a half etc.

If you're really going nowhere seeing as how you're in Syndey we could try it on one of my PCs. I've got a dual Xeon, if it prangs on that it's got to be a Vegas problem.

Bob.

Thanks Bob, appreciate that.

Interesting development thanks to Joe's post ... I tried turning the Priority up to High and the Affinity setting to just one processor and immediately there was an improvement in stability ... I got about 7% of the project out before Vegas disappeared off my screen ... which is heaps more than previously ... a LOT more!

Then I tried disabling the secondary cores in BIOS and there was a further improvement using one of the two available processes in the Affinity setting in Task Manager - as Joe said by right clicking on the Vegas application. I got to about 10% this time ... very excited !

I'm now going to try using both available processes in the new dual core setup and see what happens ... thanks for the input all!

Cheers,

Darren

PS. will be in touch Bob if I can't get any further. I reckon it's a quad problem ...

Wooooo Hooooo!!

OK, special thanks to everyone who's made suggestions regarding my render problems - but an extra special thanks to KING JOE!

Your suggestion to go into task manager and tweak the Priority and Affinity for the Vegas Pro 8 application has worked - with only one slight modification.

So, here's the work-around for quad core users of Vegas Pro 8.

First - restart and go into BIOS. Disable the secondary cores for the quad cores. ie: neuter your quad and turn it into a dual core machine.
Bummer I know but it works.

Second - start Windows - Open Vegas Pro 8 and CTRL ALT DEL to the Task Manager. Follow Joes instructions from there.
Which are: Right Click on the vegs80.exe application under the 'Processes' tab.

Third - Set the 'Priority' option to High - don't set it to Realtime because that produces instability again - I tried it ... Just set it to' 'High' and click on 'Yes' when Windows warns you that changing the 'Affinity class may cause instability' ... that's bollocks - exactly the opposite as a matter of fact ...

Fourth - set the 'Affinity' option to 'CPU 0' - ie: uncheck CPU 1 so that CPU 0 is the only processor with a check in the check-box ... I tried both and CPU 0 was more stable on my machine.

Fifth - Close Task Manager and open your project in Vegas Pro 8.

Sixth - Render away ... I've just passed 24% of my project at 720p (I'll try WMV"s and stuff tomorrow) and the render is still going 486MB at last count!

Thankyou so much everyone and again, thanks Joe for that excellent piece of information.

Cheers,

Darren

PS. I hope Sony supports quad core boxes in Vegas Pro 8b.

That's a little hint to Sony. I've wasted a month on this.

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

www.thesilentwomanmovie.com

umm..
so your saying NOTHING renders?

iM thinking what if u render out to DV AVI, or the closest thing to yoru source file res using Huffy, then reimport THAT before u encode to WMV...

as for beutering a quad core, i feel this defeats the purpose, as it must obviously be only certain machines whch are affected by this problem...

Im sure thaere are tonnes of quad core users out there who dont have this issue

Darren,

Out of curiosity, did you ever try going into the Vegas preferences and reducing the number of rendering threads to 1 and reducing the RAM preview size to a small number (like 16Meg)? Try that without the other BIOS changes you made (i.e. turn your quad back on!)

I concur with the post about MOBO RAID setups. They've burned me before, too. When I reinstall the OS (XP PRO), I turn off the raid settings and my computer hums like the precision machine it should.

You're not the first to wonder that, and it might be one factor, but people are also saying that things were stabler on their Quad Cores with V7. I tend to think it's a combination of things adding up to trouble:

--Maybe Quad Cores put extra demands on memory timing
--Maybe Vegas 8 is over-optimized in the way it accesses memory, or it's otherwise exposing a weakness
--Maybe it's an issue with certain DIMMs that Vegas 8 and quad core CPUs expose
--Maybe it's an issue with the number of DIMMs installed, or a flaw in a specific stick of memory
--Maybe more people have Quad core systems with 4 GB installed (bigger sample of users with this setup, more individuals having the problem)
--Maybe more people are working in HDV on these systems (again, more individuals having this problem-could be that the percentage of users having trouble is the same but the head-count is higher so we hear about it more in the forum). This could also have a relation to more people using larger still images. JPEG and HDV seem small on disk but are pretty big when uncompressed for viewing.
--I wonder if Dual core users are seeing the same problems, if there's any difference between Intel and AMD CPUs, if Phenom will be stabler. The AMD processors have integrated memory controllers, which is different from Intel systems.

Regardless, SCS is selling an edit system that is supposed to run on pretty generic hardware, and they don't make hardware recommendations, so it's their job to make the software stable on stock systems (not overclocked systems, not systems with memory tweaks like /3GB switches, just plain systems).

One thing I've thought for a long time is that Vegas users would eventually exceed Vegas' abilities, especially as more of them tried to move into long form projects or as they built up libraries of media over the years.

On more practical matters like getting a render out, would it make any difference to prerender? Prerenders are done in segments so maybe Vegas could get through a prerender and then do a final render? Seems too simple.

Rob

"The Silent Woman"

My dad's first sailboat was named that. It came with the name but he liked it so much he didn't rechristen it. Sexist humor was still acceptible in the 70's.

Rob

Just a thought. Prerenders are done in segments, so maybe you could try prerendering first and see how far you get (assuming Vegas can use the prerenders after a crash).

Rob

After you get your render done and get some sleep, of course!

Good to hear you're getting somewhere.

Rob Mack

I've been following this thread for the past couple of days but had nothing to add, since I don't use a quad-core system. Still, the issues sounded vaguely like the kinds of problems I had last year when I added additional ram. Apparently, certain renders would spill over into the new ram, hit a bad spot in that stick, and crash.

If changing the priority makes your system run properly, then great, but I don't think one should have to resort to those kinds of tweaks to make something run stably.

Before concluding that it's an issue within Vegas (very well could, be, I just don't know), it's very easy to test for memory and processor weaknesses. Get the free "Memtest86," which boots from a floppy or a CD and very quickly torture-tests your entire ram setup. If Memtest can run for an hour, you can pretty much eliminate ram as the issue. Incidentally, I had to go through several sets of dual-channel ram sticks before finding a set that ran the test without error.

The other freeware utility to download is "StressPrime 2004." This is a close variant of the famous Prime95 test, but with an elegant user interface. It runs the processors hard, then compares the computational results with known results. If your processors are failing anywhere, it will find out. You will have to run several instances of the program to get all 4 processors running together at 100%.

In this way one can definitively eliminate any possible hardware issues. If we don't do this step, things could get incomprehensible very quickly. For example, it could very well be that changing priority makes Vegas run better--but maybe that's because a higher-priority Vegas means that a particular bad patch of ram is never used.

Hope this helps.

Following up on this idea, there's a setting in the internal prefs for how long to make the preview files. It appears to be in frames and the default is 300. So if prerendering was helpful because it creates small file segments then maybe it'd also be helpful memorywise to make them smaller segments.

Just another thought.

In the internal prefs just search on "pre-" to find the setting.

Rob Mack

I have been complaining about the stability of Vegas 8, since it was released. I also have a Q6600 Quad core on a MSI p6N Mobo.
I had constant crashes prior to release of 8a, and I found out that cutting up the project in smaller chunks prior to render, and keeping my memory usage below some 60% (I can watch this using the Vista gadget which shows CPU usage and mem usage) allowed me to succesfully render.
In my experience 8a has been a bit more stable, but just yesterday the program as it was rendering just jumped to the desktop. No message or nothing, just disapeared. I have seen this before, and I think I may have some JPEG's that are too big.

I think Sony may have bit off more than they can chew by releasing a new Pro version with Vista compatibility, without enough beta testing.
It seems that various people with various hardware configs have stability problems, and I think it is the responsiblilty of Sony to make sure it works of these different platforms.
I have been reading here since September that 32bit does not work, and it seems most users are now accepting that it doesn't.
I have read in some posts that Sony is aware of the various problems people are reporting here. The obvious question here is how long does it take to get these fixed?

Ted

It appears to be mostly quadcore users who have this issue ... that seem to be the common thread at this point in time.

Yes, I did try turning off the number of render threads available to Vegas ... tried all the different settings and lots of different combinations of Dynamic RAM as well ... that was a month ago.

Interestingly, it's only been since last night when I switched off the secondary cores in BIOS (yes, effectively making the machine a dualcore) and setup the Task Manager options as described by Joe that I got a extreme increase in stability ... still not 100% ... I had an exception on one of my renders over night but still managed to produce a large video file in HD 720.

It's interesting that people are saying 'doesn't turning off the secondary cores and effectively turning your machine into a dual core machine defeat the purpose' ... 'turn them back on' ... well, think about this ... I need to render this project ... with the quad core switched on Vegas is crap ... with the quad core set up as a dual core I can actually get some work done!

Also, what's the point of advising people to go into Vegas Preferences and reduce the number of available rendering threads ?? Isn't that doing exactly the same thing as saying ... here you go Vegas you can only use one processor! (Apart from the fact that with the quad core fully functional those settings in Vegas preferences don't make any difference anyway!)

I will trade speed for productivity until Vegas adds quad core support to Vegas Pro 8. At least I can get some work done.

As Ted just stated regarding other problems (ie the 32 bit thing) ... how long will it take to get this stuff fixed???

And Rob, The Silent Woman isn't meant to be a sexist statement ... it's just a story about a woman who is a mute! :-)

Cheers,

Darren

No, the name of my father's boat was what had an air of sexism to it. Everyone at the time thought it was the same as naming the boat "purple cow". Sorry if you took that personally.

In looking for your site I mistyped and got a "Silent Woman" pub in Chelsea.

I have to agree about disabling some of the CPU cores. A quad core that can't render is the same as a no-core, so you've effectively increased the usable cores by 100%. Right?

I'm curious about doing a prerender in little chunks. You can pick the prerender format and it does indeed leave behind files that you could use even if Vegas crashes. I'd think that if you did the prerender in the same format you eventually plan to output then this would save you some effort between crashes. If the formats are the same then your last output might even be renderless - maybe.

There's an internal preference setting that allows you to really choke down the size of the prerender files. The default is 300 frames but you could choke down to some smaller number and maybe you'd not run into a render wall so often.

However, if things are working right now, don't experiment! Glad you've made some progress and what you're finding out is really useful!

Rob Mack

Well I should have looked down the posts a bit because i just had a wierd V8a crash as described here...stops rendering but keeps counting, system is badly hung. This happened at exactly the same spot on a Vista machine. Opened the project on an XP machine and same thing. I tried rendering small pieces and this would happen at random places along the timeline, not always at the same spot. Created an EDL and opened in V7b. Aside from having to re-do the track motion and Pro-Type titles, 7B rendered with absolutely no issues.

Mike

Just bumping this up cause its a real issue - just tried to render a simple .mp3 and it brought Vegas 8a and my computer to its knees.

Had to reboot