Well i avoid using BCC Particle Illusion, has always make Vegas very unstable for me.

@Steve_Rhoden Indeed, but that is just it: Particle illusion plugin is perhaps a good "tool" for the developers to stress test Vegas and making it even more robust in general...

@VEGASDerek maybe an idea?

Hmm, just tried it as described, but no crash either, even after repeating the procedure several times

BCC 17.5.4, Win11 Pro, VP 22-122, AMD-CPU

@frmax thanks for trying!  

I redid the the procedure and could crash Vegas again, sometimes it takes a while (going in and out PI, playing the timeline), sometimes pretty quick. Make sure you press the "Launch PI 2024.5" button inside the PI plugin. just opening the PI plugin will not crash Vegas.

Yet another crash, it took a bit longer to try and crash it (5 minutes), I show only the last bit.

Problem Description
   Application Name:    VEGAS Pro
   Application Version: Version 22.0 (Build 122)
   Problem:             Unmanaged Exception (0xc0000005)
   Fault Module:        C:\Program Files\BorisFX\ContinuumOFX\17\lib\Continuum_OFX_8Bit.dll
   Fault Address:       0x00007FFC50994CC7
   Fault Offset:        0x00000000002F4CC7

 Hello bitman,
I repeated the tests because I actually (sorry) only played with Particle Illusions presets the first time. (You should read more carefully....)
But even the new test with multiple calls via the Launch PI 2024.5 (previously also added a title with BCC type on text), multiple playback of the timeline and several changes to the particles did not result in any crashes.

Nevertheless, which could point in your direction, I had not edited the first project for hours yesterday and strange things happened when I “played” it again: The preview did not show the video under the cursor, or sorted parts of the title, changes possible, also adding more clips to the timeline still possible etc.
However, there was no crash, so no error log was written.

@frmax Thanks for trying again, reproducing an issue is not always easy, especially if the systems, HW and SW, configuration, media used, etc. are not equal. It is even possible that this particular crash will never happen on your system.

In the mean time I tried if I was able to crash VP21 as well as VP22 using the same procedure. And I was able to crash it as well.

Very often, Vegas crashes when launching BCC particle illusion (PI) under following conditions:

 

I adore PI. I adore Vegas. I use Vegas daily once our busy season starts (end of this month). i use PI a few times, project dependent.

Like you, I experience "I wonder when it'll crash" anxiety.

I've always thought it somehow had to do with video drivers and my RX470.

Just updated to an RTX5070ti expecting huge benefit... in some ways, I know I will.

But PI -- weird stuff.

A *very simple* project (with just PI on solid media generator) created in PI2025 now won't show the PI controls when opening an FX on one of the events after updating to PI2026.

Regarding your crashes -- have you kept Performance Monitor open while running things to see if it's memory related?

I observed yesterday that going into PI grabbed about 20GB. It returned back to Vegas.. usually... but often -- each time I went into PI and made a few changes, then returned to Vegas, the memory wouldn't settle back down and reclaim... just kept going up. Do that a few times and Vegas is sure to crash.

@RedRob-CandlelightProdctns I try to avoid PI, or at least manual save Vegas before adding PI!
When I wrote the original post, I had a RTX 3090. I still have the same PC, but I have since replaced the GPU with a RTX 5090. Not sure if I have still the same issues, considering the other hardware, other Vegas build, latest Boris and obviously more GPU memory.

PI takes up a huge amount of system memory on my computer. 13.5GB starting PI 2026 in VP23. GPU RAM increased to 8.6GB. And this is just starting it and going to the UI. Once I select a "particle", I've seen system RAM usage steadily climb. For sure, this would have caused issues if I still had "only" 32GB of RAM. Now, with 64GB, I am able to work much better with it.

You might try having the Vegas timeline event selected with playback head within its boundaries when opening the PI window and see if it makes a difference.