WMV files problematic?

Ethan Winer wrote on 10/22/2010, 9:46 AM
Until recently I used Vegas 6 because it works well and did everything I need for my little amateur videos. But then a year ago I bought a Sony HD Camcorder, which outputs MTS files that Vegas 6 can't read. So I bought a $39 program to convert all my 1080x1920 MTS files to WMV at 720X1280. This quality is good enough for "HD" on YouTube, and until recently converting the files worked very well.

But as my current music video grew to dozens of WMV files, and editing became sluggish, I upgraded to Vegas 9 which helped a lot. But now I get Low Memory errors when rendering, and I can't finish the project. I'm pretty sure this is a bug in Vegas because Task Manager shows Vegas never using more than 700 MB of RAM. I've been dealing with tech support for quite a while about this, and so far have no solution.

Now for the actual question: In one of my exchanges with Sony support, I was told, "I think the problem might just be the fact that there are a lot of memory-hogging WMV files in the project." This is news to me. Why would WMV compression be more demanding than any other lossy video compression scheme? Is this really true? If I convert all the WMV files to another 720x1280 format (huge PITA), might that solve the Low Memory problems?

Now that I have Vegas 9 (and the Vegas 10a demo) installed, I can read my camcorder's MTS files directly. So for future projects maybe this is all moot. But I need to finish my current project using the files I have. I can't believe I'm the only one who gets Low Memory errors that don't make sense logically.

--Ethan

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 10/22/2010, 10:13 AM
Without providing any file details or uploading an actual clip of your WMV, it's impossible to tell. If they're 5Mbs the should be easy to work with, if they're 35Mbs, you'd need a pretty spry CPU and plenty of memory. WMV is not exactly the most efficient compression.

Download MediaInfo. Post your file details. Upload an actual clip somewhere like MediaFire or Vimeo.

BTW, for the sake of consistency we like to express pixel dimensions as Width x Height; 1280x720 or 1920x1080, etc.
Marco. wrote on 10/22/2010, 10:17 AM
You could try reducing the amount of RAM given to the dynamic RAM preview ("Options/Preferences/Video"). Setting this value to 16 or 0 often helps when low memory errors occur.

Marco
musicvid10 wrote on 10/22/2010, 10:20 AM
Another memory saving trick is to save and close your project after editing, then reopen to render. That flushes the undo buffers. I often reboot as well.
A-Scott wrote on 10/22/2010, 11:24 AM
I once did a project in Vegas 6 that used many .wmv clips. Near the end of the project I started getting out-of-memory errors during the render. I had to work around it by rendering part of the timeline to an uncompressed avi and dropping that in place of some of the wmv events.

For every new upgrade of Vegas, I used that project as a test to see if they fixed the memory problem. Finally with Vegas 9 I was able to render without the memory error.

For what it's worth, Vegas depends on codecs for a lot of the heavy lifting. Who knows how much memory is allocated by the wmv codec for each opened video stream and where the out-of-memory condition is being raised. The wmv codec just might be a resource hog and that's not really under Sony's control.

I eventually started doing everything with Cineform and haven't looked back.
Steve Mann wrote on 10/22/2010, 11:56 AM
Low Memory does not only mean "Not enough RAM", though adding RAM can fix a "Low Memory" waning.

One of the biggest sources of confusion over memory usage is the whole concept of virtual memory compared to physical memory. Windows organizes memory, physical and virtual, into pages. Each page is a fixed size (typically 4 KB). To make things more confusing, there’s also a page file (sometimes referred to as a paging file and dynamic RAM). Many Windows users still think of this as a swap file, a bit of disk storage that is only called into play when you absolutely run out of physical RAM. In versions of Windows starting with Vista, that is no longer the case. The most important thing to realize is that physical memory and the page file added together equal the commit limit, which is the total amount of virtual memory that all processes can reserve and commit.

A "Low Memory" warning usually means that you have exceeded your commit limit. You need either a bigger page file, more physical memory, or both.

Paging file configuration is in the System properties, which you can get to by typing "sysdm.cpl" into the Run dialog, clicking on the Advanced tab, clicking on the Performance Options button, clicking on the Advanced tab (this is really advanced), and then clicking on the Change button. I would suggest a value of 1.5X the currently allocated value. Windows supports up to 16 paging files, where each must be on a separate volume, so if you have more than one internal disk drive you could also try enabling a Paging File on your second hard-disk.
Ethan Winer wrote on 10/22/2010, 12:00 PM
Thanks guys, good replies all. I should have added that when I convert my MTS files to WMV I set the WMV bit rate to 8 mbps. So that shouldn't be too challenging for Vegas 9, and is half the bit rate of my Sony camera's native MTS files.

I've done all of the optimizations such as lowering preview RAM to 64 or even 32 MB, render threads to only 1, no thumbnails, and rebooting before rendering with nothing else running. Rendering still fails partway through. I also watch Task Manager monitoring not only the RAM used by Vegas (average and peak), but also total RAM usage which would include any codecs. I have 4 GB physical RAM, and I understand that Windows XP can use only a little more than 3 GB. But the total RAM used by all processes during rendering is barely over 1.5 GB.

In the larger picture, I don't see how this could be anything *but* a memory usage bug in Vegas. While editing I often get strange behavior, such as blank frames or a video preview that changes image size or darkness randomly etc.

--Ethan
Ethan Winer wrote on 10/22/2010, 12:55 PM
> Windows supports up to 16 paging files, where each must be on a separate volume so if you have more than one internal disk
> drive you could also try enabling a Paging File on your second hard-disk.

That sounded promising so I tried adding a second "system managed" paging file on a separate partition. Alas, rendering still craps out with a Low Memory error about 25 percent of the way through my 6 minute video.

--Ethan
24Peter wrote on 10/26/2010, 1:05 PM
Ethan - I've had all kinds of problems rendering /wmv files in Vegas 9 (I recently upgraded to Vegas 10 but haven't had a chance to try any .wmv yet). Anyway, from what i can tell "low memory" errors (and the subsequent crashes) have nothing to do with your computer's memory (RAM or otherwise). Rather, they are coding/routine problems in the software (admittedly I'm not a software guy but I did enough digging to satisfy me this is the problem).

Anyway for me the boogieboo was rendering .wmv files directly from my 5DII's .mov files. In Vegas 8, the .mov files usually crashed when added to the timeline; in Vegas 9, I got memory errors/crashes trying to render .wmv files. Mp4 files from the exact same timeline rendered perfectly without issue.

Eventually what I did was just render out my .mov project to a (relatively) uncompressed format (.avi, mxf, etc.) and then take that file and render it out to a .wmv file. It may seem like extra work/time, but the uncompressed files rendered very quickly and then going to the .wmv file also went much quicker then rendering from my .mov files (and of course, any render time is wasted if the render crashes).

So my advice, instead of fooling around with your dynamic RAM preview and all the other well-intentioned recommendations, just find an uncompressed file format that doesn't crash and then use that to create your .wmv files.
Ethan Winer wrote on 10/27/2010, 11:16 AM
Thanks Peter. As it turns out, I found a solution to my Low Memory problem last night. I'll start a new thread because I feel the solution is significant information for others using Windows XP 32-bit who have this problem.

--Ethan