Render crashes

[Miguel "Macgregor" De Olaso]

Vegas crashes when i try to export a 5 minute 1080p video. No matter what format (avi, dpx, qt...) and codec. "Vegas runs out of memory".

So far i´m rendering at 720 and seems fine, but it hasn´t finished. The render takes forever and the system is only using 20% of the processores (8core macpro with bootcamp).

[Chuck Fryberger]

I have had some issues when trying to render to larger formats as well. I tried rendering a 2K TIFF .MOV file and my system crashed consistently. I opened task manager and restarted the render and watched as my physical memory usage climbed steadily to 12GB (the max I specified in Vegas Preferences for dynamic ram preview... also seems to apply to renders...) and then the crash occurred.

It's like Vegas renders to RAM instead of writing to disk.... or maybe the disk isn't keeping up for some reason... both of which seem impossible.

I'm also running Vegas 9 on Win Vista 64 with Bootcamp on a Mac Pro.

I know that you can specify ram and render thread count in preferences. Maybe changing these values will help.

[Adrian Van Rossum]

I've tried toggling the ram and render thread count settings to no avail. Two minute timeline will render to a SD .avi, but the HD renders always hit the memory wall. Admittedly it's an XP system crippled by the RAM limitations of the OS, but I think we would all prefer a 'go-slow' to a complete crash or freeze.

Been a Premiere guy for more than 10 years now and when I cranked up the Vegas 9 trial at work I thought I was about to jump ship - everything was there without special Red downloads and cumbersome workarounds or transcoding to intermediates. R3D's playing in real-time with colour correction and effects applied. Love the fact you can change the timeline resolution and properties at any time, and the way each of the four audio channels can shift up and down tracks independent of their siblings.

For their first R3D support offering it's a stellar effort by the Vegas crew, but we have to be able to spit out the HD content at the end or it's all for nought - for now that's the dealbreaker for us. Shame Vegas doesn't support Linux, but you can't have it all. Premiere has had its fare share of 'memory' issues in the past so I'm keen to see how the next Vegas patch/update/versions pan-out. Anyone rendering longform R3D timelines to HD Blu-Ray with the 64-bit version on Vista?

[Brian Kaz]

On a 5 minute 1080p clip in 32bit version, I get the "ran out of memory" error when using magic bullet looks. In 64bit w/o looks, I can get a full render just fine (Haven't done 30min+ yet) but occasionally on some renders the video will go blank at random times. Seems to happen when I use extensive FX plugins. Rememeber to send in the problem to them so they know!

[Adrian Van Rossum]

Thanks for update Kaz. I notice in 'Googleland' there's loads of posts about memory crashes with Vegas 8 and below, partcularly in relation to AVCHD files. Seems to be all sorts of problems and workarounds identified, from swapping video cards to rendering to a drive separate from the source material. Would appreciate suggestions from long-time Vegas users before the trial expires.

Suggestions I have researched so far -

1) Close all background applications (obvious)
2) Drop render cores from 4 to 1
3) Drop preview RAM right down (more memory for render)
4) Run a utility like End-It-All
5) Switch to Windows 'Classic' view rather than 'XP look'
6) Upgrade to Vista and throw 12GB of RAM at the problem

Cheers.

[Miguel "Macgregor" De Olaso]

I´ll try to render without magic bullet then to see if it´s fixed

[donatello b]

yesterday for several hrs i tried rendering a 5 min time line ... i too kept getting the low memory in the V9 32bit version ( running on 64bit vista, 8gig RAM ) or it would crash during the render - one time before it crashed it did pop up a window that asked what was i doing just before the error noticed popped up - i filled it out and then it had a SEND button on it ( it also sends some V9 log info to sony ) ... tried rendering out to both QT & AVI ...

i then tried 3 renders on the 64 bit V9 and never got the low memory pop up ... i let them render for approx 30 min then cancelled ( the 32bit V9 would error out after approx 8-10 min) ..rendered 1920x1080 23.97 AVI uncompressed

[Mark Holmes]

I''m a long-time Vegas user who has had these problems since version 7, and resorted to workarounds. We edited our last feature on Vegas, a 720P HVX-200 micro-budget film, and never were able to render out the full feature. Our solution was to render out in 10-12 minute reels, drop them on a Final Cut timeline on our Mac, and use Compressor to render full versions of the film. Not ideal, but it worked, with the additional benefit of having a Final Cut final version in Quicktime for our post house, which preferred to work that way.

But it is something that needs to be addressed immediately by the Sony Vegas team.

That being said, we have a Final Cut Studio system five feet from our Vegas system, and there is no argument over which NLE is the quickest, most intuitive, most modern workflow for film editing - Vegas, period.

[Mark Holmes]

For what it's worth, I think the 64-bit version of Vegas 9 is going to take care of this, but I would wait til they release the 9.0a version to work out the inevitable zero release bugs. It usually takes Sony a month or two to get the .a version out after each initial release.

[donatello b]

got a reply from Vegas support ...
they said to try ...
set the RAM preview to 0 and to set the number of render threads to 1 when you render