Vegas crashes when 4 cores are selected
 

I'm running Vegas 8.0 Pro on a machine with a total of 8 Cores. The footage is a mixture of stills and video. When I select 4 cores, it crashes at the very end of the render (about 1.5 minutes) but when I select 2 cores it does not.

Why do you think it is doing that? Does it run out of Ram with 4 cores? I have 14 gigs of Ram installed.

To my knowledge some programs just are not designed to be efficient with more than a certain amount of processors. It's nothing I would worry about, it is the same way on my ProTools system. Of course there is a real explanation out there and you are welcome to research.

JS

John,

Thank you for the response. It just makes me wonder why they would even give the option of using 4 then?

I've experimented with the 64bit version of the program, and with a few limitations it seems to make good use of all the resources. I wish they could meld the two together.

When you say you have it set to 4 cores do you mean in the Rendering threads box in the preferences? Just curious, I have an 8-core mac and my rendering threads are set to 16 with no issue...in fact it auto detected and set itself to 16.

I am also using an 8 core mac, and in 8.0 the default is 4 and I can only set it to 4. If I set it to 8, the next time I open it the program says 4 again. Hmm. When I run 8.1, it says I have 16 cores.

Are you using 8.0 or 8.1?

And yes, in the Rendering threads box.

Sorry, Yes only 4 with 8.0C it is my Mac Pro running Vista 64-bit with Vegas 8.1 which shows 16. However, I have no issues on my other Quad core machines running 4 threads in 32-bit Vegas nor on the Mac Pro. My min ram is 2GB in one machine The others have 4GB, but the Mac Pro has 10GB. I guess only version 8.1 is taking real advantage of all the extra cores. Still Vegas should not crash on an 8core with only 4 threads. I would try 8.1 I am only using 8.0 when I have to use MBL plugin...I hope Red Giant will ave the 64-bit version out soon. You using XP or Vista? Also by way of bootcamp?

I'm using Vista Business 64 by way of bootcamp, and so far it is the most stable Windows machine I've ever used. I'm really impressed so far.

I run Vista Ultimate 64 on a 4 gig laptop that is core2duo and I don't have any problems with that ones with 8.0c, it is really centered around my Mac Pro. I wonder if it is trying to use too much ram for each thread since it only can handle the four?

I second that... The Mac running windows is fantastic!!! Your issue is very strange, you might be onto something with the RAM allocation though, as that is usually what crashes Vegas or at least causes it to hang and not respond.

Hi,

There is a known issue with Vegas 8.0c. If you run on all 4 cores and render to HD formats, you will probably crash quite often.

There are two workarounds:

1. Use 8.1 for your rendering (ok IF you are running on 64 bit windows AND IF you do not need any other plugins as the Vegas own). 8.1 works fine with all files I have tested and even if all 4 cores are filled close to 100%.

2. Select less than four cores for the rendering. I would recommend two.

I quote Sony's support:

"...the render is working when you allocate only one processor to the job, but not when all 4 cores are specified. This is usually due to some other process on your computer requesting resource allocation during the time of the render. Since you have cores open for outside resource allocation, the render is not crashing when only using one core. There are a few troubleshooting steps I could recommend for this issue. First, try using three cores for the job and just leaving one open, by setting the max rendering threads to 3. As a troubleshooting step, you may also disable start up and background processes that may be requesting resource allocation on your system from time to time."

Unquote.

SCS thinks that it's not their fault - I compelety disagree. A program properly written does not hang if you use all cores for it. The 8.1 works like a clock, this prooves that there IS a serious bug in 8.0c, at least when redering high defition formats.

Just go down to 3 or 2 cores to solve the problem. It is however wasting your investment in an expesive 4-core CPU!!!!

Hopefully SCS will get this fixed in the next release. Hope this info was of some help.

Christian