Why Does Vegas 6 Freeze Regularly?
 

I've discovered that when I'm using Vegas 6 (with the "A" version download applied) the program siezes then I get the "Not Responding" message at the top. I have to completely shut down the program, re-open it then re-name it to save the previous version. It does this about ten minutes into my editing sessions or when I'm navigating around the timeline. Does anybody else have this problem? What is causing it and how may I fix it? I've never had this problem with any of the previous Vegas versions.

Thats a tough one because it seems to be a problem that you haven't experienced before. Normally you take a look at IRQ assignments, use of computer resources etc. I think the best thing you can do is turn in a trouble ticket with Sony and try to find out if other people are experiencing the same thing. Go over to their forum and do a search.

I have not seen anything like that happening. Can you give some more details? Also, if you just wait for alittle while, will it come back?

Dear Hugh,

I have not had a problem with Vegas 6.0. I am using the "6.0a" version, Build 99. My previous version on this computer was Vegas 4.0.

I used it last night, for about 4 hours, to capture and edit a 2-hour live performance.

I did not experience any problems with the capture, nor with the editing. In fact, I have not had a single problem so far.

I just mention this in case there may be a setup or computer problem. I fully realize that I have used just a fraction of Vegas's features so far. But, I have done panning, cropping, cutting, and numerous other normal editing steps without a single problem.

As a side note, I did notice that the rendering was using hyperthreading very well. The CPU was pegged at 100% (which indicates that both cpu's (or more technically, both sides of the same cpu, were being fully utilized.). With Vegas 4.0, the maximum that you could obtain during a render was 50% which indicates that one cpu was being full utilized.

Please understand that I am not saying that Vegas 6.0 does not have problems. Any new software may have problems. I am saying that I have personally not found any yet.

Thank you all for your replies. I will try an experiment tonight: Disconnect my cable internet and see if that was messing me up. Also, I will check my CPU usage while rendering to confirm what you said. I never thought about that!

Ed: Still freezes
 

I literally had to break up my 80 minute documentary into 8 separate chunks and render each chunk separately (and even then sometimes, the render would freeze and I had to make the chunks smaller!) then piece each rendered chunk onto a new project timeline. Then, when I tried to print to tape from the timeline, the last menu (the one that comes after clicking okay to start a five second color bars and tone) the whole thing came up shaded and did not permit me to print from the timeline. What is going on with this program? I never had this problem before!

Can you help me troubleshoot why it would not let me print to the timeline? Be advised that I tried to print from an already rendered Windows for Avi project timeline and not the original edited version with eleven tracks.

The first thing I'd check is that it's not a communication problem with an external drive. Is that where your media is?

Gary

Gary:
 

O/S is on C: drive and media is on D: drive. I've been using it that way for years with Vegas 3, 4 and 5. Never ever had this problem. Just so you know, in this particular documentary, I have many many many photos placed in the timeline. I watch the render slow significantly when it gets to a particular photo cropped and "slow zoomed" with the pan/crop tool.

During render, when it freezes, it usually freezes at a point in a normal video clip and the CPU usage indicator of course drops down to 1% indicating that the render has stopped. Then, in order to exit the frozen program, I have to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. What a pain in the arse!

It also freezes while I edit normally as I dance around the timeline. I was up until 0300 hours this morning reformatting the hard drive and re-installing everything from Windows XP Home right through the drivers to Vegas 6a (downloaded directly from the Sony Website).

I have been a staunch and loyal Vegas user since version 3 and I would never even think to change to another editing program. But dang, of all times for this to happen when I was asked to edit a very important documentary for a North Jersey colleague. I've aged dramatically in the last week.

Hugh,

Have you tried selecting just that troublesome picture with the pan/zoom and then prerendering it? If it will render, then that section is just a segment of AVI in the 'big' render.

As I understand Vegas, if you pre-render a region and do not change anything, Vegas does not re-render that segment when rendering the whole project. Right Edward? Gary? DSE?

That's basically what I said. Pre-render the whole thing (which renders in 300 frame segments) and then try the final render. Even when going to MPEG2 the pre-renders would be used. I just finished rendering roughly 1 hour 13 minutes to MPEG2 (VBR 2-pass) with no hangups.

Another question: What format are you rendering to?

I'm with Gary. Sounds to me suspiciously like a USB/Firewire external drive problem. Does your drive light stay lit when things lock up? Are you hitting the external when things lock up? These issues can come out of nowhere, everything worked fine before and all of the sudden it doesn't. I had these problems and they were devestating. Lost time, lost projects, lost sanity. The good news is that I got rid of them eventually! I found a patch for WinXP that cured the issues.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;885464

Check it out and see if it applies to you. I feel for you, but there's hope!

John

Sorry Edward, I shoulda known you'd beat me to the punch.

Hugh, You know that 'Murphy's Law' states that the likelihood of a malfunction is directly proportional to the perceived importance of the project and inversely proportional to the time available. I'm sure humor doesn't help and this won't be funny until it's behind you. I'm just hopeful you can track down exactly what it is; I hate having things clear up mysteriously and not knowing what actually caused the problem.

One thing you could try:
Decrease RAM preview to something like 16MB. It may be that Vegas is hitting page file activity (which you want to avoid, and can slow Vegas down dramatically) and perhaps some bugginess associated with it?

Maybe something else you can try:
Decrease the number of rendering threads to 1. It's in the Vegas preferences somewhere. (Sorry my hard drive crashed yesterday but I recovered all my data, but my computer isn't running yet.)

There's a very small chance those things may work.

2- Maybe you could workaround your problem by using something that's stable on your system?

3- Maybe Vegas is having problems with the size of your project. You already tried breaking it up into smaller projects right?

Hugh, can you go back to V5 to get you past your deadline? Both can be installed with no interference between them.

Good luck.

Dennis

You might also be able to open a Vegas 6 project in V5. I know with the V6 sample editing projects, at least some of them open in V5.