Help! Instability (read: CRASH) when rendering, Vegas Pro 9.0c
 

Help! I've searched and read the forum on this, but nothing was totally specific to the questions i have...

I've been having major problems with Vegas crashing during renders. And I don't mean Vegas locks up and give me an error message, it's rebooting my entire computer without warning!

Vegas will let me render out small projects, or sections of big projects, but if I try anything over 5 minutes or so, it's crashy time! The projects vary from very graphics/animation intensive to basic video-only without even one transition, and it still crashes about 2/3rds of the way through the render no matter what! And it doesn't seem to be based on what i'm rendering out to, I've had it do the same thing with .mpeg2, .mp4, .avi, and .mov renders...

I've gone through the 64 bit 9.0, 64 bit 9.0c, uninstalled those, installed 32 bit 9.0, same problem, went to 32 bit 9.0c, same problem!!

My system is an i7 920, 6 Gb ram. Rendering uses all the cores, and only around 2 Gb of the ram...

And yes, I'm running Windows 7... Which i'm thinking more and more could be the root cause... Although this only recently started happening... Up until a few weeks ago, I could render out a 2 hour project no problem. Weird stuff.

Can you monitor heat levels? If it gets too hot it could certainly reboot the entire machine.

I'll see if i can check that... Interesting...

Another (somewhat unappealing) option is to try setting "Preview RAM" to 0. Your render will probably be a bit slower, but i have had success this way getting renders through.

marks

Edward, you were right on the money!! It was a little HOT in there... Side off the case, big fan going, and rendered out just fine!!

I think I need a bigger power source, that was where the bulk of the heat was coming from... It's barely up to the task of running everything, so replacing that should keep the heat down, right?

When computers simply reboot, I often suspect heat first. Changing the power supply *may* help some. But I'd also make sure all fans are properly running, if the CPU has a fan, make sure it's running, blow the dust out of all vents, etc...

I'd actually already done that. All fans were running, and i'd vacuumed out the heat sink on the cpu, too. It just needed a lot more cooling than it was getting... Even with 3 case fans & the cpu heatsink/fan...

It's only a 450 watt power supply, so it's maxing its little heart out!

Alright, put a giant Zalman heat sink/fan on the cpu, upgraded a case fan that was too small, and everything was going beautifully! I was blowing right through a pretty complex render...

...Until the power supply blew... :)

So i'm replacing that too, and it should be the end of this particular story.

Hey Mark, had to mention this, just because its worthwhile knowing for anyone that doesn't.

When rendering from Vegas, ALWAYS set your Ram preview to zero.
The reason being is Vegas will use your Ram to render if that feature is engaged,
Whats the problem with that you ask?
Run task manager while you do a render, with ram preview set nice and high, say 10,000 (10gb), your render will take off like superman, and as you watch in task manager, your memory usage (ram ) will start to climb.
BUT, and heres the killer, it will max out at about 80-90% and your render will slow down to a snails pace, and I mean really slow, and drag on forever.

If Ram preview is set to zero, Vegas will use the CPU to render and not really touch your ram at all ( which is also good if you are working in another instance of Vegas ).
Your render speed will be consistent from first frame to last.

The only exception to this would be if rendering a title or FX that only goes for 5-10-20 sec, in which case it wouldnt matter because you have enough Ram to 'push' through the render and come out at full speed, anything much longer though, and you will see the slow down begin to happen.

I know this isnt really relevant to this particular heat problem, but its worth knowing.

Just to add my two-penny worth. I think a 450w power supply is a bit low for a 17 especially if you have a punchy GPU to go with it. I am running a quad core AMD Phenom II 965 and have a 650w, the guy in the shop said I should really have a 750 or 800w to be safe, but I already had the 650 so thought I'd give it a try. It seems OK

The lack of power could have something to do with your crashing too, although I'd go with heat. I had Vegas crash on me (i.e. do a restart), I discovered that the two rear case fans (set to extract) were not kicking in when using the motherboards automatic power settings, so I now have all case fans on a control unit that I control. The CPU fan I just have run at max all the time and the power supply fan I also have on max manual control when running Vegas.

Bryan,

Are you running a Dell xps 435 work station? I have that unit with the 450 watt power supply and I have run an an hour and a half video with lots of color correction, efects titles etc and have never had it just shut down. I may have been misled, but a computer professional told me that for what i do the power supply was fine unless i was going to go to two or three graphics cards and doing 3d animations (Like maya or such). I have not had any real render problems with veresion 9 to date.

So, I would be very interested how this all turned out for you?


Dale

Gerald & Mark - Always had that set to zero, RAM usage never went above about 1.86 Gb of 6 available... Only pushing the proc.

Dale - I'm running a semi-custom build from CyberPowerPC, and it was my fault for not checking out the power supply, reading reviews, etc. I've learned a lot through this process, including that power supply ratings are sometimes flat out lies... The one I had in my original build was junk, and it slowly fried. I've replaced it with a BFG 550W supply, very well reviewed and working perfectly. Render speed is back up, and no crashing!

This has been a bit of a "learning what I should have known the first time" process for me, but I have learned quite a bit, and I'm pretty happy at this point, having come through with only a few scars... :)

Yep, the power supply is often over-looked and even disregarded as a 'crash problem' but in my experience of fixing & building many many gaming standard PC's heat and power are nearly always the problem (in that order)..... and don't buy cheap PSU's the power rating they quote is usually wishful thinking and rarely anything like what you can expect to get.