Wow, sorry you're having that big a problem Simon. That is a sign of something not right.

I don't know all the technical stuff Vegas "likes", but I use a Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT graphic card, ASUS P5K-E motherboard, Q6600, 2 each 2 gig Kingston KVR800DD2 sticks, and Seagate Barracuda drives (4 total) with Vista 32 bit. It handles HDV nicely, and I keep the preview window pretty much at Good and Full, or Best if not a lot of stuff thrown in to slow things down.

I also do not run anything in background like anti-virus software, auto-updating stuff, or other junk that can eat your pc's resources.

Best of luck,

Jamie

edit: Hey... I hit a hundred!

I use the same system as you except i use XP and the video card and mother board are both Gigabyte.
My last system was a ASUS board but i had problems with the north bridge overheating.

Cheers

Sort of solid....
 

I dont think I'm a chicken-little, but I find it hand on heart to say Vegas is solid - (how can it be when the Forum administrator on Sony Vegas forum is asking for beta0-testers to test a fix for vegas hdv capture?). But anyway, last night i rendered a 1 hour school play i'd finsihed shooting - 2 camera shoot with a Sony V1 and a CXanon HV20. Captured in Cineform Neo HDV.

1. 12 midnight -i start render using standard DVDA PAL template
2. I go to sleep
3. At 7am I wake and go to the PC (a typical quad-core XP 2Gb nvidea )
4. There is nothing on the screen - NOTHING but XP - no error message

I restart the render and go to the school embarrassed that I cant show them the dvd i promised (told them the dog chewed my homework).

I come back and same thing. Vegas crashed - no error messages. I didnt change settings and rendered a 3rd time and it completed finally.

So there you go. I just think there is no excuse for any commercial s/w to crash without leaving an error message. I work for the 2nd largest IT system integrator in the world and I see what is required to properly test software - Sony must have 5 people, half a biscuit and a dog testing Vegas............... (hey Sony prove me wrong - invite me to meet your testing staff)

Shame, because I prefer it to Premiere.

Hopefully that's about to change:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=125232

Vegas crashes
 

Did you look at event viewer?
I had an issuewhere I pre-rendeder supers in 1080p to m2t file and some of them were causing Vegas to crash when I added the file to the main timeline. There was an event listed indicating the mpeg decoder was root cause. I moved the pre-renders elsewhere so Vegas would leave them offline and the issue went away. Needless to say with about 100 clips in a 1:13 show it was quite time consuming, and the underlying issue of why vegas created pre-renders caused thecarsh was not resolved, but I got theproject done by replacing the pre-renders with nested VEG's. BTW got no response from Vegas as to why.
I agree it's esasperating. I now save the file with a new name periodically at logical breakpoints, so if I come in next day and it crashes, I can open older versions and not lose too much work. Grrr.

For the record, I'm using Vegas 7.0e and last night I dropped 6 tapes worth of HDV (.m2t) files on the timeline which was equal to about 120 +/- clips and have been editing and manipulating these without any problems whatsoever.

The only time I've ever run into Vegas crashing would be on rendering some projects but I have later discovered some of the rendering settings I was using caused those crashes and after changing them a bit, everything is just fine.

Jon

FWIW, there's a thread on the Sony Vegas forum right now where one guy (Q6600 quad core, Intel MOBO, Vista 64 with 8G RAM) said:

I now capture with HDVsplit but I capture the tape in its entirety first (with its preview off), then I use HDVsplit's option to scene detect capture files already on the harddrive (audio/video sync switch OFF). I haven't had a render crash in at least 6 months now and I'm rendering big 1440 timelines over to 1920 for Blu Ray.

A few other users are doing the same thing (one long capture) and it seems to have solved a lot of problems.
I'm not saying that this is a cure but it's a solution worth checking out.