Why Does Vegas 6 Freeze Regularly?

Hugh DiMauro · May 15th, 2005, 12:18 PM

Thank you all for your replies. I have been spending alot of time on the Sony website and lo and behold, I visited their forum (it looks just like the DV Info.Net forum thankfully!) and many other users are having the same exact problem as me! And it's kinda funny that other people suggested your suggestions and the problem still exists! Sounds like the Sony techhies need to get started on version 6.0b!

All loyal Vegas users who had re-edited their projects back on version 5.0d had no problems. It's obviously a 6.0a bug of some sort.

David Mintzer · May 15th, 2005, 12:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hugh DiMauro

Thank you all for your replies. I have been spending alot of time on the Sony website and lo and behold, I visited their forum (it looks just like the DV Info.Net forum thankfully!) and many other users are having the same exact problem as me! And it's kinda funny that other people suggested your suggestions and the problem still exists! Sounds like the Sony techhies need to get started on version 6.0b!

All loyal Vegas users who had re-edited their projects back on version 5.0d had no problems. It's obviously a 6.0a bug of some sort.

I'm a big Vegas booster but I have always found stalling to be an issue, particularly on a lengthy project.

Hugh DiMauro · May 15th, 2005, 01:28 PM

Do you mean big projects such as time length, number of tracks/layers and number of panned/cropped stills? And do you mean stalling as in stalling during normal routine editing?

If so, very interesting. I wonder who else has that problem?

Lars Siden · May 16th, 2005, 06:02 AM

Maybe be abit OT:

I upgraded one of my C# pre-compiled scripts from V5 to V6 and got all kinds of fuzzy problems with timecodes and cursor placement. Debugged the code for a couple of hours and it worked perfect in debug mode. But when I let the code "go" I got skipped timecodes and stuff. My answer to the problem was to do a "Vegas.UpdateUI()" everytime I made a change to the timeline from my script. This has never been an issue before V6 - so something has happened to the way Vegas deals with input.

// Lazze

Hugh DiMauro · May 16th, 2005, 06:20 AM

Does this response from JJK from the Sony Forums website make sense?

QUOTE: <<Ok guy's, here's what's happenning. The reason the V5 project doesn't work in V6 is that V6 pushes the living crap out of the processor. For instance:
1hr 6 min project (V5) pushes the processor 55to 98 % and takes 4 hrs to complete with a processor temp of 131F.
1 hr 34 min project (V6) pushes the processor 86 to 100% and mostly 100% and takes 2.5 hrs to complete with a processor temp of 142F. In other words the processor is humping big time. Any bad fan, high room ambient, high processor temp in limit will cause the render to stop and the clock still ticks. If you are rendered into a memory limit sometimes you will also get the same indication. I had one render stop at a frame count of 109,700 and at that point was the beginning of a still with a velocity mesh that was concealing a black frame. The black frame was not visible until the mesh on the upper track was moved. I then rendered all the complex stuff to avi and substituted it in the timeline and removed the original stuff from the project to knock down the memory usage.B When an action is performed in V6 with the memory close to being sucked up everything goes ga ga crash hang when the intiated action tries to comply. It's like sticking Batman in the huge clock gears and everything crashes. My personal opinion is that 4 gig of ram will do wonders for V6.
P-4, 3.4, 800 buss, 2gig ram, Intel P875, SATA 500 gig, and 250 gig of SCSI drives. 6300 rpm fan on processor, about 6 fans in cabinet all blowing outward with the exception of the front fans which suck inward.
Room air conditioner on max (71F) with outside temp at 60F.

JJK>>

Will increasing my RAM really help the CPU cooler problem? I have to make a decision because it will cost me $460.00 for the upgrade.

Thanks!

Lars Siden · May 16th, 2005, 06:30 AM

Hugh,

I've been into to "cooling business" :-) doing both waterchill and Vapochill. And sure, if the cpu gets too hot, it will stop working correctly until cooled down. These days I do my renders on a ordinary fan-chilled machine. My setup is like this:

1. One 80mm FAN pushing the heat out from the box where the HDD:s are located
2. One 80mm FAN drawing in air over the MB and chipset
3. One 90mm CPU fan with a "THERMALRIGHT XP-90" heatsink.

With this setup my P4 3.2 with 4HDDs can run 24/7 and never get hotter than 65 C.

One thing that I have noticed with Vegas 6 is that on my DELL machine with an ATI Radeon card, the screen can get "black" during renders, that is - not screensaver black, more like "Help I have no cpu power to send output to the GFX chip"-black. My guess is that the boys at sony has got abit too far in taking control of the cpu. Probably V6.0b will let the OS in for some more cycles.

Last: No, more memory won't let you CPU rest during renders.

// Lazze

Hugh DiMauro · May 16th, 2005, 06:54 AM

I have a Gateway 700 XL Digital Filmmaker. How may I cool my CPUs better? Is there an aftermarket way?

Edward Troxel · May 16th, 2005, 07:21 AM

Vegas 6 is designed to use multi-processors better and, therfore, provide better rendering times. However, that also means that the processor will be working harder than before and, therefore, generate more heat. Unless you can keep it cool, that could lead to problems.

If you look at your RAM usage while rendering, you'll notice the demands are fairly minimal. Increasing RAM will not show you significant improvements. For example, if I upgraded from 256 meg to 512 meg, I might notice a little. If I upgrade from 1 Gig to 2 Gig, I probably wouldn't notice anything at all.

Hugh DiMauro · May 16th, 2005, 07:31 AM

Ed:

So then the CPU overheating theory could be correct? And it can be remedied by dual processors? My computer hyperthreads. Does Vegas 6.0a overtax my hyperthreading? I check my CPU usage and it is at 100% during renders.

Will two physical CPUs correct my problem?

Edward Troxel · May 16th, 2005, 07:47 AM

Yes, it is conceivable that your processor is overheating. Vegas 6 hits it MUCH harder than Vegas 5. Multiple physical processors would give you faster rendering times but Vegas may still hit them all hard. I would first try to cool them down in some way.

Lars Siden · May 16th, 2005, 07:51 AM

Hugh,

Dualprocessors can speed up render time, but it will give you MORE heat. 2x CPU with HT == 4 threads running 100% CPU. CPU1 will give heat to system and so will CPU2.

Aftermarket, certainly - here in Sweden we have dedicated stores for chilling-products. The things you need to know is

1. CPU Socket type, standard P4 == 478 socket
2. How much ROOM do you have surrounding the cpu? A big CPU-fan requires lots of space. The CPU chiller I use is good because it is normalsized in the bottom and large at the top. That high above the CPU there usually is lots of space.

My advice would be to find a good computer store that has a range of different processor chillers in stock and either bring the machine over, or at least take a picture of the cpu and surroundings ( place some kind of ruler or someting visible in the picture for determing space/scale on the picture ) and show the picture to the guys at the store.

Or, drop by Sweden and I'll promise to help :-)

One last note, if you currently have several case-fans, consider replacing them with high quality alternatives - like PAPST fans. It can make a huge difference.

// Lazze

David Mintzer · May 16th, 2005, 11:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hugh DiMauro

Do you mean big projects such as time length, number of tracks/layers and number of panned/cropped stills? And do you mean stalling as in stalling during normal routine editing?

If so, very interesting. I wonder who else has that problem?

I essentially do long form documentary in Vegas---and I find that once I get over lets say 45 minutes on the time line (minimal fx, transitions and maybe three tracks) --and I'm working real fast, either adding, cutting, moving, etc. I get stalls. Most of them I recover from in about ten seconds. I brought this up with the first version of Vegas I bought (I believe it was 3.0)---and I made sure to tweak my system etc. Anyhow, I can live with it---As I am working I am thinking what incredible demands we are putting on a mechanical system, and I'm amazed that I dont have more problems.

Lars Siden · May 16th, 2005, 11:41 AM

Hi,

I'm doing a C# module for vegas that is called DV2DVD. It "automagically" edits a whole DV tape, add chaptermarkers, generates clip lists and subtitles etc etc etc essentially all my projects are 60 minutes and I have the "stalls" that your talking about. But 10 seconds isn't enough, my stalls for 30 seconds. Oftenly it stalls if I leave the computer for a while with VEGAS not being the active window.

// Lazze

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Mintzer

I essentially do long form documentary in Vegas---and I find that once I get over lets say 45 minutes on the time line (minimal fx, transitions and maybe three tracks) --and I'm working real fast, either adding, cutting, moving, etc. I get stalls. Most of them I recover from in about ten seconds. I brought this up with the first version of Vegas I bought (I believe it was 3.0)---and I made sure to tweak my system etc. Anyhow, I can live with it---As I am working I am thinking what incredible demands we are putting on a mechanical system, and I'm amazed that I dont have more problems.

Glenn Chan · May 16th, 2005, 01:03 PM

If the heatsink is properly installed, then you should not have processor overheating issues at all. If it isn't installed properly then your processor will have overheating issues. I don't think you need to buy a new heatsink/fan.

To check for CPU heat problems:
Motherboard Monitor, Speedfan, or your motherboard manufacturer's temperature/voltage utility may provide you with information on the current temperature of your CPU. The manufacturer's utility would be the easiest to configure.

You can stress test your computer with Prime95 and CPUBurn running simultaneously. Prime95 performs mathetmatical calculations and checks the results against known results for calculation errors. On my Pentium 2.6C system (865 chipset), running CPUBurn on top of Prime95 generates more heat.
Prime95 website
CPUBurn

To check for having enough RAM:
Hit Crtl Alt Del to bring up windows task manager
Click performance
Note "PF Usage" and look under physical memory / available to see how much RAM is available.
Start Vegas and edit normally in it (for 10 minutes or so).
Bring up task manager again and look at PF Usage and memory available.

Lars Siden · May 16th, 2005, 01:13 PM

Glenn,

If the cpu has an Intel standard cooler it just barely manages the heat, so if the system adds heat by having a "hot"-graphics card or several harddrives it may fail ( my Intel fancooler did ). Also, if you have a modern gfxcard and added stuff you'll drain more power from the PSU which also will generate more heat.

// Lazze

May 15th, 2005, 12:18 PM	#16
Hugh DiMauro Trustee Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Central Florida Posts: 1,205	Thanks Guys, for coming to the rescue! Thank you all for your replies. I have been spending alot of time on the Sony website and lo and behold, I visited their forum (it looks just like the DV Info.Net forum thankfully!) and many other users are having the same exact problem as me! And it's kinda funny that other people suggested your suggestions and the problem still exists! Sounds like the Sony techhies need to get started on version 6.0b! All loyal Vegas users who had re-edited their projects back on version 5.0d had no problems. It's obviously a 6.0a bug of some sort. __________________ Interesting, if true. And interesting anyway.

May 15th, 2005, 01:28 PM	#18
Hugh DiMauro Trustee Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Central Florida Posts: 1,205	Dave: Do you mean big projects such as time length, number of tracks/layers and number of panned/cropped stills? And do you mean stalling as in stalling during normal routine editing? If so, very interesting. I wonder who else has that problem? __________________ Interesting, if true. And interesting anyway.

May 16th, 2005, 06:20 AM	#20
Hugh DiMauro Trustee Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Central Florida Posts: 1,205	Hey Mr. Troxel: Does this response from JJK from the Sony Forums website make sense? QUOTE: <<Ok guy's, here's what's happenning. The reason the V5 project doesn't work in V6 is that V6 pushes the living crap out of the processor. For instance: 1hr 6 min project (V5) pushes the processor 55to 98 % and takes 4 hrs to complete with a processor temp of 131F. 1 hr 34 min project (V6) pushes the processor 86 to 100% and mostly 100% and takes 2.5 hrs to complete with a processor temp of 142F. In other words the processor is humping big time. Any bad fan, high room ambient, high processor temp in limit will cause the render to stop and the clock still ticks. If you are rendered into a memory limit sometimes you will also get the same indication. I had one render stop at a frame count of 109,700 and at that point was the beginning of a still with a velocity mesh that was concealing a black frame. The black frame was not visible until the mesh on the upper track was moved. I then rendered all the complex stuff to avi and substituted it in the timeline and removed the original stuff from the project to knock down the memory usage.B When an action is performed in V6 with the memory close to being sucked up everything goes ga ga crash hang when the intiated action tries to comply. It's like sticking Batman in the huge clock gears and everything crashes. My personal opinion is that 4 gig of ram will do wonders for V6. P-4, 3.4, 800 buss, 2gig ram, Intel P875, SATA 500 gig, and 250 gig of SCSI drives. 6300 rpm fan on processor, about 6 fans in cabinet all blowing outward with the exception of the front fans which suck inward. Room air conditioner on max (71F) with outside temp at 60F. JJK>> Will increasing my RAM really help the CPU cooler problem? I have to make a decision because it will cost me $460.00 for the upgrade. Thanks! __________________ Interesting, if true. And interesting anyway.

May 16th, 2005, 06:54 AM	#22
Hugh DiMauro Trustee Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Central Florida Posts: 1,205	Lars: I have a Gateway 700 XL Digital Filmmaker. How may I cool my CPUs better? Is there an aftermarket way? __________________ Interesting, if true. And interesting anyway. Last edited by Hugh DiMauro; May 16th, 2005 at 06:54 AM. Reason: Punctuation

May 16th, 2005, 07:21 AM	#23
Edward Troxel Sponsor: JET DV Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Southern Illinois Posts: 7,953	Vegas 6 is designed to use multi-processors better and, therfore, provide better rendering times. However, that also means that the processor will be working harder than before and, therefore, generate more heat. Unless you can keep it cool, that could lead to problems. If you look at your RAM usage while rendering, you'll notice the demands are fairly minimal. Increasing RAM will not show you significant improvements. For example, if I upgraded from 256 meg to 512 meg, I might notice a little. If I upgrade from 1 Gig to 2 Gig, I probably wouldn't notice anything at all. __________________ Edward Troxel [SCVU] JETDV Scripts/Scripting Tutorials/Excalibur/Montage Magic/Newsletters

May 16th, 2005, 06:02 AM	#19
Lars Siden Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Sweden, Stockholm Posts: 469	Maybe be abit OT: I upgraded one of my C# pre-compiled scripts from V5 to V6 and got all kinds of fuzzy problems with timecodes and cursor placement. Debugged the code for a couple of hours and it worked perfect in debug mode. But when I let the code "go" I got skipped timecodes and stuff. My answer to the problem was to do a "Vegas.UpdateUI()" everytime I made a change to the timeline from my script. This has never been an issue before V6 - so something has happened to the way Vegas deals with input. // Lazze

May 16th, 2005, 06:30 AM	#21
Lars Siden Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Sweden, Stockholm Posts: 469	Hugh, I've been into to "cooling business" :-) doing both waterchill and Vapochill. And sure, if the cpu gets too hot, it will stop working correctly until cooled down. These days I do my renders on a ordinary fan-chilled machine. My setup is like this: 1. One 80mm FAN pushing the heat out from the box where the HDD:s are located 2. One 80mm FAN drawing in air over the MB and chipset 3. One 90mm CPU fan with a "THERMALRIGHT XP-90" heatsink. With this setup my P4 3.2 with 4HDDs can run 24/7 and never get hotter than 65 C. One thing that I have noticed with Vegas 6 is that on my DELL machine with an ATI Radeon card, the screen can get "black" during renders, that is - not screensaver black, more like "Help I have no cpu power to send output to the GFX chip"-black. My guess is that the boys at sony has got abit too far in taking control of the cpu. Probably V6.0b will let the OS in for some more cycles. Last: No, more memory won't let you CPU rest during renders. // Lazze

May 16th, 2005, 07:31 AM	#24
Hugh DiMauro Trustee Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Central Florida Posts: 1,205	Dual Processor Ed: So then the CPU overheating theory could be correct? And it can be remedied by dual processors? My computer hyperthreads. Does Vegas 6.0a overtax my hyperthreading? I check my CPU usage and it is at 100% during renders. Will two physical CPUs correct my problem? __________________ Interesting, if true. And interesting anyway.

May 16th, 2005, 07:47 AM	#25
Edward Troxel Sponsor: JET DV Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Southern Illinois Posts: 7,953	Yes, it is conceivable that your processor is overheating. Vegas 6 hits it MUCH harder than Vegas 5. Multiple physical processors would give you faster rendering times but Vegas may still hit them all hard. I would first try to cool them down in some way. __________________ Edward Troxel [SCVU] JETDV Scripts/Scripting Tutorials/Excalibur/Montage Magic/Newsletters

May 16th, 2005, 07:51 AM	#26
Lars Siden Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Sweden, Stockholm Posts: 469	Hugh, Dualprocessors can speed up render time, but it will give you MORE heat. 2x CPU with HT == 4 threads running 100% CPU. CPU1 will give heat to system and so will CPU2. Aftermarket, certainly - here in Sweden we have dedicated stores for chilling-products. The things you need to know is 1. CPU Socket type, standard P4 == 478 socket 2. How much ROOM do you have surrounding the cpu? A big CPU-fan requires lots of space. The CPU chiller I use is good because it is normalsized in the bottom and large at the top. That high above the CPU there usually is lots of space. My advice would be to find a good computer store that has a range of different processor chillers in stock and either bring the machine over, or at least take a picture of the cpu and surroundings ( place some kind of ruler or someting visible in the picture for determing space/scale on the picture ) and show the picture to the guys at the store. Or, drop by Sweden and I'll promise to help :-) One last note, if you currently have several case-fans, consider replacing them with high quality alternatives - like PAPST fans. It can make a huge difference. // Lazze __________________ Sony HDR-CX130,Canon 5DMKII,i7 930@4.0, 12gb memory, 3x SSD + 2x1Tb(stripe), Geforce 480, Dual 24", Win 7 x64

May 16th, 2005, 01:03 PM	#29
Glenn Chan Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 4,750	If the heatsink is properly installed, then you should not have processor overheating issues at all. If it isn't installed properly then your processor will have overheating issues. I don't think you need to buy a new heatsink/fan. To check for CPU heat problems: Motherboard Monitor, Speedfan, or your motherboard manufacturer's temperature/voltage utility may provide you with information on the current temperature of your CPU. The manufacturer's utility would be the easiest to configure. You can stress test your computer with Prime95 and CPUBurn running simultaneously. Prime95 performs mathetmatical calculations and checks the results against known results for calculation errors. On my Pentium 2.6C system (865 chipset), running CPUBurn on top of Prime95 generates more heat. Prime95 website CPUBurn To check for having enough RAM: Hit Crtl Alt Del to bring up windows task manager Click performance Note "PF Usage" and look under physical memory / available to see how much RAM is available. Start Vegas and edit normally in it (for 10 minutes or so). Bring up task manager again and look at PF Usage and memory available.

May 16th, 2005, 01:13 PM	#30
Lars Siden Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Sweden, Stockholm Posts: 469	Glenn, If the cpu has an Intel standard cooler it just barely manages the heat, so if the system adds heat by having a "hot"-graphics card or several harddrives it may fail ( my Intel fancooler did ). Also, if you have a modern gfxcard and added stuff you'll drain more power from the PSU which also will generate more heat. // Lazze