Lars:
 

Can I take the poor man's route and cool the CPU by opening the side panel and pointing fans towards the motherboard? I know that sounds cheesy, but...

Then again, what do CPU coolers cost nowadays? I am running two 7200 rpm hard drives and a Radeon 9800 Pro 3d Graphics Adapter, dual monitors. Could I be slowly frying my CPU?

Hugh: Opening the side panel and pointing a table fan into it should lower temperatures. You can confirm this with a temperature monitoring utility (i.e. the one your manufacturer provides). Not sure if OEM computers like HP provide such a utility.

I doubt it will help your problems though. I think the stability issues just relate to the way Vegas is coded. All processors are designed to make accurate calculations at full load, and generally have lots of headroom. Of course, you can double-check hardware stability with Prime95 + CPUBurn.

With the cooling your case thing, be sure no objects get inside (i.e. pets, children, drinks, etc.).

Opening the side is okay, Looks more "macho" that way :-)

Remember: A well chilled HDD will serve you for years, an overheated HDD can die in a blink...

My guess is that new fans and new cpu-cooler would set you back about 50-60 USD top.

Good luck!

// Lazze

I actually have the problems being described in the KB article - in my case, 1 firewire device plugged in and it works fine, plug in 2 devices and I get all the slew of errors they describe (NEC 1394 chipset). Why don't the make the hotfix publicly available (you have to call & then get charged - and it's only a possibility that the charges will be canceled)??

Lars--I said 10 seconds off the top of my head--its probably closer to your 30 seconds.

David,

I installed 6.0b and now I feel that Vegas is more "in the game" again. I do feel that Sonys thread handler needs some touching up, it is still hard to cancel some actions.

// Lazze

Sorry for sounding like a stuttering phone-answering-machine :-)

I still have problems with Vegas 6.0b - it "hangs" if I leave a project open for some time without actively using it ( like taking a break, making coffee ). No big deal, just make sure that you save the proj regulary....But I never had this kind of probs with Vegas 4 or 5.

// Lazze

Vegas 6.0b IS DRIVING ME NUTS!
 

I am not in such a good frame of mind right now. I stayed awake all night last night trying to render this documentary and the renders kept freezing. I did everything Ed Troxel instructed. Hell, I even bought a new machine! The program froze up on me each and every time I moved around the timeline! I had to CTRL-ALT-DEL to shut down and would constantly lose pre-renders. I need to lay my cards on the table because tomorrow is the premier in North Jersey and I promised a clean copy and now I can't deliver. Here are the symptoms:

1) Program freezes up when doing something as simple as moving around the timeline.
2) Chunks of clips on the timeline just go "offline" for no apparent reason and I cannot locate them again even though the clips had been captured in one place on a secondary drive.
3) Renders freeze over and over again.
4) When I pre-render, the pre-render markers above the pre-rendered areas disappear.
5) The timeline contains many pictures scanned at 600 dpi.

I am using Windows XP Professional 64 bit.
Dual Xeons, 3.0 gHz with an 800 mhz frontside bus and 2 mb of L2 cache.
2 gig of ram.
40 gig SATA drive for the Vegas 6.0b program.
250 gig EIDE hard drive for the files.

Thinking it was my EIDE hard drive, last night I even added a brand new 120 gig SATA hard drive, saved my project to it (along with a trimmed copy of the media) and attempted to render. Nothing. Still froze. Program still froze during routine editing.

Some time ago I posted this very gripe on the Sony Mediasite technical assistance web page. I even followed their instructions:

1) Download the latest verson of Vegas (I did)
2) Defrag (I did)
3) Error check (I did)
4) Shut down some of the background programs according to the list they furnished (I did)

I really need some solutions here. I even tried rendering sections at a time then placing them on a new timeline and renaming the project. Nope. Still had render freezes and the program still froze. Does anybody have any ideas?

A couple things I notice:

5) The timeline contains many pictures scanned at 600 dpi.

I've seen times when I needed to pre-render smaller sections in order to get things of this nature rendered.

I am using Windows XP Professional 64 bit.

Not sure if this might cause any problems. I don't believe Vegas has officially placed this OS on the "approved" list.

Ed:
 

I became so desperate last night that I pre-rendered only two pictures at a time in the looped region. But the further down the timeline I traveled when just moving the loop region, Vegas would freeze.

Secondly, do you think the 64 bit O/S might be the culprit? If so, should I be moving past Vegas and maybe into Premier Pro?

I am bummed. I'd hate to have to learn a new interface.

I honestly don't know what is causing your problems. I haven't seen these problems on my systems. I've tested on both Win2K and XP SP1. I have .NET 1.1 installed with the SP1 update for .NET and DirectX 9.0c. Vegas 6b has been running fine on that system. I had a lot of issues with 6.0 and a few issues with 6.0a but 6.0b has been stable for me.

Thanks, Ed. Let's se what our pals at Sony have to say.

I can think of three things:


1. hardware failures. However, since you indicate you are using new hardware (you had the same issues on the old?) this is unlikely

2. windows xp 64 bit

3. multi-threading is causing a problem with xeons and/or win64


Point 3 should be easy enough to verify. If you know your way around the
BIOS you should be able to disable a processor. Otherwise you can set the
affinity of Vegas to just one processor (try both!). Here's how:

1. Start Vegas

2. right-click on an empty spot on the taskbar on the bottom of the screen

3. select "Task Manager"

4. go to the "Processes" tab (and optionally hit the "Image Name" column header to sort it on name)

5. locate vegas60.exe, right-click on that name and select "Set Affinity"

6. per default both of your CPU's will be enabled. De-select CPU 1 and OK the screen. Then close the Task Manager

7. See how it works now. If the problems remain, go back to point 2 above and now select the other CPU on the screen in step 6.


If that still does not solve your problems I'm suspecting Windows 64 (remember,
it uses a 32 bit "emulation" layer to run your 32 bit program) or your hardware
(most suspect would be memory and your mainboard).

Hopefully you can get it resolved!

Thank you all for your replies
 

Douglas Spotted Eagle was kind enough to advise me that he thinks the culprit might be too many stills on the timeline scanned at 600 dpi. This kind of makes sense because I never had a problem with Vegas up to this point. Any comments?

The folks at Sony blame it on the 64 bit O/S, claiming that Vegas was not engineered for a 64 bit O/S.

Here's what I'm going to do: I will rename my project and delete all the stills then move around the timeline and render it to see if it freezes. Stay tuned...

You might want to try running with 32bit Windows. I don't think there are any real gains with 64bit Windows. Many benchmarks show marginal gains of a few percent at best (some programs are also slower by a few percent.. and a handful of others ~30% faster).

The big downside with 64bit Windows is that not everything may work (which may or may not be the case here).