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.

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.

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

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?

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

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!

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

Lars:
 

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.