Vegas 9 + AVCHD + Cineform = horrible!

[Yang Wen]

I've used Cineform on 5D footage for short 3-4 minute projects with good success. I've just started to edit my first long form project with AVCHD footage from the Panasonic HMC150. 30P AVCHD files have been converted to cineform prior to bringing them to Vegas.

I literally can not edit for more than 5 minutes without Vegas freezing up and eventually have to be killed manually. The error detail shows a BEX event.. What is that? a search doesn't bring anything up.

I'm running Veags 9c 32-bit on a freshly installed Windows 7 64-bit system.

Since installed Windows 7, I've also noticed that I now have a much greater tendency to see the red event block bug.

Any ideas?

[Perrone Ford]

Why on EARTH are you running 32bit Vegas on a 64bit OS? You are seeing these problems because you are running out of memory. If you were running the 64bit version, you wouldn't be seeing these problems.

[Yang Wen]

It has nothing to do with running out of memory. The project as it is right now does not exceed the available system memory nor the 4GB max the 32-bit Vegas is able to address.

Many people are running 32bit Vegas in 64bit OS due to certain plug-ins restricting them to 32-bit version of Vegas.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Yang Wen

It has nothing to do with running out of memory. The project as it is right now does not exceed the available system memory nor the 4GB max the 32-bit Vegas is able to address.

Many people are running 32bit Vegas in 64bit OS due to certain plug-ins restricting them to 32-bit version of Vegas.

Yes I know. I use both 32 and 64 bit Vegas on Windows7 (and WinXP64). But the ONLY time I run into red frames and other such problems is when using long-GOP on the timeline, and/or when running out of memory.

And Vegas cannot address 4GB, it can only address slightly over 2GB unless you've changed the OS presets so that it can address 3.2GB. 2GB is a paltry amount when you start laying full HD on the timeline.

But, I can only offer my experiences when I've seen similar issues using the same configuration. If you feel this is not your issue, then I wish you all the best of success in figuring it out.

[Yang Wen]

Perrone: I appreciate your insight.. I was under the impression Vegas can address up to 4GB thus a 2GB limit IS significant.

I'll investigate a bit more and see if Veags is hitting that 2GB limit next time it bombs out on me.

Where in Windows can we specify more memory to the 32bit instance of Vegas? Thanks

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Yang Wen

Where in Windows can we specify more memory to the 32bit instance of Vegas? Thanks

I don't even know if that hack is available any more in Win7. It's not that Vegas can't address 4GB. It could IF IT WAS AVAILABLE. But I don't believe that Vegas runs in it's on virtual machine as it were. Thus it is sharing that addressable 4GB with other programs running.

When I run the 32bit version, I watch my system properties and committed memory. When Vegas loads on my Win7 machine, with nothing on the timeline, I am right at about 1.3GB consumed. When I drop a clip on, it jumps to maybe 1.7-1.9. When I put on my Magic Bullet looks (the only thing I use that still needs the 32bit version of Vegas) it jumps to about 2.1. I get the red frames once it creeps past 2.4GB committed. It's like clockwork. So I've had to adapt my workflow to ensure I don't break this limit.

In 64bit Vegas, I can do whatever I want.. never a problem.

[Mike Calla]

32bit programs can run fine on a 64bit os'. Obviously the memory limits of the 32bit world still stand.

the problem seems to be with exactly what your title is "Vegas 9 + AVCHD + Cineform = horrible"

open a ticket with Cineform and let them handle it. They'll ask for a sample file and give you a url to upload to.

As we all know sometimes successful codec coversions depend on one little teeny tiny setting to work perfectly. I had a similar issue during my trial period and its was easily solved.

[Robin Miller]

Tried the VAAST program, tried Cineform, in the end went back to working directly in Vegas (9 Pro) with MTS files. Longest project I've done so far was 17 minutes. Took about an hour to render. I had no problem while editing, ran into no file size problems.

When previewing/editing, I use the "preview" quality to stay near-realtime.

One thing: I have a Quad-core. It's 32 bits, but beefy enough with 4 GB RAM that I only max the CPU when rendering, and never max RAM.

[Marc Salvatore]

Yang,

This thread Sony Creative Software - Forums - Vegas Pro - Video Messages explains how to do a memory hack to the Vegas program. It's helped my crashing dramatically. Vegas is still buggy but this allows me to do long form editing in Vegas 32bit with less problems. I'm running Windows 7 with 8 gigs of ram.

Good luck, Marc

[Soeren Mueller]

I can only second what Marc said - also it may seem weird at first, but the "memory hack" for Vegas is now something I consider essential if working with Vegas 32bit on serious projects, especially if you use AVCHD footage!
Of course it leads one to believe that the memory management in Vegas is seriously messed up.. :-/
Give it a try! It fixed many/most of my red frame/render-crash occurances...

[Yang Wen]

Thanks Marc,

I tried that with the 32bit version and it didn't seem to fix my issue.

I was also getting a tons of errors and random freezes (would come back to life after 15secs or so).. so I went out locally to the TigerDirect store and bought 8GBs of overpriced RAM.. 64-bit 9c now seems to run a bit better, however, just now I saw the red frame issue again, however, this is 1 hour into the session, so much much better than when I was running with 4GB of RAM.

What is the optimal Dynamic RAM preview size?

Tanks,
Yang

[Marc Salvatore]

One thing I've noticed is that if I have internet explorer open when I open Vegas or during long form editing I have more of a problem with my icons on the timeline going red.