Issues with low memory while rendering Vegas 11

[magic612]

Hi there,

Bought Sony Vegas 11 Platinum based on the strong recommendations I got at this forum. It has worked generally pretty well for quite a few months. It would occasionally crash, but it wasn't a real problem.

Today I am trying to render a 4.5 minute video, and it is giving me an 'low memory' error, saying, "The system is low on memory."

I don't have anything else open though!

I closed the internet and tried. I had nothing else running. Looking at Windows Task Manager, nothing is open that shouldn't be, from what I can tell, and resources of the system certainly aren't being taxed by any stretch. I changed the "Dynamic RAM Preview" to 0MB, as suggested, and even tried it at the "Default" setting of 350MB.

I have a Dell Cori i5 quad core processor with 6 GB of RAM. I've not had any problems with rendering before - any ideas? I've even tried rendering in various similar and lower quality video formats - nothing seems to work. This is not good - I have a video I need done by tomorrow.....

[aedipuss]

hard to tell but it is most likely a corrupt source video. what's mediainfo say about the source?

[poisondeathray]

32bit or 64bit vegas ? 32bit programs can only access 2GB memory (in some situations up to 3)

Does it slowly or not at all when rendering ?

As a temporary workaround, you could render out segments then join (or render out lossless video segments, join, then encode with another encoder. The problem is some formats don't "join" well after the fact, hence the recommendation the 2nd option)

[magic612]

First, thank you for the quick replies. Very much appreciated.

aedipuss, I didn't even know what that was until just now. I'll check it out.

poisondeathray - by some fortuitous circumstance, I was able to get 53% of the video rendered in one shot. I then deleted the first half of the edit (saving as a new file) and saved the second half. Joined the two and managed a full file, but it does bother me that this happened, and I'd like to avoid it in the future.

Now that I am looking into it, I believe this is 32 bit. Grrrr....

For reference, it would render, but would stop in different places when I tried. Sometimes only to 3%, other times 10, 15 or even 25%. When I got the 53% render, I knew I had a shot at getting a full video, since there was a natural break just past the 50% point.

[poisondeathray]

Another poster had similar issues , it turned out the problem was quicktime files (MOV wrapped). Quicktime causes many issues with vegas.

What were your source files ?

[magic612]

Source files were mt2s AVCHD files directly from my Canon camcorder, some WMV files and and MPEG-2. All of them have worked for me in Vegas in the past. I have converted QuickTime files when needed, because I know they don't work in it. I usually convert them to MPEG-2's.

[aedipuss]

i you didn't create the source files don't ever count on them being usable in vegas, even if you can play them, they might be corrupt.

but since it dies at different points is it possible you are running low on free hard drive space?

for future reference it would help if you filled out the computer details in your forum profile.

[magic612]

Hmmm... I figured files that came from NASA wouldn't be corrupt. Maybe some were? Anything's possible.

Definitely not running low on hard drive space - it's a new computer, huge drive (for me anyway), and with 1TB available, I'm at like 5% used space so far or something ridiculously low. It's not that... yet.

Sorry about the computer details on my profile - I've added that so when I have questions others can see that in the future. Thanks for pointing that out.

[budwzr]

Do you have a bunch of huge stills? That will choke any program.

Huge stills should be resized before import, or use png.

[jagabo]

Use Task Manager to see how much memory Vegas is using. The problem sounds more like a memory leak from a bad add-on or something like that.

[magic612]

budwzr - I used "some" stills. I guess I'm not sure what the definition of "a bunch of huge stills" is...? Thing is, I've probably used more stills in the past, and never had a problem.

jagabo - I did look at Task Manager. The vast majority of RAM resources were being used by Vegas. I had closed everything else that was using any significant RAM. Most of the rest of it looked like Windows applications to my eye, but I'm no expert on that either. But Vegas had far and away the most RAM usage.

Thanks for all the thoughts - maybe when I edit my next one I'll avoid the NASA videos, or re-format those on my machine (would that resolve any potential corruption issues?).

[jagabo]

Vegas had far and away the most RAM usage.

But how much? I know Vegas is something of a memory hog (I don't use it, that's just what I hear) but I find it hard to believe a 4.5 minute project normally takes up all memory. Even if you are running 32 bit Vegas and it can only access ~2 GB of the 6 GB in your computer.

If it's something about the NASA videos, maybe you should quickly convert them to some other format that Vegas can handle better -- hdv, mjpeg, huffyuv.

[budwzr]

I would think you would WANT it to use all available resources during render, but you might try minimizing it.

Also, do you have any weird settings going on? Like Floating Point FX? Or other heavy duty grunt work?

[magic612]

@jagabo - Honestly, I don't recall how much now. And I've done at least 8-10 of these projects in the last several months, with absolutely zero problems. Haven't installed any new software recently. I even ran anti-spyware and my anti-virus to make sure there was nothing hogging resources I didn't know about.

I don't know - I'm kind of at a loss on this.

EDIT: Yeah, I'll try reformatting the NASA videos when I use them again. I wonder if that was the problem. I will wind up using them again, but at least I'll try the reformat first to see how things run in the future.

[magic612]

I would think you would WANT it to use all available resources during render, but you might try minimizing it.

Also, do you have any weird settings going on? Like Floating Point FX? Or other heavy duty grunt work?

I do run a fair amount of chromakey, and the background behind it is usually not a static one. So I know that is using some CPU horsepower. But it's not run into RAM issues in the past either.

[budwzr]

Well, you say you can split the project in half, then render both halves no problem, so that's a tough one.

[jagabo]

This is just a wild guess, but the files from NASA may use long GOPs, much longer than you get from a camcorder. Maybe Vegas decompresses entire GOPs into memory while it's rendering? With each 1920x1080 HD frame taking about 8 MB of memory a 200 frame GOP would eat up most of your RAM (on a 2 GB, 32 bit system).

[aedipuss]

a couple more thoughts.

make sure you have the latest build installed. http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/updates and even if you do removing/re-installing is a thought.

a few people have reported your problem was caused by having the source files in the same directory as the render destination. don't ask me why, it sounds weird to me, but changing the output folder worked for them.

if you are getting paid for these, i'd think about an upgrade to vegas pro 64bit. i can't say i've ever had an error like that and i've been using the pro version 32bit and now 64bit from v6.0 and my projects usually run 1.5 to 2 hours on the timeline.

[magic612]

budwzr - well, I wouldn't term it "no problem" exactly. It happened to get half of it done on one of the attempts, then I split off the first half and resaved, rendered that and then connected the two. But I got it done at least.

jagabo - interesting thought. Would me converting to a new file type change that at all?

aedipuss - I did install the latest update after the first couple of failures. That's another interesting though about the source files; I didn't have them in the same folder, but they were "right next to each other" so to speak. Unfortunately, not getting paid for these ones... just weird that all the prior ones worked fine, and last night they didn't.

Thanks again for all of the good thoughts - I'll try some of those suggestions, and hopefully they will help some others in the future as well.

[aedipuss]

their problems only occurred if the were in the same folder unfortunately, it won't help you.

if you have a good idea which source file is causing the most problems you could post a link to the video on the nasa site so we could d/l and take a look at it.

[jagabo]

jagabo - interesting thought. Would me converting to a new file type change that at all?

Yes. Even if you use the same file type and codec you could reencode with shorter GOPs. An all I-frame codec would eliminate the problem.

But, like I said, it's a long shot that long GOPs is the problem. It's more likely there is a memory leak. While running, programs often allocate memory (ask the operating system for more) and free it (return that memory to the operating system) . A memory leak is when a program doesn't free those temporary buffers. So each time that function is called more memory is taken from the system, and never given back. Eventually the program will have consumed all the memory. When you exit the program the OS performs a cleanup and reclaims all memory the program was using. So the problem goes away once the program is terminated.

It's also possible the the error report is misleading. The problem could be something else, the program just mistakenly gave that error dialog. That's quite common in large, complex programs.

[magic612]

I should note that I rebooted my system a couple of times and still encountered the problem with rendering. Not sure if that matters or not, but it's another action I did take to try and eliminate potential issues.

[budwzr]

I would blame the NASA media. You know these quasi-government organizations always do things in some fakkakta way that doesn't mesh with what the norm is.

Like Jagabo said, try re-encoding the source media and see if that solves it.

When I mentioned huge stills, I know that many of the stills from NASA are 20MB or more, and the pixel dimensions are outrageous. Vegas supports 4K stills only (I think). So maybe cut down your stills to 4K or less in both dimensions.

[magic612]

I'll try re-encoding. Doesn't take long, and can't hurt to try. Plus it just may save me aggravation in the future when I forget to re-encode first and have this problem again!

The largest stills I'd be using are 1440 x 810. Don't recall total file size offhand, but I'm sure they're not 20MB. More like 2 - 4 MB, tops - and those were files I produced in Photoshop on my machine. Again, I've done the same kind of thing in the past and not had issues. I'm thinking re-encoding the NASA vids may go a long way towards solving this.

Thanks again, all.

[jagabo]

I should note that I rebooted my system a couple of times and still encountered the problem with rendering. Not sure if that matters or not, but it's another action I did take to try and eliminate potential issues.

From a fresh boot: Start Task Manager. Start Vegas. Note Vegas' memory usage. Open the project. Note memory usage again. Start rendering. Watch Vegas' memory usage as the render progresses. Does it keep increasing until you get the error message? That's a possible sign of a memory leak.

[magic612]

I should note that I rebooted my system a couple of times and still encountered the problem with rendering. Not sure if that matters or not, but it's another action I did take to try and eliminate potential issues.

From a fresh boot: Start Task Manager. Start Vegas. Note Vegas' memory usage. Open the project. Note memory usage again. Start rendering. Watch Vegas' memory usage as the render progresses. Does it keep increasing until you get the error message? That's a possible sign of a memory leak.

I'll give that a try. If that is what is happening, any idea how I fix it? (Or should I ask only IF it is happening? )

[jagabo]

memory leak

I'll give that a try. If that is what is happening, any idea how I fix it?

Then you have to track down what's causing the memory leak. Like I suggested before, if you recently started using some new plugin, look there. Maybe it's just a bug in the source filter used to read the file type you got from NASA. Or the codec that's decoding the video or audio.

[budwzr]

All the ideas given so far are excellent, but I just wanted to add that iTunes and/or Quicktime has been known to screw up a perfectly good Windows machine. You might try shutting all that Apple stuff down from the task manager.

[magic612]

First things first - no Apple products on this machine. Itunes is on another computer on my home network, but not this one. This computer is specifically for video editing and such. I don't even have QuickTime - I just automatically convert any QuickTime files to something usable.

Okay, so I tried re-rendering with Windows Task Manager open, watching the CPU and RAM sections to see what would happen, and when as it stopped. Guess what? The WHOLE FREAKING THING RENDERED! So I don't know what the problem was the other day. I had rebooted several times, removed some software, did everything I could think of to make it better, and kept coming up with difficulties. This time - first time! - BAM, renders fine.

So... I don't know. I've got another one I'll need to do this weekend. Hopefully I won't have the same trouble. Thanks again for everyone's thoughts and insights. Wish I had something useful to report, but at this point, I got nothin'!