Or maybe it's some combination of Vegas8 and certain machines.

Rob Mack

I have to agree... I've just finished some slideshow projects with about 1000 stills and no crashing at all.

Can you give us some details?

Are you using V8 or 8a?

How big are the stills? It may well be that you're using all system resources just with the stills themselves. What value is your Dynamic RAM set to?

Sounds a little bit like my problems with 8.0 Pro, I hve issues with HDV video. I have seen that you also have a 8800 GTS. Is there maybe an issue between 8.0 and the NVidia cards? I have tried a different card that I had on hand but it was a 7200 GS and the crash followed.
Which cards is anyone else running here, who has no problems? Would be great to hear that someone with a 8800 GTS has no problems.

Regards

Axel

nVidia7950GTX , no problems whatsoever with sd, hdv or stills

nv 8500gt as above, no problems at all....

leslie

btw - winxp.

What OS are you using?

I too have a project with many stills and track motion and Vegas crashes when in 32 bit mode. I went back to 8 bit.

EVGA 8800GTX and have my share of problems... I have given up trying to figure it out as I am able to do everything by keeping the mem usage down. But anyone else running into trouble with the 8800 series of graphics cards??

Geezz, I was thinking of purchasing one of them EVA 8800's. How much memory is that card sucking up?
JJK

I'm using an 8800 and have had my share of crashing problems. 8.0a seems to be more stable but it's not perfect.

V8a crashes when I try to render to mpeg2 on my all of my V7 projects (all of which use stills) that I have tried so far, when I attempt to convert them to 32bit. They appear to work fine in 8bit on V8a.
I have an incident in with support these last 10 days, no reply yet.

VP 8a works fine apart from 32bit mode - crashes when rendering. I opened up a ticket with support. Uploaded a project along with media when asked. It has been shifted to development, which I guess means that support was able to recreate the issue. If you have issues, I would suggest opening up a support ticket. Unless the problem can be recreated, it cannot be fixed. It also helps in tracking issues.

"Geezz, I was thinking of purchasing one of them EVA 8800's. How much memory is that card sucking up?"

---------------------------------------------

Maybe stupid question, but how do I find out how much memory the card is using up? I know it has 768MB on board, why would it need more from the main memory??

I wonder if there is something going on with the 8800 and VP8, have not seen a reply that shows these cards working all that great with Vegas.


Ted

What is the recommended RAM setting and # of threads that folks without problems are using?

Would there be different settings for a dual core vs. quad core machine with V8.0a?

Eileen

If you are using Vista, it may well use more from the main memory for the graphics adapter. Crazy but true.

Aside from that, even that 768 MB subtracts from what would otherwise be available for programs, because it uses addresses that could have been assigned to RAM. Still, 32-bit windows should be capping Vegas at 2GB, some of which would be page file.

If you're using Vista, you can turn off all things Aero, which should help a lot. Honestly, the way Vegas uses graphics cards, you could get away with using a card with just 64MB (probably 32MB would be fine, but 64MB should handle three 1920x1080 screens). Aero, though, requires huge amounts of memory because it's storing all sorts of 3D data.

Maybe Vegas didn't need to police it's own memory use in the past, but they probably need to be more rigorous now, with HD resolutions and 32-bit float support.

PPro just throws up a warning and stops you from importing stills larger than 6k px across, afaik. Vegas could do that.

Rob Mack

Thanks Rob, but I now am a bit more confused. Are you saying that my 8800 GTX card which touts 768MB of RAM subtracts this 768MB from motherboard RAM ?? (btw I am using Vista)
The more memory on the graphics card = less available memory in RAM?

I seriously am starting to think there is a problem with the way Vegas handles the memory, as I have posted on several occasions when my project reaches above 75% of RAM usage it starts to crash on renders etc... When I stay below 60% it is rock solid. I just finished an hour project by combining 5 seperate veg projects (all less than 60% mem usage each, and each rendered to AVI, then combining them all together for the final render)

Ted

That 768MB of RAM lives in the same space as all the other RAM at the top end of the memory address space.
So if you only have 2GBs of RAM it has no effect. If you have 4GBs of RAM then that's 768MB of RAM less that can be used as system memory. The advantage of having RAM on the video card is it's faster RAM than you're likely to have on the mobo and the GPU can access that memory without tying up the system RAM.

Bob.

Thanks Bob. I think I understand!!
I was under the impression that this 768 was used by the GPU on the graphics card only and not counted as mobo memory space.
How confusing can it get, I have 4G, but vista only shows around and uses only 3gig, then the graphics card takes another 768MB.....
It was all so much easier with my Apple][ and 48K of RAM sigh....

Ted

No, no!

That 768MB is being taken out of the 4GBs which is why you're left with roughly 3GB.

If you only had 2GB then you loose none of it as the addresses of the RAM and video card do not overlap.

Bob.

Ah ha.... :) That makes more sense. It is completely clear now!

Thanks Bob

No. The card has it's own memory. Vista may add a little system memory to it as well, if needed to support the 3D Aero interface.

The phenomena of installing a memory heavy graphics card at the expense of system memory is another matter. You have 4GB of address space for things like graphics cards, sticks of RAM, system resources, etc. The more you have of one the less you can have of the other. RAM always gets last dibs on system address space as the system boots up. The fatter those graphics cards, the less address space left for RAM.

This isn't usually a problem if you only install 2 GB of RAM but becomes a consideration when you try to install 4GB. The lights are on but nobody's home.

A 64-bit setup gets arround this by assigning the last of your RAM to new addresses made available by the 64-bit hardware and OS.

Think of it like a phone system with 4000 numbers. Then imagine that thousand or so numbers are set aside for infrastructure. You could still buy the 4000 phones, but a bunch of them will never receive a call unless you go to the new 64-bit phone system and give those phones some of the new numbers.

This bit about addressability has nothing to do with Vegas, BTW. But it may be that Vegas needs more rigorous memory management to work in the space it's allowed to work in. It could just start saying "No" when you put too many stills on a timeline, or if they're too big.

Rob