Vegas with Vista 64 bit crashes - solved

bbgunn wrote on 1/11/2009, 5:34 AM

I wanted to post this as a possible solution for folks who are having lock up, "appcrash", or fatal exception errors when using Vegas on a Vista platform. I have the 64 bit home professional version. I have a Gateway LX6200 system - Quad core with 8 gig of ram. (brand new).

The symptoms were these: All of my programs (particle illusions, bluff titler, photoshop, sound forge, swishmax, xara 3d) worked perfectly on my system - no problems whatsoever. However, I was getting constant crashes using Vegas 8.0B or 8.1. The symptoms were always slighty different. Sometimes it would shut down completely by itself. Sometimes I would get the dreaded "fatal exception" error.It always happened seemingly after a certain amount of time elapsed. I spent several hours troubleshooting - ran ram memory test (everything ok), reloaded Vista, reloaded vegas - still crashed.

What I finally found was the problem was my video card! I have dual monitors and when I purchased the pc I also bought a Vision Tek ATI Radeon 512meg DDR2 dual video output card (I think it was an HD 4650). Updating the drivers did not help. If I used the built in vga video connector on the Gateway PC with 1 monitor everything worked great with vegas - no crashes.

I took the ATI Radeon card back and exchanged it for a Nvidia GEforce 9500 GT 1 gig DDR2 (for the same price!) Now everything works fine.

Wanted to pass this along in case someone out there is pulling their hair out.

Comments

blink3times wrote on 1/11/2009, 9:05 AM

Makes sense.

I have always said that 9 out of 10 Vegas crashes have little to do with Vegas itself and more to do with Vegas along with other hardware/software.

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 1/11/2009, 12:06 PM

Then the question is: If all other software works with this same hardware, but Vegas does not - who's blame is it ??? Vegas ???

Christian

John_Cline wrote on 1/11/2009, 1:28 PM

Vegas is not particularly dependent on the video card, so it is most likely the video card drivers. My experience with ATI has been that the hardware is OK, but their drivers are poorly written. I have had strange issue with every ATI product I have ever owned. I have never had an issue with nVidia cards, ever.

ushere wrote on 1/11/2009, 2:20 PM

echo jc's comment. i gave up using ati cards around vegas 5. and it wasn't just vegas i had problems with in those days but a number of other programs too...

kentwolf wrote on 1/11/2009, 5:09 PM

>>I have had strange issue with every ATI product I have ever owned....

Ditto here. For years. Almost every time (~80+%) I went to update ATI drivers, for some reason I would get an error of some sort so that the drivers update did not go well. I think I have had about 5 different ATI cards through the years. The notable exception to receiving some sort of error was when ATI drivers were updated through Windows Update. Aside from Windows Update, plan on a problem.

>>...I have never had an issue with nVidia cards, ever....

I finally decided to get an Nvidia card for the first time. Works fine. Drivers update fine. Not too much to write about...which is good.

goshep wrote on 1/11/2009, 8:23 PM

Wasn't there some incredible Vegas/ATI symbiosis in the works some time ago? I recall there being numerous teaser announcements and lots of speculation about finally having GPU utilization. Perhaps there was a fallout and ATI said, "we'll have the last laugh...muahahahahaaa!"

John_Cline wrote on 1/12/2009, 1:25 PM

You may be thinking of a short relationship that Sony had with AMD which, as far as I could tell, was only about sponsoring a user bash at NAB a few years ago.

As far as I'm concerned, any Vegas version which would be tied to either AMD or ATI hardware would cause me to dump Vegas. However, since such a relationship will never happen, I'm not going to worry about it.

I use Intel processors and nVidia video cards exclusively. This is unlikely to ever change.

Editguy43 wrote on 1/14/2009, 8:18 AM

I am running 2 ATI cards (2600 Pro 512 meg and a 1550 512 meg)and 3 monitors on my intel quad core (Q6600) 4 gig ram.and have never had a problem with any program including vegas 8C, but I am also only running XP pro 32 bit.
Is everyone who is having trouble running Vista 64bit because I am concidering going to 64bit Vista, a friend gave me an OEM copy of it but the more I read the more sceptical of it I become. my XP box is stable, does Vegas 8.1 really give any advantage other then memory usage.

Paul B