VP12 and Windows 7 Pro: No More Crashing !

BriceWilliams2 wrote on 3/6/2013, 6:26 PM
This may be a little premature, but i was reading a short list of recommendations on Videoguys website and it listed Windows 7 Pro vs Home Premium due to addressing memory issues in Home Premium. I use Windows 7 Pro on my business computer and never upgraded on my editing PC since i have 12 gig of memory.

Three things have changed:
Windows 7 Pro (video guys recommendation)
Render to System drive: (video guys recommendation)
Windows Features: Turned off as many as possible

I rendered an 35 minute clip (3 cam shoot) with color correction, neat video, and mercalli plugins, three or four audio streams to Main Concepts MP4 and Bluray 1080 60i main templates.

Both files rendered with GPU acceleration, and not one crash.

Typically this would render for 40-60% and crash. Will experiment with a few longer projects and keep you posted,

Comments

stevengotts wrote on 3/6/2013, 7:07 PM
Brice
Im stuck with alot of crashes in vp12. could you please point us to a page you referenced for recomendations from videoguys, or was it in a personal conversation. Im sure you and I are not the only ones frusrated by vegas crash syndrome.
Thanks
Steven
VidMus wrote on 3/6/2013, 10:18 PM
@BriceWilliams2

Render to system drive? Are you sure???

I have Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate.

Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com/ccm
ushere wrote on 3/6/2013, 11:11 PM
i have NEVER heard of a recommendation to render to a system drive!!!

frankly sounds like a typo or very bad idea!
Grazie wrote on 3/6/2013, 11:27 PM
+1 Leslie. News to me?

G

videoITguy wrote on 3/6/2013, 11:42 PM
What system drive? It's just not techno speak going on here!!. What they meant was to an internal conventional harddrive connected to the motherboard - and NOT the drive bearing the Operating System of the PC - we call that the NON-SYSTEM drive.

The point was to get off the sleepy function USB drives connected as outboard drives. Now if you disable sleep and run drive full-speed on USB3 at all times with hard-mapping to the OS - you will do at least as well as any internal drive.

More to the point - none of your results that you claim as the OP of this thread has anything to do with a performance enhancement that you speak of in your claim. SOMETHING else you are not telling us has happened in the interim. FESS UP - now.
Grazie wrote on 3/7/2013, 4:32 AM

Yessh, Master, make 'im Fess-Up!!!







BriceWilliams2 wrote on 3/7/2013, 5:10 PM
Have to say Grazie, I really like your sense of humor. Nothing to confess here, just a simpleton grasping at straws to use VP12 with out fear.

Encoding a 1 hr reception now, will post results.

Here is the quote from VG site.

..." but we've had good results using our system drive. We'll set up a folder on our C: drive called EXPORTS and have our encoding software write the files there. This does result in improved render times. Just make sure to move the files off your system drive when you are done"

I guess the last part of the statement caught my attention, the begin of the sentence recommends what we would consider typical. Separate drive for encoding, another drive for content and separate system drive. All drives are connected to motherboard. Not USB, or Esata connected

LINK:
http://www.videoguys.com/Guide/E/Videoguys+System+recommendations+for+Video+Editing/0x4aebb06ba071d2b6a2cd784ce243a6c6.aspx
stevengotts wrote on 3/7/2013, 7:18 PM
Thanks for the link Brice
Barry W. Hull wrote on 3/7/2013, 7:30 PM
Oh, that's funny.
SuperSet wrote on 3/7/2013, 7:53 PM
So, what's the verdict fellas? Render on system drive or dedicated drive? I have the 3 drive setup - system, source, render and Vegas does crash on me. Immediately when starting, end render (just as it's about to finish), and sometimes when I'm resizing the timeline. I've been working around them by restarting the render or avoiding the timeline resize.
Can't wait till SCS issues the next round of fixes.
videoITguy wrote on 3/7/2013, 10:15 PM
Talkin conventional harddrives, not SSD systems. get schooled in how a drive works, how logical partitions work, and how folders on single drive work in comparison to the whole enchilada.

Then take a look at how a system bus works, how cache on a drive is setup, and how a PC manages the throughput from processor, memory, bus, and drives attached.

Then consider, depending on your NLE, source materials, compositing, and rendering what you need.

Most likely you need a system drive, holding the OS and the app/Windows system files. Then you can have source drives and destination drives. So in source drive I have the camera files, I feed these to the NLE, and render to the destination drive. Pretty simple.
Hulk wrote on 3/7/2013, 10:56 PM
Say it ain't so.

Is it really news that Vegas 12 can edit and render a 35 minute 3 stream video with minimal processing applied? That's a feat?
videoITguy wrote on 3/7/2013, 11:05 PM
I have been trying to get OP to fess up - finally found his secret change in setup here:
Subject: RE: Can You Commit ? GPU Acceleration
Reply by: BriceWilliams2
Date: 2/21/2013 2:22:31 PM

Will give Nvidia 296.10 driver a try. I really want to use GPU Acceleration of my 570 with Vegas 12.
Aha!
FilmingPhotoGuy wrote on 3/7/2013, 11:43 PM
This article is ambiguous with respect to C: drive being the render drive.

Quoted:
We've also found that you can speed up your encoding by having the file written from your video drive or RAID to a 2nd drive. A separate dedicated 7200RPM drive is best for this, but we've had good results using our system drive. We'll set up a folder on our C: drive called EXPORTS and have our encoding software write the files there. This does result in improved render times. Just make sure to move the files off your system drive when you are done.
End quote.

I rendered a 53 minute Vegas12 (486) video with various plug-in's. Some color corrections. 6 video tracks and 2 audio tracks. No crashes.

Win7 x64 Home Premium, 3 drives.
i7 260 - 12 GB 1333 RAM - Nvidia 560i

Best practice for me:
Vegas' temporary File Folder = D:\temp
Project source on X:\project\name
Render to X:\project\name\finals

Vegas does crash sometimes while making the Veg. I find that if you work "too quick" (moving those HUGE movie files) around onto other layer tracks etc then Vegas seem to fall behind then hang then whiteout.

Before final render I restart Vegas, load project, wait for thumbnails to update, start my two extra cooling server fans then render as........... work in the garden.

Craig
VidMus wrote on 3/8/2013, 12:08 AM
SuperSet asks, "So, what's the verdict fellas? Render on system drive or dedicated drive?"

On my particular system with Vegas the answer is: Dedicated Drive.

I tried the system drive and the results were poor.

Think about it. There is the app called 'HD Tune Pro' and when I use it to test the system drive there are periods when the Benchmark test will drop significantly because Windows is accessing the system drive while I am doing the Benchmark. I do not see this when doing a Benchmark on the other drives in my computer.

Now if VG's call all of the drives in a "system" system drives then maybe they are including the dedicated drive(s)? Bad wording and/or idea!

Anyway use of at least three drives and even more important, keep them lean and clean. The more cluttered they get the more fragmented they get and the slower they get. Also, with clean and lean you will be using the outer thus fastest part of the drive.

When rendering to uncompressed, the bottleneck is the hard drive and not so much the video type. A cluttered drive can reduce rendering time by 60%.

Clean drives significantly speed-up peak builds. Even helps about 5% with highly compressed files.

Finally, clean drive get much less wear and tear on the heads because they are not 'banging' all over the platters finding data and/or finding a place to put the data.

I have a 2 TB drive that is partitioned such that the first part (12 gig) is exclusively for SD DVD creation. Fastest part helps a lot when I burn 3 DVD's at a time.

Use 'HD Tune Pro' with short stroke and see just how much faster of what seems to be a tiny drive can be. Because all of it is located at the fastest part of a large drive. The rest of the drive is for scratch files that are not accessed while burning SD DVD's

My C: drive is partitioned to be the fast (first) half of a 1 TB drive. It can never get slowed down by the slow half. I keep it fragmented and it is plenty fast. My web page files occupy the slower half and the entire thing is cloned-backed-up regularly.

A clean system (as in drives) is much less likely to crash and/or have problems! Avoid the so-called 'Green' drives. They spin down and cause problems. I had one and gladly got rid of that horrible thing!

I hope all of this helps,

Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com/ccm
FilmingPhotoGuy wrote on 3/8/2013, 1:40 AM
It doesn't make sense to partition a drive. The drive head mechanism still has to move between the 2 partitions to read and dump. You need 3 seperate drives.
VidMus wrote on 3/8/2013, 3:38 AM
@LightAds

All I know is that it makes everything much faster on the partitions that are at the first (fast) half of the drive.

BriceWilliams2 wrote on 3/8/2013, 6:06 AM
Hey video ITguy,
I really hope you find the reason why Vegas is working (so far).

I never rolled back the driver, it wasn't compatible, I am using the same updated driver for my GPU.

As far as encoding to my system drive; it's something i don't want to do, but will try it to see if I have something more stable. I intend to continue using my three drive setup:
SSD for system
10,000 WD for content
encode to a 7200

And thank you for your input, it is appreciated.




TeetimeNC wrote on 3/8/2013, 7:08 AM
I wonder about the statement regarding the need for Windows Professional or Ultimate. Here is the referenced statement from Videoguys:

Note: We do NOT recommend Win7 Home edition for video editing. Win7 Home has issues addressing and using the amounts of memory we recommend. You need to get the professional or Ultimate versions for best results.

I can understand not using Win7 Home edition, but what about Win7 Premium? Are they really saying you need at least Professional? I'm not aware of any difference in memory use between Premium and Professional. I suspect they were only singling out the Home edition to avoid. Anyone know better?

/jerry
BriceWilliams2 wrote on 3/8/2013, 6:26 PM
Tee time, I miss read this too. VideoGuys was stating that windows pro can address the amount of memory they listed in MOB. They recommend 24 gig; 32 gig would be better especially if using I7 hex core. Home has a 16 gig limit.

My system is more stable, it maybe the fact that I shut down windows feature more than upgrade to pro. Just grateful that V12 is usable

I am really thinking of jumping out of Vegas and moving to premier next year. It is such a shame, I really like their concept and GUI.
SuperSet wrote on 3/8/2013, 8:46 PM
Spent about 3 months learning and working with Premiere CS6 and I'm now back to Vegas for the latest project. CS6 is stable but really slow, compared to Vegas. My render times took almost 4-5 times longer and I just don't have that kind of time.
If Vegas would just figure out their stability issues, it'd be just killer.
barfnuts9000 wrote on 3/9/2013, 3:14 AM
Holy cow, you're right!

When I first installed VP12 (GPU Acceleration on), it would crash even if I looked at it the wrong way - even when doing something like simple previewing from the timeline with no effects.

When trying to render a project, it would fail somewhere around 30% and the program would crash.

I've been using it ever since then without the GPU acceleration on with no problems.

After I saw your post, I upgraded to the latest Catalyst drivers, and wha-bam! No crashes! Rendered about 6 projects so far without a hiccup. The render times have dramatically improved.

My vid card is an AMD Radeon HD 6800.

Thanks Brice!
BriceWilliams2 wrote on 3/9/2013, 12:00 PM
Just an update.
Another long intense encoding with GPU enabled without a crash.

Turning off as many background process (normal procedure in the past) limit windows features (recent change to my process) windows Pro (may not have anything to do with recent success)
BriceWilliams2 wrote on 7/31/2013, 3:33 PM
Just an update on GPU encoding.

I have found that when i enable GPU acceleration and encode MP4 with "automatic or "CPU only", Vegas 12 will lock up.

GPU Acceleration enabled, select GPU only during encoding and Vegas 12 will not lock up or crash during encoding process..

I noticed that the GPU load will rise to50%-70% +/- during the encoding and lower to 3%-5% when Vegas comes across a clip with a lot of effects, especially Neat Video, the GPU will lower to 3%-5% and CPU will remain around 29%.

I am considering taking any clip with a lot of effects (Neat Video) and rendering to a new track using AVI Cineform codec. Then encode with GPU accelerated. I would expect the total time to encode would be 30% less..

Well that is it, just thought I would pass along my success with GPU accelerated for encoding.