Getting fed up with crashes at DVinfo.net

Ron Cooper · June 13th, 2011, 05:17 AM

I am editing a long project but only doing cuts and a few dissolves after upgrading to win 7 64 - ( 2.8g i7 12g ram plus sep HDD's )

I am using Veg 9, only about 12 mins down the timeline and every so often Vegas crashes, - freezing, and if I click anywhere, the screen goes pale and "Not responding" shows in the top bar. I have no alternative but to close it down and windows then "Looks for a solution " but no luck.

I have auto save on, which is suppose to save every 5 minutes, but with the last crash I lost about 20 minutes of edits which were rather complicated so I am rather disgusted and not a happy-chappy.

I remember having similar problems with Vegas 8 on my previous XP computer.

Now to try and recover my edits, where does Vegas put the auto saves ? In the help it says it does not overwrite the project but uses a temp. project file to aid crash recovery.

Also, is there any way I can make Vegas auto-save every two minutes like you can in Premiere ?

Ronc

Chris Harding · June 13th, 2011, 05:31 AM

Hi Ron

I wonder if it might be your 'puter??? I have run Vegas 4, 5, 7 and 9 over the last umpteen years on Win XP Pro with just 3GB Ram on a DuoCore 2.2GB and NEVER once has any version ever crashed on me...never a freeze never ever that nasty screen saying "This program is not responding"

I use Vegas 9 on a daily basis (and it works hard too) and has never failed me!! Am I just lucky?????

Hope you get it sorted out though!!

Chris

Jeff Harper · June 13th, 2011, 05:45 AM

Make sure you change Power Option (control panel) in advaced settings for Hard Drives to never be turned off, this will often help with crashes.

Many times Vegas will crash when a hard drive becomes unavailable in the background. This can happen most often with externals that have a built in sleep mode. This is why I assemble my own external hard drives, this issue can be avoided this way by choosing the right hard drive and enclosure.

Most of my crashes with Vegas ended when I stopped using pre-made external hard drives as soure files to eidt on. Some may work fine with Vegas, but I don't take the chance any more.

Internal "Green Drives" will often cause issues as well, if used as a source drive for ANY element of your project. Any hard drive that can/will automatically pause to due inactivity will cause issues if you're editing files on it. How to find if you drives automatically pause or rest? Research the drive on the company website, on NewEgg, anywhere, particularly review sites. You have to hunt hunt hunt, this information is not always easy to find. Western Digital Green drives are not good for edting. Most performance drives are fine, but even some of them are dicey.

Jeff Harper · June 13th, 2011, 05:55 AM

The other issue can be background programs such as Nero, if that is installed on your computer, you're on you own.

Also, and this is a biggie, sometimes you just have to wipe your hard drive clean and reinstall everything. Out of 10 installations of Windows, I may have to reinstall it 3 times, it doesn't always install correctly, but you don't know this until you see it get hinky. You will see some minor strange behavior after installation. Reformat your hard drive with a utility, then do it again. Don't assume just because it's a new install that it is correct. You can usually know within a few mintutes, or day at most.

In your case the first thing I would do would be to wipe your hard drive clean, and start over. As I said, this is what I would do, and I have pretty much have good luck with Vegas.

You must get in the habit of saving your work often, it's just something you must do after every important section is completed. I save everything twice, and often. I get more tired of saving things than any other aspect of editing, because I do it so much. I always "save as' rather than save, as to avoid corrupted veg files, which can happen when saving a project you open and close a lot.

Ron Cooper · June 13th, 2011, 06:22 AM

Thanks for your input Chris & Jeff.
You must be very lucky Chris !
Now Jeff, I checked the power options & the only one I have is to turn off the monitor after 20 mins. (When I get interrupted etc.) All the drives are "Never" and I don't use any "green" drives or external ones.

However, I do have Nero 8 installed but I don't see any reference to it in windows Task Manager when it is not being used. But you are right in that I must keep remembering to Save, Save Save ! I think this at least is the only way to keep going at present, as reformatting & re-loading everything is not an option at present.

RonC.

Jeff Harper · June 13th, 2011, 06:28 AM

You don't have to see nero doing anything for it to be causing issues, believe me. You must go into msconfig and turn if all off. While there you should turn off most if not all start up applications. Nero is insidious, and I'm not the first person to find this out. Good luck.

Gerald Webb · June 13th, 2011, 08:04 AM

If you download the trial of Edward's Excalibur, it enables autosave for any amount of time you set.
While working with composites or heavy 3d motion I have it set for every min if the project is a bit crash happy.
After the trial expires if you dont decide to purchase, the auto save keeps working forever.
A big "thank you" to Edward.

Kevin Lewis · June 13th, 2011, 08:21 AM

ROn I have minimal experience with Vegas but I frequently use external hard drives. Are you accessing your external with usb 2.0? If so, perhaps its simply not fast enough if your doing actual editing from the external drive. Perhaps you should try usb 3.0 which is much faster. Its ever faster than fire wire. I use Pinnacle and have the same problem when I edit from an external.

Dale Guthormsen · June 13th, 2011, 07:59 PM

Jeff's advice is pretty solid. I had these issues a couple years back with version 9 and when it was all sorted out I had Frontpage turn out to be the culprit, would have never guessed that!!!!!

External hard drives are interesting. I now do all projects on enternal velociraptors and back up to an esata docking station. I too found out green drives to be a big problem!!! No doubt usb 3.0 or firewire would be fine, but use a high end drive not a 60 dollar wonder. You will end up wondering why you ever bought it at some point.

I no longer keep any software on my work station except working software. Sense I cleaned it, reinstalled and followed the aforementioned, much recomended by Jeff way back when, I have stopped having real issues with vegas.

Jeff Harper · June 13th, 2011, 08:49 PM

Thanks Dale, you made me feel good.

Gerald, why do you wait to tell us about the autosave feature until after I unistalled Exacalibur's trial? I installed it for a specific reason, never even used it, and then removed it just cause I didn't plan on using it. Darn! The autosave feature sounds very nice.

Leslie Wand · June 13th, 2011, 09:25 PM

i've occasionally had 'white-outs' with vegas 9 (none with 10), all of which turned out to be vegas doing 'something' that simply 'froze' it till after (a variable degree) of time it would come back on line.

since win7/64 and vegas 10/64 haven't had any glitches, other than using a couple of ofx plug-ins - which have been documented and reported elsewhere.

in my experience most 'problems' with vegas are more often than not problems with the pc - be it other software (eg. anti-virus), or hardware (eg. sleeping hd's, dust, bad ram).

James Harring · June 14th, 2011, 04:24 AM

Best thing you can do (for free) is to go to the PC manufacturer's website and update your PC's drivers. While my recommendation is to update all of them that are out of date, focus specifically on the chipset, BIOS and (in the dell world) Notebook/Desktop system software, which controls USB.

Also, update the video card as is seems they are always out of date. Finally, some graphics cards have their own BIOS as they are essentially computers themselves. Don't skip this.

Finally make sure you have the latest operating system service pack installed.

As a network administrator who manages hundreds of PC's, I've seen touchpad drivers cause BSOD's when the wifi was turned on, as well as a Intel RAID5 that crashed constantly be fixed with firmware (BIOS) and driver updates. Many times these are not documented in the readme's.

Oh, and defrag your hard drive quarterly.

One final note, if you are commercial, consider at minimum a dual boot pc, one partition handling general computing and the other as dedicated NLE. Obviously two separate computers buy flexibility. The idea is to minimize performance killing auto-runs and accumulated "clutter" as you install/upgrade/remove software over time. Simplicity breeds stability.

Jeff Harper · June 14th, 2011, 07:25 AM

Updating the chipset, very good advice, James.

Buba Kastorski · June 14th, 2011, 03:39 PM

vegas 9 was bad, to my mind the worst , crashing all the time, I even tried FCP and wanted to go back Adobe, but with 10, and with 10d I am very happy, it is very stable on Win7 64, don even need cineform anymore for DSLR footage; although hard to tell if it's 10d release alone, or my new very fast PC improved things also, now it crashes maybe every month instead of every 30 min, but my Ctrl+s is on the reflex level already :)

Larry Reavis · June 14th, 2011, 05:00 PM

I really can't remember when I last saw a crash in Vegas 8c (32-bit is the only variety) while editing, or 9e-64 bit while rendering. Both, in fact, are virtually quirk-free even on my 1-hour+ .VEGs with heavy FX. No other combination has been nearly as flawless - although v9 certainly was better than v8 for rendering, even in its 32-bit versions.

It's my understanding that you can always download earlier versions of Vegas, although I'm not sure where you get a serial number for earlier versions. In any case, the download link is:

download.sonycreativesoftware.com/

I do have a number of external drives connected through a USB3 hub; but they're for backup . . . I rarely edit from them.

Generally, I get 2TB Samsung 5400 rpm drives connected via SATA2 - or 3, although I think I have a couple of 2TB Hitachi drives somewhere among the dozen or so that usually are connected. The Samsungs are a new breed of green drives (I, too, had headaches with the Western Digital greens). And they are cheap - see Newegg.com - SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive.

My ancient RexTest says I'm getting 88 mb/s reads, with 121 mb/s writes with one of my Samsungs (it's about 1/4th full). My recent ATTO Bench32 averages around 92 for reads,and 97 for writes - with file size transfers that are 64 kb or larger. In other words, both agree that writes are faster than reads - not sure why.

Otherwise, follow the above hints. I must say that I use MS Security Essentials as my AV software. I don't know if that helps with stability, but I read recently another Vegas user who claimed it solved his problems. It's free, so you might give it a try.

June 13th, 2011, 05:17 AM	#1
Ron Cooper Major Player Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 481	Getting fed up with crashes I am editing a long project but only doing cuts and a few dissolves after upgrading to win 7 64 - ( 2.8g i7 12g ram plus sep HDD's ) I am using Veg 9, only about 12 mins down the timeline and every so often Vegas crashes, - freezing, and if I click anywhere, the screen goes pale and "Not responding" shows in the top bar. I have no alternative but to close it down and windows then "Looks for a solution " but no luck. I have auto save on, which is suppose to save every 5 minutes, but with the last crash I lost about 20 minutes of edits which were rather complicated so I am rather disgusted and not a happy-chappy. I remember having similar problems with Vegas 8 on my previous XP computer. Now to try and recover my edits, where does Vegas put the auto saves ? In the help it says it does not overwrite the project but uses a temp. project file to aid crash recovery. Also, is there any way I can make Vegas auto-save every two minutes like you can in Premiere ? Ronc

June 13th, 2011, 05:31 AM	#2
Chris Harding Inner Circle Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Perth, Western Australia Posts: 8,441	Re: Getting fed up with crashes Hi Ron I wonder if it might be your 'puter??? I have run Vegas 4, 5, 7 and 9 over the last umpteen years on Win XP Pro with just 3GB Ram on a DuoCore 2.2GB and NEVER once has any version ever crashed on me...never a freeze never ever that nasty screen saying "This program is not responding" I use Vegas 9 on a daily basis (and it works hard too) and has never failed me!! Am I just lucky????? Hope you get it sorted out though!! Chris

June 13th, 2011, 05:45 AM	#3
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Getting fed up with crashes Make sure you change Power Option (control panel) in advaced settings for Hard Drives to never be turned off, this will often help with crashes. Many times Vegas will crash when a hard drive becomes unavailable in the background. This can happen most often with externals that have a built in sleep mode. This is why I assemble my own external hard drives, this issue can be avoided this way by choosing the right hard drive and enclosure. Most of my crashes with Vegas ended when I stopped using pre-made external hard drives as soure files to eidt on. Some may work fine with Vegas, but I don't take the chance any more. Internal "Green Drives" will often cause issues as well, if used as a source drive for ANY element of your project. Any hard drive that can/will automatically pause to due inactivity will cause issues if you're editing files on it. How to find if you drives automatically pause or rest? Research the drive on the company website, on NewEgg, anywhere, particularly review sites. You have to hunt hunt hunt, this information is not always easy to find. Western Digital Green drives are not good for edting. Most performance drives are fine, but even some of them are dicey. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

June 13th, 2011, 05:55 AM	#4
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Getting fed up with crashes The other issue can be background programs such as Nero, if that is installed on your computer, you're on you own. Also, and this is a biggie, sometimes you just have to wipe your hard drive clean and reinstall everything. Out of 10 installations of Windows, I may have to reinstall it 3 times, it doesn't always install correctly, but you don't know this until you see it get hinky. You will see some minor strange behavior after installation. Reformat your hard drive with a utility, then do it again. Don't assume just because it's a new install that it is correct. You can usually know within a few mintutes, or day at most. In your case the first thing I would do would be to wipe your hard drive clean, and start over. As I said, this is what I would do, and I have pretty much have good luck with Vegas. You must get in the habit of saving your work often, it's just something you must do after every important section is completed. I save everything twice, and often. I get more tired of saving things than any other aspect of editing, because I do it so much. I always "save as' rather than save, as to avoid corrupted veg files, which can happen when saving a project you open and close a lot. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

June 13th, 2011, 06:22 AM	#5
Ron Cooper Major Player Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 481	Re: Getting fed up with crashes Thanks for your input Chris & Jeff. You must be very lucky Chris ! Now Jeff, I checked the power options & the only one I have is to turn off the monitor after 20 mins. (When I get interrupted etc.) All the drives are "Never" and I don't use any "green" drives or external ones. However, I do have Nero 8 installed but I don't see any reference to it in windows Task Manager when it is not being used. But you are right in that I must keep remembering to Save, Save Save ! I think this at least is the only way to keep going at present, as reformatting & re-loading everything is not an option at present. RonC.

June 13th, 2011, 06:28 AM	#6
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Getting fed up with crashes You don't have to see nero doing anything for it to be causing issues, believe me. You must go into msconfig and turn if all off. While there you should turn off most if not all start up applications. Nero is insidious, and I'm not the first person to find this out. Good luck. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

June 13th, 2011, 08:04 AM	#7
Gerald Webb Trustee Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Central Coast Australia Posts: 1,046	Re: Getting fed up with crashes If you download the trial of Edward's Excalibur, it enables autosave for any amount of time you set. While working with composites or heavy 3d motion I have it set for every min if the project is a bit crash happy. After the trial expires if you dont decide to purchase, the auto save keeps working forever. A big "thank you" to Edward. __________________ http://vimeo.com/livewebvideo

June 13th, 2011, 08:21 AM	#8
Kevin Lewis Major Player Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Philadelphia, pa Posts: 705	Re: Getting fed up with crashes ROn I have minimal experience with Vegas but I frequently use external hard drives. Are you accessing your external with usb 2.0? If so, perhaps its simply not fast enough if your doing actual editing from the external drive. Perhaps you should try usb 3.0 which is much faster. Its ever faster than fire wire. I use Pinnacle and have the same problem when I edit from an external.

June 13th, 2011, 07:59 PM	#9
Dale Guthormsen Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Saskatchewan Posts: 3,048	Re: Getting fed up with crashes Jeff's advice is pretty solid. I had these issues a couple years back with version 9 and when it was all sorted out I had Frontpage turn out to be the culprit, would have never guessed that!!!!! External hard drives are interesting. I now do all projects on enternal velociraptors and back up to an esata docking station. I too found out green drives to be a big problem!!! No doubt usb 3.0 or firewire would be fine, but use a high end drive not a 60 dollar wonder. You will end up wondering why you ever bought it at some point. I no longer keep any software on my work station except working software. Sense I cleaned it, reinstalled and followed the aforementioned, much recomended by Jeff way back when, I have stopped having real issues with vegas. __________________ DATS ALL FOLKS Dale W. Guthormsen

June 13th, 2011, 08:49 PM	#10
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Getting fed up with crashes Thanks Dale, you made me feel good. Gerald, why do you wait to tell us about the autosave feature until after I unistalled Exacalibur's trial? I installed it for a specific reason, never even used it, and then removed it just cause I didn't plan on using it. Darn! The autosave feature sounds very nice. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

June 13th, 2011, 09:25 PM	#11
Leslie Wand Trustee Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: upper hunter, australia Posts: 1,410	Re: Getting fed up with crashes i've occasionally had 'white-outs' with vegas 9 (none with 10), all of which turned out to be vegas doing 'something' that simply 'froze' it till after (a variable degree) of time it would come back on line. since win7/64 and vegas 10/64 haven't had any glitches, other than using a couple of ofx plug-ins - which have been documented and reported elsewhere. in my experience most 'problems' with vegas are more often than not problems with the pc - be it other software (eg. anti-virus), or hardware (eg. sleeping hd's, dust, bad ram). __________________ www.lesliewand.com.au

June 14th, 2011, 04:24 AM	#12
James Harring Major Player Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Tampa, FL Posts: 210	Re: Getting fed up with crashes Best thing you can do (for free) is to go to the PC manufacturer's website and update your PC's drivers. While my recommendation is to update all of them that are out of date, focus specifically on the chipset, BIOS and (in the dell world) Notebook/Desktop system software, which controls USB. Also, update the video card as is seems they are always out of date. Finally, some graphics cards have their own BIOS as they are essentially computers themselves. Don't skip this. Finally make sure you have the latest operating system service pack installed. As a network administrator who manages hundreds of PC's, I've seen touchpad drivers cause BSOD's when the wifi was turned on, as well as a Intel RAID5 that crashed constantly be fixed with firmware (BIOS) and driver updates. Many times these are not documented in the readme's. Oh, and defrag your hard drive quarterly. One final note, if you are commercial, consider at minimum a dual boot pc, one partition handling general computing and the other as dedicated NLE. Obviously two separate computers buy flexibility. The idea is to minimize performance killing auto-runs and accumulated "clutter" as you install/upgrade/remove software over time. Simplicity breeds stability.

June 14th, 2011, 07:25 AM	#13
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Getting fed up with crashes Updating the chipset, very good advice, James. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

June 14th, 2011, 03:39 PM	#14
Buba Kastorski Trustee Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Toronto Posts: 1,414	Re: Getting fed up with crashes vegas 9 was bad, to my mind the worst , crashing all the time, I even tried FCP and wanted to go back Adobe, but with 10, and with 10d I am very happy, it is very stable on Win7 64, don even need cineform anymore for DSLR footage; although hard to tell if it's 10d release alone, or my new very fast PC improved things also, now it crashes maybe every month instead of every 30 min, but my Ctrl+s is on the reflex level already :) __________________ I love this place!

June 14th, 2011, 05:00 PM	#15
Larry Reavis Regular Crew Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Encinitas California Posts: 121	Re: Getting fed up with crashes I really can't remember when I last saw a crash in Vegas 8c (32-bit is the only variety) while editing, or 9e-64 bit while rendering. Both, in fact, are virtually quirk-free even on my 1-hour+ .VEGs with heavy FX. No other combination has been nearly as flawless - although v9 certainly was better than v8 for rendering, even in its 32-bit versions. It's my understanding that you can always download earlier versions of Vegas, although I'm not sure where you get a serial number for earlier versions. In any case, the download link is: download.sonycreativesoftware.com/ I do have a number of external drives connected through a USB3 hub; but they're for backup . . . I rarely edit from them. Generally, I get 2TB Samsung 5400 rpm drives connected via SATA2 - or 3, although I think I have a couple of 2TB Hitachi drives somewhere among the dozen or so that usually are connected. The Samsungs are a new breed of green drives (I, too, had headaches with the Western Digital greens). And they are cheap - see Newegg.com - SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive. My ancient RexTest says I'm getting 88 mb/s reads, with 121 mb/s writes with one of my Samsungs (it's about 1/4th full). My recent ATTO Bench32 averages around 92 for reads,and 97 for writes - with file size transfers that are 64 kb or larger. In other words, both agree that writes are faster than reads - not sure why. Otherwise, follow the above hints. I must say that I use MS Security Essentials as my AV software. I don't know if that helps with stability, but I read recently another Vegas user who claimed it solved his problems. It's free, so you might give it a try.