End of the road?

[Ian Stark]

Mark, that was indeed my thought but I've managed to crash it again twice :-( It's certainly been reported by others as well. Interestingly, I just tried it on the laptop and it did NOT crash (Win 8.1). Oh, the joy of technology . . . .!

[Juris Lielpeteris]

Any sufficiently complex program user can hang up performing certain operations. I've been able to try except Vegas Pro virtually all of the other modern PC-based broadcast video editing applications including CS6, CC, Edius and Avid MC, but none of them has proven to be as stable as the Vegas Pro.

[Ian Stark]

This does seem to highlight how different environments offer different outcomes. My experience is exactly the opposite of this - the others are stable whereas Vegas is not. My experience is limited to Avid and Premiere (from CS up to CC) although, as I mentioned before, never for particularly complex projects. With After Effects and Cinema4D, however, I work on very complex jobs and I don't recall a single crash in C4D and perhaps three or four over ten years of using AE.

[Jeff Harper]

What is weird is that I've seen long rants and discussions on the instability of Adobe PP. Apparently it's been improved in the last few years. In Adobe forums, I remember reading how horrible it was and how utterly unstable it was. I remember cases of people jumping ship to come to use Vegas because of it's stability.

It really is a matter of the configuration and hardware combo, I believe, but there is no clear combo that works or doesn't work. Maybe Sony should scour the internet for a dozen of the most stubborn cases of crashes and then buy the PCs from the customers and then study the machines to find the issue.

[Leslie Wand]

there was a period a few years ago that i felt i was on a trampoline....

but at the end of the day there's nothing approaching vegas's utilitarianism.

[James Manford]

Haven't read the whole thread yet. But here's my experience ...

Just like everyone else, all the way from Sony Vegas 9 up until 12 I have experienced problem after problem. But I still loved the program too much to switch. What I have discovered is SONY VEGAS is VERY VERY VERY sensitive when it comes to your PC settings.

The cure for me was to always monitor my RAM levels. Whenever it reaches 90% I close down Vegas and re-open the project. Ever since doing this I do not crash even ONCE. All the way from creating a long 1 hour wedding film right up to rendering.

Sony Vegas is THIRSTY for Ram.

I'm running a i7 3770k, 32GB Ram (not any specific brand), R9 270x graphics card, 256gb SSD.

My projects are always complex, with various opacity levels, multiple layers etc.

[Mike Kujbida]

Originally Posted by James Manford

I'm running a i7 3770k, 32GB Ram (not any specific brand), R9 270x graphics card, 256gb SSD.

James, I'm in the process of putting together a new computer and the R9 card is one that I'm considering. Have you always had it or is it a recent addition? Have you seen a performance increase with it? Are you happy with it?

[Leslie Wand]

also interested in the r9 (hi there mike ;-))

please let us know your thoughts and experiences...

[Al Bergstein]

Saw this in the "new posts" listing, so read it and had to add to this. I have left Vegas after 12. Same issues as reading here in 13. I still have to go back and re-edit Vegas projects on occasion. I've frozen my windows Vegas machine to V12. There is no way I'll go to 13.I have to tell you all, that Adobe PR and CC have been like a breath of fresh air. Crashing is so infrequent, I never think much about saving. Though I have learned from Vegas experience enough that I always catch myself and do, before trying anything crazy with CC.

Something has gone terribly wrong with Vegas since they started using GPU. I agree that 10 was far more stable than what came after it.

But I wouldn't blame anyone for trying something other than CC. Adobe isn't perfect, but they have really spent a lot of time getting their stability issues down. It's not a fluid as working in Vegas, and I agree with Ian that for raw ease of editing Vegas had it down. But you can't always be experiencing crashes. Other competitors don't crash like that. I've moved from Vegas to Adobe Pr and then CC on Windows, then moved from Windows to iMac in the last year. I have had no issues of consequence.

I only post this to point out that this is not a Windows issues, it's Vegas. Sony needs to get some better regression testing and developers into the mix. If this was fixed, it would be a significantly powerful package.I experienced this crashing on multiple machines, all with vast amounts of RAM and video cards of the highest calibre and none of them experienced the same problems on Pr and CC. With the same footage no less.

To be clear, I shoot HD AVCHD, 5Dmkiii MOV, and 50 Mbps mxf files. Very little grading. Documentary style shooting. On Vegas have used Boris as my 3rd party fx. It crashes far far less than New Blue.

I wish you all luck with this. Did anyone talk to Vegas at NAB?

[James Manford]

Originally Posted by Mike Kujbida

James, I'm in the process of putting together a new computer and the R9 card is one that I'm considering. Have you always had it or is it a recent addition? Have you seen a performance increase with it? Are you happy with it?

Yes, any plugin that works off GPU acceleration has been improved.

[Mike Kujbida]

Leslie, wish me luck!!
After almost a year of trying to convince my boss that I needed something more powerful than the i3 that the college gives to all employees (good for word processing but that's about it), she sat down with me to review some projects. The machine was struggling to play back an HD MXF file in Draft mode so she finally got the message :)
I'm swamped with projects right now but did get the go ahead to price out a "beast" so fingers are crossed that whatever I get will fly instead of crawl.

[Leslie Wand]

be interested in reading what you end up with, and of course, why ;-)

[Daymon Hoffman]

Damn. I thought i'd jump into the upgrade to 13 (from 12) and i can't even get 13 to fire up for the first time. It crashes on startup and i can't get any further! Not even after reboot. DOH!

[Danny Fye]

Originally Posted by James Manford

The cure for me was to always monitor my RAM levels. Whenever it reaches 90% I close down Vegas and re-open the project. Ever since doing this I do not crash even ONCE. All the way from creating a long 1 hour wedding film right up to rendering.

While rendering a test project, a Yellow triangle warning showed up in my task bar telling me that my memory is low and that Windows needs to shut down one of the programs to restore the ram. It was showing Vegas as being the one it will shut down, which it did.

I never saw that one before.

I had been doing a lot of heavy work between multiple apps so I doubt if Vegas itself caused the problem.

The good thing is that it warned me instead of just crashing. I very, very seldom get a crash anyway.

[Christopher Young]

My experiences to date, which is all I can go on, are that most cases of Vegas being unstable can be greatly improved by a number of simple steps. Especially in HD editing systems where a lot of data is being handled. They are:

1. Go to System / Advanced System Settings / Advanced and under 'Performance' select Settings / Visual Effects and then select 'Custom' and only have two items checked. These two are my own personal choices based on legibility and they are 'Smooth Edges on Screen Fonts' and 'Use drop shadows for Icon Labels on the Desktop.

Your beautiful Windows box will now look very plain vanilla after this but the resources and CPU calls made for running all that beauty is totally wasteful and impacts on OS and program run efficiency. Your system will now have more resources for mission critical operations such as Vegas.

2. While in this dialogue box go to the 'Advanced' tab and select under the 'Adjust for best performance of:' and select 'Programs'.

The next step I found that assisted in Vegas becoming more stable, much more stable in fact, was to run it with a decent 4 drive Raid running only a SINGLE partition. The next step was:

3. Still in the Performance Options dialogue box go to 'Virtual Memory', select 'Change' and follow these Adobe recommended settings.

Set virtual memory paging default | Windows 7, Vista

I know this is for Premiere but have found this works well for Vegas.

I have done this on a number of Win 7 Vegas systems I have built and configured for a government video department and all are proving to be very stable. These boxes have now gone through v10 through to v12 and are still going strong. The only one that gave me any inconsistent unexplained hangs or crashes was on an existing box based on a Gigabyte MOBO, can't recall which model though. Swapped out the MOBO for an Asus one like the others and it is now having no issues. Don't ask me why I wouldn't have a clue. I just know it sorted out what issues that system had. Touch wood so far so good!

Obviously this is based only my personal experiences. I'm no computer nerd or tech head, just a cameraman / editor who wanted solid systems for my business and for other people who asked me to build their Vegas systems. Most of what I have come up with came from really trying to get my head around stability issues. Much of my decision process was influenced by studying many of the tips at Mark Russinovich’s Blog and various other sources. Russinovich’s Blog is at:

Blogs - Mark's Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

If any of the above steps helps anyone out then that would be good news. I point out though that what works for me may not work for you, caveat emptor. If it doesn’t I may have to run away and hide :)

Edit: I just remembered we had some issues with PCs and drives going to sleep. PC power settings were changed to 'High Performance' and Put the computer to sleep was set to 'Never.' To overcome 'Eco' type green drives that wanted to spin down I used 'xSleep.exe' that can be configured for a number of additional internal/external drives to 'tickle' them and keep them awake and on line. I can't confirm but I have a gut feeling some hangs were due to Vegas needing a resource on a drive that had 'dozed' off.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney