Vegas Pro problem.....HELP!

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David W. Richardson

Chapelgrove Films
Okay, I've been running Vegas Pro 8.0c on a WinXP machine (dual-core with 2GB RAM) for awhile.

Now I've upgraded to a new PC (6-core, 16GB RAM) that runs Windows 7. I installed my Vegas on it and got up and running. Love the speed! But now I have a problem...

When I open an existing project file I've been working on for the past month, it seems like there is some kind of corruption in the video files. The preview window shows a black screen with something that looks like static. Then the program crashes before the project is completely loaded.

I've been thinking the problem was a codec issue -- that maybe some codecs were loaded on my old PC that aren't on the new one. But apparently that's not the problem. I started a new Vegas project and added one of each type of clip from the project I'd been working on -- and they are myriad. But all the clips loaded and played without a problem.

Now I will say the project I've been working on is big and complex. It is video and audio from a live band performance. Video files from 7 different cameras, a variety of types -- HDV and HD; AVC and MPEG; and some previously rendered .MOV files. Every video has its own audio, plus I have audio files from a Zoom H4 and a Zoom H4n. So it's a big, complex project. But it worked on my old PC, so there should be a way to get it to work on the new one. Right? (God, I hope so!)

Any advice or suggestions???

Thanks in advance!
 
Your problem may be related to the OS....going from XP to W7....32bit to 64bit. I assume that Vegas 8 is running 32 bit?
I know when I set-up Vegas 9 Pro on my W7 machine (64 bit), I had the same craziness trying to open Vegas 7 projects.

Now I'm in the process of upgrading to Vegas 12...and have a very similar project (live band shoot with multiple cameras & audio) to edit.
Tell me more & do a web search...that helped me iron things out last time. I'll help any way I can.
 
Honestly, David, I would just finish it on your old machine. It is rarely a good idea to change systems in the middle of a complex project; there may be no solution. Vegas leverages so much of Windows in its operation that it may be impossible to recreate everything you need to get this project to work perfectly.
 
Thanks for the help guys! I really appreciate it.

Going back to the old PC is a last resort. One reason for buying the new system was that working with so many tracks of HD -- with so many different codecs -- was causing Vegas to crash frequently. And renders on that system were extremely slow. Nothing could be viewed in real-time without first pre-rendering, which took forever. Pre-render times, as well as render out times, ran in the range of from 6:1 to 9:1 or higher. Rendering out a 20-second clip with significant color correction was taking 3 minutes or more, so you can imagine how that was bogging down a project of this size.

I also found Vegas just couldn't handle some of the file types unless they were rendered out as .MOV files and those files were then used in the timeline in place of the original footage. Render out times were really long.

But with the new PC, I was able to render a color-corrected and tweaked 23-second clip in just 38 seconds. With no crashes. Major improvement!

So I really need to make this work if at all possible.

If I uninstall Quicktime, then I'm able to open the project file and work with it -- but, of course, the .MOV files won't work. Which is fine for the most part. I think the only .MOV files I was using were the ones I had rendered out in the first place. If I'm able to use the original footage, without the need for the rendered .MOV versions, then okay. I can go back it find the sections of the original footage and replace the .MOV clips with that. But if I can find a way to use those already rendered .MOV files, that would save me some time.

Thanks again!
 
Maybe......just maybe.....I've got it fixed.

On the old system I had used a little patch program called 4gb_patch.exe. (http://ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php)

I had run the patch on my vegas80.exe file, as well as a number of the .dll files, including the File I/O .dll files. The patch enables these files to use 4GB of virtual memory, instead of the 2GB limit previously imposed by Windows XP. (If I'm understanding it properly.)

I just went and ran the same patch on the same files on my new system. Lo and behold, it seems to have fixed the problem. I hope so anyway. Time will tell.

Thanks again guys!
 
Yes, it's possible that a previously 4gb_patched file requires 4gb_patch to then be able to read that same file, i.e. the operating system's treating it as a nonstandard file type (presumably some file header information is nonstandard).

Frankly, you're lucky 4gb_patch still works in W7 - some old programs don't.

I expect you'll have no problems with files that never went through 4gb_patching.
 
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