VS X7 frequently crashes, other issues

[Mark Swanson]

Hi Folks...thanks for looking in.
I posted a question last night asking about RAM and if I had enough, wondering if that was causing my troubles and I guess not. I have more than 8GB.
I am having some troubles with VS X7. I love the program....but I get frequent crashes, and I am only working with short 3-5 minute music videos. SO I might have 3-4 overlay tracks with video loaded in, and a music track with a WAV file and a few images here and there. That doesn't seem like much...And I do not use all that many filters either. The program will just stop working, I get a window telling me "VideoStudio has stopped working" and it will close. When I re-start the program it will recover the file I was working with but it will be a few steps back from where I was when it crashed.
What is also going on is that some of the images I am using in the video all of a sudden stop displaying in the video, even though they were there, and are still seen in the timeline....but they do not show up in the preview window when I run the Project. This goes on even though the program has not yet crashed....perhaps related to this, I sometimes get a popup that tells me my "graphics card stopped working, but was recovered"...and it also seems like it takes forever for VS to render a three-minute video, over an hour and maybe two.
I have a feeling that all these things are related. Do I need a better Graphics card? Any advice?

[conrail6055]

Mark,

I'm seeing the same thing here as well. It always crashes on me when I preview the various royalty free music tracks. I can listen to 5 or 6 different versions and then go to try the next one and it locks right up. Task manager it and get the dreaded "Not responding" message. At that point, I didn't even have a project started, I was just checking out the music options!

~Kris

[asik1]

first tip I can give you is to set the automatic save option to 3 or 2 minutes.
second always re-save your recovered projects with different names.
What format and type are your clips? some FX are more compute intensive than other and can take very long time to render.
Are your projects are 4K? What graphic card you have? Have you looked at the other processes that run while you use VS?

[Mark Swanson]

Thanks for your advice! My clips are MTS files, and they are 1920x1080 clips. I am rendering them down into .MP4 files of the same size.
I have not looked at what ever else is running...not sure how to do that, but I try and run nothing else when working with VS.
I have looked a bit more into my Graphics card. It is a AMD radeon HD 7450, as far as I read this is a pretty lame card. I should probably think about upgrading it, along with a power supply that can handle a better one.

[asik1]

Personally I don't like radeon cards, I'm Nvidia guy. let's hope someone with radeon and 8.1 will pop here to give you a tip. Another tip in your situation is to run VS fresh after boot.

[bobp]

For VS it shouldn't make any difference whether you even have a GPU. Onboard graphics should be fine. In any event, make sure your drivers are up to date. I don't think VS requires a powerful computer (doesn't hurt), but like everything else, it needs one that is running well. Make sure your cache is clear and your registry is clean.

[Mark Swanson]

Bobp, thanks a lot but as someone who doesn't know that much about computer tech, I am a bit confused. To put it quickly, I would like VS to respond quicker to my mouse clicks, (it is annoying to have to wait for a bit when clicking from one track to another, or from one window to another) and to have my playback in the preview window be so choppy that I find it difficult to edit. Those things, on top of the crashing and the error messages about my GPU "crashed but was recovered" and the missing images, all of that makes me think my GPU is inadequate. If that isn't it, then where is my "bottleneck", and how can I get things to run more smoothly? Thanks in advance....

[asik1]

Mark, you must check what process are running that hog your system.
I know nothing about 8.1 as I'm still using the snappy XP.
You need to look at the task manager and services.

[Mark Swanson]

Thanks, I have been thinking that I needed to do that as well. So, running Task Manager and watching what happens when I run VS with a video loaded in and playing..this is a 3 minute video with three overlay tracks and an MP3 playing....a few images thrown in...with this running I am told that I am using an average of 40%-50% of my CPU, with about 23% of my memory. Does that make any sense? It seems like it's really using a lot of CPU, for a six-core system that I have.
I'm telling you, it would really help if I knew more about this stuff!

[Mark Swanson]

Ok folks.I have an update to my troubles. It seems that I have erroneously described my error message, and it will make a difference I think. I just got the error again, and the correct message is "AMD display driver has stopped working and has recovered"....After the "recovery", VS no longer displays some of the still images in my timeline.
I'll see if this driver can be updated, but I am quite sure that all of my drivers are up to date. I think this might help me a lot to get this fixed, if no one reading this discussion can help me out, maybe I'll start another discussion about the driver troubles if that is OK with the moderators. Thanks folks!

[RobertOZ]

Ok folks.I have an update to my troubles. It seems that I have erroneously described my error message, and it will make a difference I think. I just got the error again, and the correct message is "AMD display driver has stopped working and has recovered"....After the "recovery", VS no longer displays some of the still images in my timeline

This would seem to indicate that your card is being stressed/overloaded, your card should be able to handle the work you are doing so could also indicate that it's time to replace it. I had similar error messages with a NVIDIA card on my laptop, eventually the card self destructed and not being able to replace the card the laptop is sitting in a corner gathering dust until such time as I can find a refurbished card.

[bobp]

Mark,
The two errors you listed are the same. It's possible your card is going bad, but maybe not. Is this a laptop or desktop. There is no "graphics card" in a laptop. There is an "on board" graphics chip. If it goes bad you buy a new motherboard or computer. And it's cheaper to buy a computer than to pay someone to replace the motherboard. Unless warranty is involved. My daughter runs Video Studio on a Windows 8.1laptop with 4 gb of ram and it is not laggy at all.
So the question really is, what is slowing down you computer. Could be anything. Not so long ago an improper virtual memory setting could cause the graphics card to stop. A piece of malware can install tens of thousands of copies of itself in seconds and you won't know it until your system slows down. Every time you visit any web site all the graphics and quite a bit of the data are saved in memory so the site loads faster the next time you go there. Every time you add or modify software or run something online, the registry gets clogged up. Plus all the programs you have installed always looking for the next update. All these things can slow your computer to a crawl. Did you download something that tried to change your home page? Have you been getting a lot of pop ups lately? Again, do you know how to clear the cache? The second thing I would do is download the free version of cCleaner from Piriform, and run the registry cleaner part of it. If your AV software (please don't tell me you use Microsoft Security Essentials )has a boot-time scanner, run it. Maybe get the free version of Malwarebytes. Over kill? Well we don't know what the problem is. Hope it's something simple.

asik1,
Just curious, do you really run XP, or W7 as your sig says.

[Mark Swanson]

Thank you Bobp, I have a desktop HP Envy H8 1414. Supposedly the graphics card in it sort of sucks, so I have been thinking that is what I need.
I have my computer as protected as i know how to get it, i have a Norton anti virus software, and I check it for everything that I can think of. But, I will do the things you suggested and check it better. I have diwnloaded things but i also know how to keep the bad stuff out...it is always possible hat something slipped through. And as far as AV software, I am not sure what you mean......

[Mark Swanson]

Well Bobp, I did the things you suggested, and they were good suggestions...I installed both the registry cleaner and the malwarebytes program, both found some small issues and fixed them. Thanks for those hints, i am sure having those two programs is a good thing! It does seem like things are moving a little bit faster...but I still have very choppy playback in my preview window, and I am still getting that error message and the disappearing images. I'm feeling quite sure it is my graphics card....I am quite unsure about trying a replacement because I read about a lot of problems others have when updating the GPU in this model of computer.

[asik1]

Bobp, I have dual boot system but my favorite for VS is XP.
Mark, installing graphic card in a desktop should not be a problem.
By looking on your HP I see you will need a PCI Express card.