I started to use Shotcut a month ago creating music video and didn’t have any problem until I tried to create a mix 30 min long. Tried to export it 5 times with average video quality and after about 10 min always saw BSoD with “Driver Power State Failure” message, which I never saw before on this laptop. My laptop with NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M adapter is not that old. I bought it for performance reasons, as my old PC couldn’t handle my DAW properly.
I tried all suggestions found here and everywhere, and those didn’t help. The only way I could finish exporting that file was with a power plan in eco mode, but it took about 2 hours to finish the job. So, I wonder what else I can do to make it reasonably work. I’d appreciate any help.
Are you sure you have a 630M? That’s an 8 year old gpu. What cpu is in the system and are you trying to use hardware encoding on export? What size ac adapter do you have with your laptop. That error message typically indicates the system is trying to pull more power than can be delivered something not unheard of on older laptops as they age.
Time flies so fast. I checked and found that I actually bought it in 2012. At that time it was the fastest in the store. Anyway, it has NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M and Intel Core i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz. The adapter provides 120W in the output. I think this is more than enough, because Toshiba eco utility shows that it consumes 40-60W while exporting. I don’t use hardware encoder, I tried it but it didn’t make any difference.
I played with power options and saw the driver called Toshiba Power saver regulated power consumption quite well. As soon as the temperature of the CPU was about 90% of max the driver just halved the speed until the CPU cools down. I think something disrupts this idyll.
While my account was blocked for several days because of this my post (they said I typed too fast), I created about 50 videos (thanks to Shotcut!), and had a chance to watch what is going on in the system using PC Health monitor and Task Manager, playing with power options, and here is what I saw.
When I start exporting video Shotcut, quite often it disappears from Task Manager’s radars. Manager shows CPU that usage goes up but there is no app that uses it. Can it confuse the power saver driver? As I saw with a very bad timing a defragmenter and an antivirus can jump in, and – kaboom, BSoD comes out. All exporting with the maximum performance options run on the edge with a cooling fan speed of 95% and CPU usage of 90%. A little push can topple down PC.
Another bad thing I saw, which is a memory leaks. I exported one video and when Shotcut finished Task Manager marked it as “not responding”. Shotcut held about 2.6Gig of memory. But in fact it was working and I just started editing another project and when exported it Shotcut had 4.5 Gig, and with all other apps PC worked at 99% memory usage. Can it cause problems?
Also when I played video inside Shotcut, every play allocated additional 1Gig of memory and didn’t release it, and after closing the project 2.5Gig was on the loose.
So, I think Shotcut has problems working with Windows, but this happens not all the time, but quite often. I hope my observations would help.
The ram usage isn’t unusual or leak related, video editing can use a lot of ram that’s why the system requirements are written the way they are
CPU: x86-64 Intel or AMD; at least one 2 GHz core for SD, 2 cores for HD, and 4 cores for 4K.
GPU: OpenGL 2.0 that works correctly and is compatible. On Windows, you can also use a card with good, compatible DirectX 9 or 11 drivers. We do not have a list.
RAM: At least 4 GB for SD, 8 GB for HD, and 16 GB for 4K.
Depending on what you’re editing your PC may be a bit behind to handle it, some more ram and moving from an HDD(which I assume you’re using since you mentioned a defragmenter) to an SSD could certainly help as well as remove the derangement entirely from the equation.
All that said, your BSoD was power related, I’d be suspicious that either your 120w brick wasn’t outputting a full 120w, the toshiba power management software was causing problems(the various eco utilities have been known to in the past) or that your laptops vrm’s may be degrading due to age which wouldn’t be uncommon at 8+ years especially when you’re demanding 100% load with the associated heat that goes with it
As you imply that my laptop is old junk, I gave it a test and started 5 video streams, started a video player, a defragmenter, a full antivirus scan and all kind of monitors. The laptop handled it quite easily with 40% CPU usage, 70% CPU temperature, 50W power consumption, 70% memory. BTW it has 8Gig of memory and I make SD videos, so it complies with your specification. So, it is still a capable thing. Anyway, I can’t upgrade it and not going to buy a new one just for Shotcut. It seems that some power option can restrain Shotcut somehow, so I just have to wait longer for each video export. I’ll try to replicate BSoD again to have more understanding of the problem.
I’m implying it’s aging not inherently junk, we have two dozen systems of a similar vintage at my office and a few of them can’t run at 100% load anymore due to aging power circutry, the ones that still do I haven’t replaced because they’re “good enough” for the work people are using them for but I also retrofitted them with additional memory and ssd’s a couple years ago for a dramtatic performance uplift and because I was tired of replacing broken hdd’s when people abused them. Please note that the ram is an “at least” and background processes and/or complex timelines can drive those suggested minimums up and a pair of 8gb sodimms is a small cost if you keep running into high memory usage related issues https://amzn.to/3mYrUMv
As for the power problem specifically I’d still try updating/uninstalling the eco utility I’ve seen various ones cause problems with applications that aim to lock the cpu at 100%(which a video export will do unless you do something like disable multi-threading)
The eco utility was not a problem, because it was not running when crashes happened. Only when I switched to eco power plan the utility started to show up, but everything worked smoothly after that yet slowly.
Today I set power plan to max performance and produced about 10 HD videos watching what the system was doing. Shotcut never exceeded 33% of CPU usage. To stress the system I ran Kaspersky AV full scan, Driver Optimizer, three performance monitors (with the eco utility), etc. All together they consume on average about 50% of CPU, 60W (50%), and memory 87% . Occasionally Kaspersky caused 100% of CPU for several minutes. The system consumed about 80W (70%) at those moments and CPU temperature didn’t exceed 90%. So, the laptop handled 100% CPU usage pretty well. So, I stand by my laptop, it works just fine.
On the other hand, Shotcut in 7 cases acted strangely. It disappeared from the list of running apps right after I started exporting, and reappeared after finishing. If an app does not cooperate with the OS properly, can it cause some troubles? I guess it can.
Anyway, I couldn’t reproduce any BSoD today. I’ll keep on trying.
Thanks a lot for the tip. I checked “parallel processing” box and exported two videos. Both were finished three times faster than usual, and my laptop didn’t flinch. For 30 min it ran steadily with 100% CPU usage, 70-80W power consumption, and 90% of CPU temperature.
But I have an idea why I can’t replicate BSoD now (and you don’t need to trash my laptop anymore). I recalled as my account was blocked for fast typing, I did some research on this problem and got two contradicting advices. On this forum somebody advised to revert drivers to old manufacture’s drivers. I didn’t go this way. At some other site they advised to update all drivers. I checked my drivers and the only one I could update was for NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M. I updated it and forgot about it, but it seems that this solved my problem. Well, we’ll see.
So, one problem is gone, but another one appeared during exporting videos. On several occasions (3-5) exporting causes the whole computer started just crawling, though Task Manager showed little activity from all programs. Then after 30 60 min. PC slowly recovered. Yet, Shotcut never, it’s present in Task Manager, and showed very little activity, but lost its face, (I mean UI). Windows is present but empty, though you can see tips pop up when mouse moved. When you try to close the window it takes 5-10 min to close. So, I wonder what can cause this Shotcut lethargic behavior.
Sounds like a lot of file or disk activity. CPU will sit idle waiting for a comparatively slow disk drive to feed it data. The two usual causes are 1) a virus checker doing a full scan, and 2) programs needing more memory than is available, so it spills over to the hard drive as a swap/paging file, which makes all operations appear slow since disk is way slower than RAM. I recall you said this computer has 8 GB RAM, but that only works if Shotcut has full access to all 8 GB. If there are 20 other programs running, then Shotcut may have only 1 GB to use and then the rest spills to the swap file instead of RAM. What does Task Manager say about disk usage during export?
Look for two processes: shotcut.exe and qmelt.exe. The export is done by qmelt. Shotcut is just the GUI.
Usually, during exports I see 95-100% CPU usage mostly by Shotcut, and memory is enough for the operation, but at the times of total slow down, CPU usage by Shotcut is about 1%, actually low disc usage, and memory usage < 50%.And I paused antivirus this time when this happened. So, it’s strange because there were no shortage of resources.
I created more than 100 short videos and temperature never was more than 90% from max. Toshiba health monitor utility limits CPU usage if temperature is critical.