CPU Overload during Realtime Export

I Searched through a lot of old threads but didn’t find anything conclusive.

When attempting to do a batch export of 1 VST Instrument Channel with “Real-Time Export” checked, the export stops at ~13% and shows a dialog saying “A CPU overload occurred during export.” What can be causing this, and what can I do to prevent it from happening?

Exporting with “Real-Time Export” unchecked works, but the resulting audio files for VEPro instrument tracks are silent.

The project is sizable, but plays fine without issue: 34 Omnisphere instances, 32 EastWest Play instances, 6 VEPro x64 instances hosting various EastWest Play instruments. The VEPro server is running on the same machine as Cubase (not on a slave).

I’m using Cubase 8.0.30 (64-bit) on Windows 7 (64-bit).

Try to disable ASIO guard. There’s lot of people in this forum having problems with VEpro and ASIO guard since 8.x.
See here: Steinberg Forums

After further experimentation I found the problem: It was a combination of the size of the project, the number of channels I was mixing down, and the amount of extraneous processing that was occurring (summing in groups, reverb sends, etc. that were downstream of the channels I was exporting).

In my first post I said exporting a mixdown of 1 VST Instrument channel would fail. If I muted all other VST Instrument outputs except the one I was mixing down, it would succeed. By muting all VST Insturment channels except those I was exporting, I could export more than one in a batch. And by selecting “No Bus” as the output for the channels I was mixing down and disabling sends, I could export still more.

All told, I still wasn’t able export everything (102 channels) at once. But I was able to do it in two batches: batch 1 was 24 channels, the more intensive VEPro Instruments; batch 2 was 78 channels, the less intensive VEPro channels, the Play, and the Omnisphere channels.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents that I had this problem mysteriously appear a few months ago - either I started using a new plugin, or a Cubase update changed something.

Disabling ASIO Guard has NOT eliminated the issue for me. Even a BLANK project still causes the hang when bouncing regardless if ASIO Guard is enabled or not. This almost seems like a corrupt prefs issue, some sort of internal problem with Cubase, or other mysterious cause.