"an error occurred while creating..."

dhill wrote on 11/27/2007, 1:42 AM
VV7e

I'm rendering a long form project. Source material is hdv and I'm rendering to SD DVD Arch mpeg 2 file. If I render the hour + long project in segments (about 5-10 minutes at a time) all of the segments render fine and look good from my test dvd burns.

However, when rendering the entire project today the rendering stopped at 40 something % after about 10-12 hours today giving me the message "An error occurred while creating the media file .mpg The reason for the error could not be determined." Hmm yes I could have figured that out on my own...it stopped and I don't know why.

Any way, I just rendered all of the photos/still shots into HDV files and then replaced the stills with the newly rendered hdv files of the stills into the timeline. I also went into properties and reset them to default. I'm trying another render tonight. We'll see what happens when I wake up tomorrow.

Any way, do any of you have any other ideas that I could try in case this render ends with yet another error message? I'm guessing it has nothing to do with the computer because it's doing it on both my dual core AMD desktop and my dual core Intel laptop. I would think there must be something wrong with the project or media, but like I said, if I render in sections, they all work.

If all else fails I can just render each chapter on it's own and have about 15 mpeg clips or so to add into DVD Arch when mastering the dvd. I not sure if that will cause any problems or not, but I'm guessing that route would be fine if I must do it that way. I'm definitely going to be late for my replication appointment now though. This is a Christmas release so I'm a bit under the gun time wise. Derek

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 11/27/2007, 5:16 AM
It sounds like your computer is running out of resources. This can happen if there are too many high resolution stills on the timeline. How big are they? As a general rule, they should not be more that 2x the project size. Otherwise Vegas will be wasting a lot of memory resizing images. Don't forget that Vegas is making ~30 video frames per second out of a still. It does not resize the still once and make a copy of it 30 times... it resize 30 times a second! That's a lot of memory intensive processing.

You are on the correct path. Render the stills in smaller segments and add the renders back to your project. Alternately, reduce the size of the stills if they are larger than 1440x960 (which is 2x larger than your target SD DVD format). If you are not zooming into the images you can reduce them to 655x480. Anything more than that cannot be represented by an SD DVD anyway.

~jr
dhill wrote on 11/27/2007, 10:23 AM
Hi JR! Thank you for your help.

Well, I hit the render button last night and it stopped again with the same error message as above.

Any way, there were no stills in last night's attempt since I rendered them into hdv files and deleted all of the stills replacing them with the rendered hdv replacements.

So, I'm am really stuck as to what else I can try other than rendering the whole thing in segments and importing those segments into DVD Arch when creating the final dvd.

Oh I should mention that the laptop I'm working on has 3GB RAM, Intel core 2 duo. Any way, it's happening on the dual core AMD desktop too which has 2GB of RAM.

Thanks again. Derek
dhill wrote on 11/27/2007, 11:55 AM
Since neither computer will render this project the way it is, which of the following would you recommend:

a) Render each chapter to an hdv file, place each new hdv file in a new timeline/project, and then render that into one long mpeg2 file for the dvd.

b) Render each chapter to a new mpeg2 file, place each new mpeg2 file into a new project/timeline, and then render into one mpeg2 file for the dvd
DavidMcKnight wrote on 11/27/2007, 6:22 PM
Yo D!

This is a longshot but might be worth a try. When you deleted the stills, rendered them out, then put the rendered file on the TL, was it the same veg file / TL as before and if so, did you do a Clean Project Media to remove the pointers to files (the stills) that are no longer being used?

Also, with regard to rendering in sections, have you done this enough to know that all of the content will render? Maybe it's something other than the stills that is causing it to crash and if so, you should see it when you do the smaller renders. If every bit of content renders when doing the smaller renders, then...I dunno. You could pretty easily break it up into chapters and string them along in DVDA, like end action of Chap 1 goes to the start of Chap 2, end of Chap 2 goes to start of Chap 3, etc.

Also, what bitrate are you rendering the mpeg to? I can tell a difference between the DVDA template in Vegas and upping the bits to 8,500,000. At least, with standard DV.

David
dhill wrote on 11/28/2007, 12:17 PM
Hi David! You just earned your free tickets. haha

No I did not clean project media. I will do it when this last render finishes.

You are a very bright boy! I thought I had tested every single frame of this project. Well, I had, but I forgot that I had made changes on one of the sections. Last night when I went to render that section I got that same error message as I did when trying to render the whole project! So, I'm hoping that was the only section and I am going to replace that with this m2t render of a past version that I know works and then try to render the whole thing again.

I would have just shot this to you in an email, but who knows who might do this/have the same problem so maybe this will help someone some day.

What is the new safe standard for mpeg max these days? Last I heard you could go even higher than 8,500,000 but that will be fine for me. I was really surprised at how good this looked in SD. I was doing them at 9,800,000 I think...is that one of the auto drop down numbers? Any way, a little noise, well yes, but not too bad. I watched it on one of my Samsung 46" LCD's playing from the PS3 (that's my blu-ray player for the guest room of course never to be used as a gaming device...pay no attention to the JMF game lying next to it) and it looked quite good.

So, I should have just emailed you to start with since you guessed right. I did however state that all of them had been tested in my first post here, so, I was not correct in that statement and mislead all who read it. There was one I did not "re-burn" to test. All I did was change some of the settings in MB misfire. Geeesh. No sleep you see. :o) I guess I'm bound to miss a few things. Too many hats/master of none is quickly applying to me. haha Thank you again. See you in Feb. Derek

dhill wrote on 11/28/2007, 7:23 PM
Update...

This is really strange. I did the clean project thing. Didn't help problem.

I rendered the problem section from when I knew it worked (2 weeks ago when I burned dvd test) and it came out completely white/washed out in spots! It has 4 effects on it (MB, MB misfire, Sony Film effects, & B&W) and looks completely fine in the project window...as in where you click on each event to see what it will look like w/effects being that it won't play with all of that on there more than 6 fps or so.

I haven't the faintest idea what it could be (problem) so any way, I just put my old test mpeg in the timeline and it will have to be fine. I am rendering the only other old film look section and if it comes out messed up too, I will stick my old test mpeg in place of the events and just render the whole thing like that. I am confident this will work but I have NO idea why something would come out blank in the render (white/completely washed out) when you can plainly see the image when clicking on any of the events in timeline. If I prerender a section in timeline it works too.

Good news is, I think this all will render much more quickly with the first 30 minutes already done now in hdv (6 sections) for my final render compared to 1000+ clips in original timeline. Derek