"An error occurred while creating the media file"

MUTTLEY wrote on 9/10/2009, 8:09 AM
"An error occurred while creating the media file The reason for the error could not be determined."

I'm trying to render out a higher quality mp4 of my movie, it worked fine using the iPod settings and I've never had any issue rendering to mp4 for Vimeo. Not sure what the deal is but after 6-7 hours of rendering this is what I keep getting. It was happening in Vegas 9. The first thing I tried was rendering the whole thing to a new track as an avi, the vid and project are 720x480. That worked fine. So I singled out that layer and thought it should go if there was some issue on the timeline or some media or something that was messing it up. Got the above error. I should mention that it gets all the way to the very very end past the credits before it goes belly up, its like when its trying to "finalize" the file that something goes wrong.

Next I opened V8 and copied the rendered avi file into a new project so now it was just the rendered avi and its audio. After 7 hours, wham! Same error. Not sure what else to try but this is driving me crazy. Anyone got any ideas of a different workaround than I've already tried?

- Ray
Underground Planet

Comments

Jim H wrote on 9/10/2009, 7:18 PM
I was getting that same error and it turned out my HD was full. Then later it happened again and it was the destination HD went offline. Same project rendered fine after I fixed those problems.
Former user wrote on 9/10/2009, 7:41 PM
Ray,

Like Jim says, I have had this either when ran out of space on a harddrive or the harddrive was formatted FAT32 and the file ran over 4 gig.

Dave T2
DavidMcKnight wrote on 9/10/2009, 9:53 PM
I did a little searching on this, and other folks have had the problem with various render formats and versions of Vegas. It would not seem to be specific to 9 but it could be resource related as the other posters have suggested.
How's the space on the C drive? Even when you render to a different drive, if you're not careful with some settings it can still use the C drive for temp files, I think.
MUTTLEY wrote on 9/11/2009, 4:30 PM
Not sure whats going on. The drive Im rendering to has ample room. The C drive only has a couple gigs free but I have the Project Properties set to render to another drive as well as in the Preferences. Not sure what else to do but ten attempts have failed.

- Ray
Underground Planet
Former user wrote on 9/11/2009, 4:42 PM
What about temp files?

Dave T2
MUTTLEY wrote on 9/11/2009, 5:13 PM

Which temp files? The two paths I mentioned are the only ones I know of.

- Ray
Underground Planet
tumbleweed7 wrote on 9/11/2009, 5:49 PM

It may not help much, but 2 gigs left on your system drive isn't very much for any page fileing going on...

Many people recommend filling the system drive to no more than 80%, I think....
Former user wrote on 9/11/2009, 6:07 PM
Sorry, I misread your post. Yeah, you have Project Properties and Preferences, and then also your Pre-Render folder, if you use that.

Dave T2
MUTTLEY wrote on 9/11/2009, 8:01 PM

I have Windows page file also set to another drive, not the C drive.

- Ray
Underground Planet
MUTTLEY wrote on 9/12/2009, 10:20 PM
Still having no luck at all, if anyone has any other thoughts ...

- Ray
Underground Planet
Steve Mann wrote on 9/12/2009, 10:48 PM
2Gb free on your system disk is not good. But, by default the Vegas temp files are on your system disk. Just look on the General tab of Preferences.

Also, your Windows temp files are on the system disk, too. Go to a DOS prompt and type "Set" and look at "Temp" and "Tmp".

Last, your "free" space on the HDD includes the swapfile if you are letting Windows manage it, so your real free space is even more limited.
MUTTLEY wrote on 9/12/2009, 11:22 PM
Steve, appreciate the reply but as mentioned above all those including the windows swap file are set to another drive. That said in the DOS Window it did say that Temp and Tmp were set to C. Thats different than the swap file though isnt it? And since I have set up the swap file to be on another drive and not on C how do I change it if its not?

*edit I meant the page file is set to a different drive then C, not sure if thats what you meant by swap file.

- Ray
Underground Planet
farss wrote on 9/13/2009, 1:46 AM
Reading all of the above it seems to me that the error message that Vegas is returning could be correct i.e. the problem occurs when writing the media file, not in the rendering / encoding.

As you say it get's all the way to the end however if this is a 2 pass encode it's not until it gets to the end of the 1st pass that it starts writing the media file.

I doubt it's a FAT32 problem, 4GB of MP4 would be one long video unless you've inadvertantly set the bitrate or resolution uber high.

It could be a that the drive is failing. It could be a permissions problem, unlikely as Vegas was able to write the new track file you mentioned. It could have something to do with a temp file or it's location. I know nutting much about this however the data created by the 1st pass of the encoder has to go somewhere.

Hm, thought I had another idea but this is failing in both V8 and V9??
Really points to something to do with your system rather than Vegas.

Bob.
lynn1102 wrote on 9/13/2009, 7:23 AM
Try rendering just the last section of the movie to see if maybe there is a corrupted file in there somewhere.
See if you can find the part of the file that did render to see where it is. No matter how I set my preferences, it seems Vegas puts the file where ever it wants to. Sometimes not even on the same drive I selected. I have filled up my system drive more than once when Vegas was supposed to save the file on the F drive.
Vegas does want to save files in a temp folder on the C drive,

Lynn
MUTTLEY wrote on 9/13/2009, 9:04 AM

Well still trying, still failing. Last night was able to free up 9 gigs on the C drive, tried to render, same thing. I'm at a loss. The fact that I can render to AVI but not mp4 just doesn't make sense to me since the AVI is much larger than what the mp4 should be. And the AVI was rendered before I exhaustively cleaned out my C drive and it only had a couple gigs free.

And yea Lynn, that's what I was originally thinking but now I'm trying to render out the actually AVI, at first I was trying to render the projects out as mp4, but now its ONLY the AVI that I was able to render out and I have it in a new project.

Not sure what else to try here.

- Ray
Underground Planet