Darren,

For what's it's worth perhaps your troubles are not with Vegas but your own OS and corrupted file structures. These days, if your not well versed in troubleshooting your OS its going to be one tough ride.

Please follow one more suggestion before you give up on Vegas 8:

Do a search for and delete any instance of "AJACaptureFilter.ax".

Yeah I know I mentioned it in another thread, but not everyone reads all the threads. I really think that will probably fix your problem.

Darren,
I just have to ask, why the heck are you trying to do EVERYTHING in the one project. Hells bells even if the thing didn't fall over the thought of what you've been trying to do sounds like a nightmare of biblical proportions! The processes that go back decades weren't just because we only had Moviolas, they were for reasons of how people work and how skills are bought to bear on a project of such dimensions. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it all yourself but surely you can see the difference between cutting a 4 minute music vid and a 90 minute feature. I have no concept of how you're finding your way around over 100 tracks, anymore than around 10 and i start to loose the plot, it's just not a practical way to work and now how the heck are you going to generate an EDL. You'll loose all your FXs, all your envelopes. EDLs work fine for cuts and cuts are what editing is all about as the first step.

I think you know what I'm trying to say here and sorry if it sounds like I'm trying to tell you how to suck eggs but there's good reasons to approach a project of this magnitude the old school way. If you had the grief would have been mitigated no end. You could take your assets and EDL into ANY edit suite. You could take your locked vision into ANY audio suite and mixed it, you could have taken your stuff into any high end grading suite, there's plenty of them in Sydney AND you can still say you edited it in Vegas! Probably you haven't got the budget to use FSM but even so, doing it one step at a time using Vegas is just so much easier. Even short projects I cut vision first or I cut/mix audio first, ignoring the other. Once I've got one set of ducks in a row, I move onto the next ones. I create titles in another project, any hard core comps in another. Which is not to say I'm an expert at any of this but I've seen many indie projects fail because of nothing more than lack of organisation and others with less talent get past the post because of organisation.

Bob.

Thanks for the feedback ...

Firstly ReneH ... I've been messing with computer operating systems since my first Hanimex HMG-1292 'Advanced Programmable Video Game' system in 1976 ... first PC in 1984 ... loaded DOS off a big old fat 5 1/4 inch floppy every time you booted up ... and my first video capture card in 1989 ... this version of XP on my quadcore is the cleanest freakin' OS in the world ...

Secondly Bob ... thanks for all your help over the last few months ... my project is broken down into 10 minutes chunks ... easy ... the audio tracks only have one individual event on each ... I like being able to see what's happening and control all aspects of the audio at any point in time... this is a nice way of doing it ... naming each type of audio event and moving logically through the project from left to right ...

THIS IS NOT A BIG JOB ... I made 2 x 47 minute doco's on my Matrox Digisuite using SpeedRazor in 2001 and 2003 and they were more complex than this ... I'm organised Bob ... ruthlessly organised ...

VEGAS PRO 8 is crap ... simple as that ...

My supplier is convinced that it's a MainConcept codec problem freaking Vegas out ...

I don't care what it is or who's problem it is ... Vegas doesn't work and I'm going back to 7 ... I will have a look at the AJA thing Laurence ... but I'm running out of time and I need some stability here ...

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

PS ... Satish's Frameserver render using the alpha channel in .png format renders my protype stuff perfectly for inclusion in the V7 project ... cool Satish!

OK, I tend to agree about the MC thing although let's not forget that it's SCS's code that wraps their codec. Purely of academic interest to you at the moment. So here's a thought, get rid of it and all things CF as well. Render all your m2t files to Sony YUV. It's not uncompressed but so close it don't matter and certainly way more robust than mpeg-2. This could be done automatically . The multirenderer in the Veggie Toolkit would handle this for you. Then it's only a matter of swapping folder names to switch from m2t to avi.

On the downside the avi files will be pretty large and you'll need a lot of disk bandwidth but nothing that spectacular. On the upside way, way less CPU load involved.

Bob.

Guess what?

(and thanks again Bob for your comments ...)

Vegas 7d is eating this project for dinner! It's just rendering and rendering and rendering ... five thousand frames so far ... all graded ... audio FX ... the whole nine yards ...

Here's the REALLY interesting part of all this ...

I tried to go back to Vegas 7e over the last few hours ... BUT it crashed at about halfway through the render ... same as Vegas Pro 8 ... I checked the dates of mcplug.dll in 7e and it was a year younger than Vegas Pro 8's MainConcept plugin ...

Then in desperation I ripped 7e off the machine and went back to 7d ... This is the one ... it's rendering like a freakin' bulldozer ... doesn't give a stuff about the stuff I've got on the timeline ... it's just chewing it up ... AWESOME!

I'm going to have my first 10 minute section of the film rendered in no time ... then I'll move on to section 2, 3, etc all the way up to 10 ...

Rockin' ... GO VEGAS 7D ...

Sony ... this is irrefutable proof that something to do with Vegas Pro 8 (and 7e) and some issue with MC has caused untold problems and time delays for lots of operators around the world.

FIX IT NOW!

I miss the mixing console in Pro 8 but apart from that I'm not moving from 7d until Sony can prove they've sorted their issues with MC ... I wonder if the MC problem has something to do with divX taking them over ... mmm ??

Cheers Bob,


Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

I do sympathise.
It is very difficultto appreciate a problem if it' don't happen to you'. You are the one struggling with a deadline.

I recall problem I had when I upgraded from V5.0b to V5.0d.
MPEG2 would not render. It only affected PAL DVD template. It was not a big deal as far as other users were concerned. It was a big deal for me. That was a reliable form of delivery for me.
I pulled my hair out here
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=377506
Then I reverted to V5.0b and MPEG2 was restored but I lost some audio plugins which SCS forgot put in in v5.0b.

Just like you, I identified the mainconcept file which was the culprit and informed SCS.
No apologies but an update was released with DVDA
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=396242

Sometimes I think PAL is a (very) poor cousin here.

Thanks Mahesh,

Yeh, it's exactly the same thing ... I've only just discovered (as I've posted a few times tonight) that Vegas 7d renders my project perfectly ... I tired 8a, then 7e, then finally 7d ... I'm sitting here in a state of shock watching it chug away without a problem ... what a relief!

In one of my other posts I mentioned that 7e was the first version of Vegas that included a new way of wrapping the mcplug.dll ... inside a .CAB file instead of just a plug-in directory ... I reckon that the mcplug.dll codec from MainConcept is just totally crap after Version 7d ... simple as that.

Anyway, that's the last time I'm going to post anything about the last three months because I'm sick of it.

Thanks to everyone who helped along the way ... helped me stay one step away from the padded cell...

Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou ... and Thank God for Vegas 7d ... what a great version of an excellent program.

Cheerio,

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

Yes, 7.0d is a total winner. I never installed 7.0e, and even though I have 8.x, I haven't installed that either because of all the continuing posts about problems. Even though I suspect that most of the problems with 8.x wouldn't affect me, I just didn't want to take the time to find out I was wrong ...

sorry to continue this post, but I don't suppose there is any way of getting the 7d mcplug.dll to replace the 8a one?

Dave