Best setting for rendereding large projects

Bigeee wrote on 9/29/2009, 5:18 AM

I shot short projects that are memory intensive, using lots of FX, I use Boris Products for my FX.with Vegas Pro 8, My current project is 17 gigs and its 9 minutes long. My computer keeps crashing when I try to render. it crashes at about 85%. I'm rendering AVI . I tryed MP4 and it worked but quality was'nt good. I also tryed MP2 and quality was there but crashed at 90%. I.m using a Duo core computer, with 3 gigs memory. A (velosoity) computer is 3 years old. I'm shoting stills and video, using cannon rebel xsi and sony Hi Def handycam. I have run out of ideas, need help so I can move forward. I,m shoting my video HD, but on this project I'm only using 2 minutes of vjdeo footage and the rest stillsm still are 12.2 migapixals.

Comments

TeetimeNC wrote on 9/29/2009, 5:49 AM

Try reducing the size of your stills to the smallest size needed for your project resolution and any zoom action. If you aren't converting your images to PNG you might try that as well, since Vegas seems to work better with that format.

Vegas 9 handles large images better than 8.

You didn't mention OS, but I've found Vegas 9b 64bit running on Vista 64 to be very solid with large projects.

Jerry

dlion wrote on 9/29/2009, 8:25 AM

hard drive space can affect rendering. your project files should be on one drive, you should be rendering to a different drive.

you may want to also take a look at the location of Vegas Temp files folder. if it's on C: and the drive is more than 50% full, this could also be a problem.

rs170a wrote on 9/29/2009, 8:31 AM

My current project is 17 gigs and its 9 minutes long.

That's a very large project.
Is the footage uncompressed?

Mike

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/29/2009, 8:40 AM

if it was me I'd make regions ~every 2 or 3 minutes then use a batch render to AVI w/regions. Then put it together in a separate project & do the final render that way.

TeetimeNC wrote on 9/29/2009, 10:17 AM

That's a very large project.

OP said it is mostly stills - hence my suggestion to reduce the size of the stills to project size (plus zoom)

Jerry

Bigeee wrote on 9/29/2009, 10:33 AM

i know c drive is 80% full, How do I locate vegas temp files

Bigeee wrote on 9/29/2009, 10:34 AM

yes,

Bigeee wrote on 9/29/2009, 10:36 AM

whats the ideal size for stills plus zoom

johnmeyer wrote on 9/29/2009, 11:07 AM

whats the ideal size for stills plus zoom If you have lots of large stills on the timeline, then that is definitely the cause of your problem. Use the batch feature in your photo editor to reduce the pixel resolution of those stills to the project resolution multiplied times the zoom factor.

For instance, if your project resolution is set for SD NTSC (720x480), you'd want to reduce the resolution of any still that you don't zoom to about 10-20% more than this. Since your photos won't be exactly the same aspect ratio, don't change the aspect ratio to fit these numbers exactly (you don't want to stretch or squish the photos), but just make sure that both numbers are at least 10-20% larger than the width/height numbers for your project.

If you are zooming, then multiply by the zoom factor. For instance, if you zoom way in so that both the X and Y sizes are cut in half, you would want to double the resolution of your photo from the numbers I gave above. Thus you would want a photo size for 2x zooming that is 1440 x 960, plus about 20%, so roughly 1720 x 1150.

This isn't rocket science, and you don't have to be precise about this, and if you aren't exactly sure what size to use, make it a little bigger.

While you are at it, save the resulting smaller files (back up the originals first !!) as PNG because Vegas "likes" this file format better.

You will get several other benefits from this exercise, which is why everyone should do it. First of all, the photos will play back more smoothly on the timeline when you zoom or pan. Second, if you archive your project (using the Save As, Trim feature), it will take up less space. Third, as I describe in this post:

Still photo flicker reduction

it dramatically reduces the flickering that happens with some photos when they are panned or zoomed.

Finally, ALWAYS do your panning and zooming of photos using the Event Pan/Crop control and NEVER pan or zoom using track motion. This is because track motion pan/zoom is done AFTER the photo has been down-sampled to project resolution. Thus, any pan or zoom will look really, really bad. This is not a subtle difference; it is huge.

Vegas 9.x supposedly fixes the underlying Vegas code so that this is no longer a problem, but there have been so many problems reported with this release that I have not been tempted at all to try it. Early reports made it sound like it did indeed work better with still photos, but there are lingering reports of problems. The technique I describe above completely eliminates the problem for any version of Vegas, and once you learn how to do the batch conversion, you simply make a backup copy of your original photos, and then run the batch feature of your photo editor to down-res the photos, go have a cup of coffee, and when you come back, re-open the Vegas project and edit/render.