Experiencing the same problem - can render my project to anything but AVCHD and this issue has been discussed on various forums for almost a month now and there's still no patch from Sony.

What's interesting is that 9.0a version got its new feature AVCHD 1920x1080 support as the only visible upgrade from the previous version and this very feature doesnt work. What's going on? Any ideas?

All of you do bug reports at Sony with the crashing debug info. If you don't do that, it's never going to get fixed.

AVCHD 1440x1080 works, but rendering 11 min. video lasts 3 hours. I shall do fault raport to Sony from crashing .

I get the answer from Sony:
1) End any applications or background processes that may be running during the render (this includes anti-virus, anti-spyware, screensaver, registry cleaner, etc.)
2) In Vegas Movie Studio Platinum, go to Options> Preferences> Video.
-- Reduce the Dynamic RAM preview max to 24
-- Reduce the Maximum number of rendering threads to 1

Then try rendering again. If you still have the error, please update this incident with the following information:

--What types of file(s) are being used in your project (please be as specific as possible).
--What file type are you rendering as, and with what template.
--What the properties of your project are.

This don´t help me. Rendering and Vegas crash after 20 %. I don´t uderstand, what these 24 and 1 mean. It seems to me, that in Movie Sudio Vegas (Sony) there is no software bug, but the fault is elsewhere, in my PC (Intel Duo Core 6300, memory 4 Gb and Vista 32 bit).

I would submit another support ticket explaining the steps you've taken and that they still don't work.

You're not alone on this, I myself cannot render AVCHD 1920x1080, and neither can a number of people here. It's a common problem that needs to be fixed soon.

Yes I am not alone. I wonder, why Sony does´t take seriously this trouble. I have also Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus, which works, but the quality is so poor, that I don´t use it. Why does Pinnale work, but no Vegas in my PC?

Same probelm! Sony wake up and do something.

What's your CPU, RAM?
Guys on the Vegas Pro forum discuss the same AVCHD rendering issue and this appears only on Quad Core processors.
I havent been able to render an AVCHD file with VMS 9.0b on my Q9550 with 2 gig of ram so far and my conversation with Sony on this subject came to a dead end. My next step will be increasing memory size but I doubt it'll help.

Same problem, come on Sony!! (Quad 6600, 4gb's RAM, 32bit Vista)

Just for the record, I have it in 9.0b, too.

Before crash it will render just fine anything from 30% up to 75% of my 24 minute long project.

I have been able to render the whole project in smaller chunks, but I consider this is an unacceptable workaround.

Please, report this to Sony. My trial version had expired by now and I still didnt manage to render AVCHD directly from the timeline even with 3 CPU cores being disabled through the Task Manager. What I end up doing is rendering into intermediate format (uncompressed 1920x1080i YUV) first, then opening that file (400gig/hour) in a new project and rendering a Blu-Ray image I needed this way.
At this point I decided to postpone my purchase of Vegas 9.0 until Sony fixes all AVCHD related bugs.

Just tested Sony's DSC-T500 HV video camera (AVCHD 720p) with my VMSP 9.0b before buying the camera.
A couple of testshots worked very well - so I bought the camera and went to China - and returned with 800 stills and 200 720p video (what I normally do in 2 weeks - and it always worked with my earlier cameras)...

This week I have been trying to edit - but as several others have experienced VMSP behaves like crazy when you try really to use it with AVCHD files.

Thought my PC was bad and installed VMSP on another (also 2 GB RAM) but there VMSP behaves like crazy as well.

During the week I have not been able to render anything but chunks of the project. And yes: I have tried 1 single thread for rendering. And no: there are no background jobs or virus scanners. And this week I have booted 10 times a day...

I have posted an error form to Sony - let us see what they answer.

Ritsmer,
If you want to post some footage somewhere (such as Mediafire.com), I'll be happy to test it on my system (VMSPP 9.0b, Vista 32, 4GB) and see where I get to.

Hi Mark -
Thank you.
Well I have sworn and whined over this for a week now - and it seems to be a question of RAM - so I have ordered 2 GB more for my Mac Pro to see how my XP + VMSP behave with 4 GB - or at least the part of the 4 GB that XP can use.

In the mean time I have converted the nearly 200 AVCHD 720p-files to m2t 720p files and now VMSP works perfectly, fast and rock stable again. But: What did I use for this conversion? well it was VMSP !! - which actually seems to do well with AVCHD files - but obviously only in smaller amounts...

Besides I have decided not to render to wmv (giving heavy trouble with mp4 input here) but to m2t which works much faster and which gives significantly better colours.

Beeing in PAL-part of the world, right now I test keeping 30 Fps the whole way from the raw video through VMSP and to the Mac Mini feeding our Plasma (through RGB) since this seems to give a very clear and calm picture.

Received my pretty expensive Apple mac Pro extra 2 GB and installed them:
After some experiments it shows up that on a Mac Pro Windows XP will allways only be able to see and use the first 2 GB no matter how much memory you have added :-)))

So now:
1) I have 2 x 1 GB Mac Pro memory for sale and
2) I found a great script in the Vegas Script forum that can convert all my AVCHD's to m2t batchwise.
3) I wonder why the camera industry has invented a format that can be compressed at real time with a small processor running on a small battery - but which can hardly be handled with professional Vegas on a 2 x Xeon Quad core machine.

Hi,

regarding your number 3 I'd say that the cameras have got a special hardware encoder specialised on just that encoding job, while any PC (or Mac) is using software encoding. It's probably a bit like doing video captures to MPEG2. When using a video tape deck as source and using a PC to do the encoding you might end up with frame drops. Using a special capture card with an MPEG hardware encoder will prevent from dropped frames.

Cheers

darkframe

(Replying to my self for your information...)

I've a case open on this in Sony support. They have finally been able to reproduce the problem there and the case has been escalated to the development group.

So there is some change that there will be a fix in the future...

I have a very similar problem. I have posted it in this forum as a new posting. The details are as follows:
"I have shot a video using my Sony HDR SR11 camcorder. The captured video is close to 1Hr 45mts.
I imported the video to my computer using the supplied Handycam utility. The files were stored as a number of .m2ts files.
I then imported all these files into Vegas and then edited the video by introducing audio (music and Voice) and a few text slides. I then rendered the video in Sony AVC format using the AVCHD 1920X1080 NTSC template. My intention is to load back the edited Video onto my camcorder using the Picture motion browser and play it on my HD TV.(This was the recommended procedure from Sony). While rendering the video, Vegas crashes after different time intervals. The maximum video footage that I was able to render is around 15minutes. I am able to view and upload the partially rendered Video. I also went through Sony customer support knowledge base and as per one suggestion, I tried breaking the footage to smaller timed footages, saving each as a separate projects and then rendering them separately, opening a new project and importing these rendered videos and stitching all of them together. The rendered videos were saved as .M2TS files and when I imported these in the project media of a new project, I found these were shown as .m2ts files and not as .M2TS and when I started rendering, it started rendering all over again at which time I thought it was useless as I knew the tool will again crash if it has to rerender the entire footage.
My computer details are as follows:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66 GHz CPU
Operating system: XP
Memory 4Gb DDR2
Internal Hard disc: 400Gb. 4 partitions. C drive 100Gb. "
I have set the max rendering threads to 1 and DRAM preview to 24, but the problem still exists.

Same problem here guys. I tried rendering a 3 minutes video with no editing, just the timeline. No problem.. besides it keeps saving with the .mp4 extension.

When it comes to a movie over 5-10 minutes, it crashes in the first 10%. I tried all different rendering methode and the only one that is working is the video for windows. I have a dedicated drive for the footage, 1 for the projects and 1 for the temp files... so I think the speed/storage part is taking care of. I have a Q6600 with 4gigs of ram on Vista 32 and all my other softwares are running perfectly.

PS: the 1440*1080 rendering doesnt work either.

any news on this issue? Anyone found someting? I don't get an error message, it just close the software without prompting anything.

thanks.

ok... I am replying to myself here but hope this will help some people out there.

My issue with rendering in 1920x1080 or 1440x1080 might be caused by the media generators, such as the credit roll or regular title. Here is how I found this.

Track#1 : TEXT ,or title as I use it.
Track#2 : Video overlay
Track#3 : Video 1

what I put in each track;

Track#1 : 2 credit roll
Track#2 : 2 still image taken with my sony HDR-SR12, one after the other with a track motion applied.
Track#3 : 2 AVCHD clip, no effect on the track on the clips.

How I aligned them is they key here, start with track #3.
- 2 AVCHD clip overlapping each other to create a fade in/out transition.
- then put a still image above it
- now above that still image, put a edit roll but make sure the image last longer than the title
- add a second title of your choice overlapping the still image you setup
- finally, add your 2nd still image under the title you put.
- now render in any type you want, VMS will crash to desktop.

Now, it crashed 1 out of 3 times I tried this. I would appreciate inputs from other users and let me know if this is reproducible on your end. If that is the case, Sony did a really bad job implementing the track composition...

I'm new to video editing but I have the same problem.
Just 13min of video with AVCHD sources doesn't reneder on my PC.
The software crashes when betwenn 25% and 75%. Further this operation request more then 2 hours of time. I have been able to render small chunks (1-2 minuts, no more).
My PC is an Intel Core2 Extreme@3.06Ghz with 3,48 GB ram with XP Pro SP3.
Sony please consider I got this software only for working with AVCHD file downloaded from an SR12 camera...

We need solution asap...

Main problem: see my last post.

Hope this can help sony developer:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Error is occurred during the current operation.

An Exception as Occurred.

Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0
Version 9.0b (Build 92)
Exception 0xC0000005 (access violation) READ:0xFF9E8B8E IP:0x488E87
In Module 'VegasMovieStudioPE90.exe' at Address 0x400000 + 0x88E87
Thread: GUI ID=0xA08 Stack=0x11D000-0x130000
Registers:
EAX=0512b298 CS=001b EIP=00488e87 EFLGS=00210286
EBX=0a4acee0 SS=0023 ESP=0011d338 EBP=0011d560
ECX=00000000 DS=0023 ESI=0512b298 FS=003b
EDX=00000048 ES=0023 EDI=ff9e8b72 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
00488E87: 8B 47 1C 8B 4F 18 53 8B .G..O.S.
00488E8F: 9F 80 03 00 00 50 51 E8 .....PQ.
Stack Dump:
0011D338: 0512B298 04EE0000 + 24B298
0011D33C: 0048A8D0 00400000 + 8A8D0 (VegasMovieStudioPE90.exe)
0011D340: D90108E4
0011D344: 0512B298 04EE0000 + 24B298
0011D348: 0011D610 00030000 + ED610
0011D34C: 00000000
0011D350: 00000561
0011D354: 0110005A 00400000 + D0005A (VegasMovieStudioPE90.exe)
0011D358: 00000323
0011D35C: 00000001
0011D360: 0011D3F0 00030000 + ED3F0
0011D364: 7E3AFD6B 7E390000 + 1FD6B (USER32.dll)
0011D368: 09010BD6 08FA0000 + 70BD6 (CDDBControl.dll)
0011D36C: 0053004D 00400000 + 13004D (VegasMovieStudioPE90.exe)
0011D370: 00530020 00400000 + 130020 (VegasMovieStudioPE90.exe)
0011D374: 00650068 00400000 + 250068 (VegasMovieStudioPE90.exe)
- - -
0012FFF0: 00000000
0012FFF4: 00000000
0012FFF8: 0085815B 00400000 + 45815B (VegasMovieStudioPE90.exe)
0012FFFC: 00000000
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------