Crashes while rendering. Lots.

Green Button wrote on 5/28/2011, 6:57 AM
I'm on a trip using my laptop and just cannot get Movie Studio 10 to successfuly render my HD video without crashing. I have LOTS of crashes at home too (way bigger PC) -- but have kinda worked around them for the most part by just making "smaller movies". I don't want to do that anymore.

I'm a sporadic user that does this for hobby -- I've avoided doing editing for months hoping to see a 10.b that addresses crashes.. but none has shown up. :(

I am trying to guess WHAT THE CAUSE IS so I can work around it. Has anyone figured this out or is it common knowledge? I'm using vid sources from camcorder (MTS), GoHD Pro (MP4) and Canon S95 (quicktime mov).

Some of my theories:
- number of files in the project. Under 100 is OK but more just dies??
- type of file?
- what I render to? (WMV was crashing like crazy on me yesterday... so was AVC)

Would love a "formula" so I could actually use the software to edit the movies I want to make. Or any news on an update coming soon?

thx

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 5/28/2011, 9:01 AM
I would say that the challenge is that you're using two non-standard video formats as source footage. Vegas Movie Studio can work with miniDV and HDV footage natively and it does a pretty good job with AVCHD footage -- but overload it with video that it needs to continually render and assimilate and it's eventually going to max out and crash.

I'm not sure what the solution is -- other than using Quicktime Pro ($29 from Apple) to convert this footage into more standard camcorder footage before your bring it into a Vegas project.

Otherwise, you've just likely good too much hybriding in your project (and mixing formats is only compounding the situation).
Eugenia wrote on 5/28/2011, 11:58 AM
Use MainConcept mpeg4, it's more stable, and it has VBR support that allows for better quality than Sony AVC. Don't bother with WMV, it's not as well supported by TV devices like h.264 is. http://eugenia.queru.com/2007/11/09/exporting-with-vegas-for-vimeo-hd/

If that crashes too, then copy/paste the timeline in a new project, set the right project properties, and retry to export anew, fresh. This cleans up corruptions in the project file.

If that crashes too, then, please search on older threads here, where they detail how to hack the Vegas .exe and encoder DLL files to use more than 2 GB of RAM (by default, Vegas 32bit, like any other 32bit app, can't use more than 2 GB of RAM, and it's often runs out of RAM - kaboom). http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=12&MessageID=751600

And if that crashes too, copy the project file in a new file, open it with Vegas Pro 10.0d TRIAL version, and export from there. I'm pretty sure it will be more stable via Pro, because while the Vegas engine is the same for both apps, the Pro one is an engine that's a year younger over the Platinum 10 that came out April, a year+ ago.

If that crashes too, go back to Platinum, install the trial of Cineform NeoSCENE, which transcodes h.264 to the much easier to decode, Cineform intermediate codec.

If that crashes too, sell your copy of Vegas, and buy something else.
Green Button wrote on 6/4/2011, 4:10 PM
Eugenia -- I just wanted to say THANK YOU for the thorough, clear, accurate -- and SUCCESSFUL answer you gave me!!

Your blog posts were SUPER useful!! I've been using this line of software for years and I wish I had discovered that info much much earlier. I'm planning to go back and re-render some old projects to get the better results you pointed me toward.

For your future refernece... and a couple of questions...
- I couldnt' figure out any way to copy/paste from one timeline to a new project. Is this only supported by more expensive versions of the software? (I've often wanted to do that and never figured it out...)

- you're saying that as long as I'm running 32-bit Vegas that I'm stuck only taking advantage of 2GB of RAM? You sure about that? Won't it use the paging file and be able to do much more .. maybe slowing perf, but shouldn't cause crashes? *IS* there a 64-bit version of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum or do I need to buy a more expensive version to get 64-bit?
Eugenia wrote on 6/4/2011, 6:47 PM
Glad you found the articles useful.
1. You select the timeline using either the SHIFT key, or going in EDIT mode. There's a toolbar icon for that.
2. Vegas can use Windows' pagefile, but to truly shine on low RAM, is to have your own pagefile, the way Photoshop does it. With a hack that is circulating on this forum, you can make Vegas go up to 3 GB of RAM, but that's about it. For more, you need a 64bit app. So far, Platinum has been 32bit.
TOG62 wrote on 6/4/2011, 11:09 PM
- I couldnt' figure out any way to copy/paste from one timeline to a new project. Is this only supported by more expensive versions of the software? (I've often wanted to do that and never figured it out...)

You need to have two instances of VMS open and copy from one to the other.