Crashes with EOS 5D Mk 2 MOVs?

Entilza wrote on 3/19/2009, 6:34 PM
Hi gang,

Just wanted to see if anyone else is editing 1080P footage from the Canon EOS 5D Mark 2 (H.264 MOVs) and having extreme stability problems in Vegas Pro 8.0c, especially since Quicktime moved to 7.6 the other week?

Things initially worked fine for me, but as the timeline grew (> 5 clips, roughly) Vegas started crashing sometimes when rendering out to any format.

As the timeline grew, the crashes became even more frequent during renders, then Vegas started bombing when manipulating clips on the time line (simple things like jumping to a new clip, it would bomb whilst rendering the preview frame).

Starting a new project and bringing in new videos did not fix things.

I was blaming Vegas which had always been rock stable for me, until I happened to notice that the clips also crashed the Quicktime player itself when playing. Thus I am now blaming the quicktime codec (Curiously, if I just rename the clips to MP4, they play without crashing in Quicktime, but sadly they crash even quicker in Vegas).

I spent days following which codecs were being called, cleaning them out, replacing them with others, etc, un/reinstalling Quicktime, Vegas, codecs, etc. All to no avail.

I have identified there is a Canon MOV H264 splitter and codec on my system which gets called, but the EOS install disk gives no option to install this (though the codec is on the disk itself, so I assume it gets on there when installing one of the aps somehow), and interestingly there is no information on the internet that I can dig up on it, including Canon's own site.

Somewhere along the way, things have improved: when starting a *new* project now, Vegas seems to be working (even though Quicktime still crashes), but I only have about 7 clips on the timeline so far.

Has anyone had similar experiences?

Does anyone have further suggestions beyond reinstalling Windows (last ditch option).

Cheers,
Jason

Comments

jabloomf1230 wrote on 3/19/2009, 9:11 PM
"I have identified there is a Canon MOV H264 splitter and codec on my system which gets called, but the EOS install disk gives no option to install this (though the codec is on the disk itself, so I assume it gets on there when installing one of the aps somehow), and interestingly there is no information on the internet that I can dig up on it, including Canon's own site."

Vegas uses the Video for Windows (VFW) interface (not DirectShow) and uses either it's own import filters or internal libraries which access certain formats like Quicktime. How do you know that Vegas is using the Canon h.264 splitter and codec? Are they VFW, because that format is pretty old?
Entilza wrote on 3/19/2009, 10:50 PM
The codecs are DSH, not VFW. Is that good or bad? Does it mean Vegas won't use it?

Regardless, you've just uncovered an assumption of mine:
I was using G-Spot to determine workable codec paths and what Windows will use depending on filter priorities.

What Windows may use is of course completely different to what Vegas may try to use. Thus exposing my assumption.

So, besides the question on DSH, any idea on how we can figure out what Vegas is using? Any tools??

Cheers,
Jason
jabloomf1230 wrote on 3/20/2009, 9:50 PM
Vegas only uses it's built-in codecs & filters and any 3rd party VFW codecs that it can find (like Cineform, Lagarith, Morgan MJPEG2K, etc.). The built-ins are located in the folder:

D:\Program Files (x86)\Sony\Vegas Pro 8.0\FileIO Plug-Ins

Most of the plug-ins have a help file, so you can tell which are used for which input and/or output file format.
Gede wrote on 3/28/2009, 9:54 PM
It seems as the same problem I have with Sanyo Xacti Movies 1080p and Vegas Movie Studio....

(Found this thread because I will have a 5DmkII soon).

Under certain circumstances Vegas just runs out of memory, without warning.

IMHO it has nothing to do with codecs directly. Just with the memory handling. Look in your taskmanager, and you probably will find that if Vegas goes over 800-1000mb of memory use, things go wrong, even if you have plenty of memory free....


Gede wrote on 3/29/2009, 10:43 PM
I found that If I convert my 1080i footage from my Xacti HD1000 first to Blu-ray mpgs with TMPGenc , I can edit the 1080 footage more easy with Vegas.

Sure there must some loss in qualty, I guess, but at least you can edit the 1080 clips for longer than a few minutes only....

So this is what I am going to do with my 5dmkII when it arrives.
Kevin Evans wrote on 6/10/2009, 4:49 AM
I to have the same problem... I have been using the 5DmkII's since November last year and am finding short clips on Vegas Pro (tried new version9 also still crashes) are fine (up to 5-7 mins) but after that it will crash on the time line... I shoot 40 hours of video in Africa (edited to 45 mins on the timeline... january 2009) I tried everthing on Vegas it did'nt work... even spoke with the Sony agents in Australia... they tried to work on the same project and they to found it just kept crashing.

I had to end up using Final Cut Pro on a Mac system and it worked fine... but I gotta tell you not as easy as Vegas to us... I hope Sony can get somthing going shortly so we can us Vegas.

I tried Adobe Premier also... it also crashed... at the end of the day short clips are fine but anything longer... you'll have to do to FC Pro and a Mac system... I'd be interested if anybody else has managed to slove the so called end wrappers on h264 so it can be used on Vegas