Diagnosing Errors

Tim Stannard wrote on 11/12/2013, 8:44 AM

I have a project which loads and after a while (a few minutes), often after I get the Win 7 equiv of the hourglass, pops up a dialog :
"Vegas Pro 12.0, Warning: An error occurred accessing project media., Some streams in teh media file could not be opened. "

Note this will happen before doing anything other than loading the project. After this processing seems to continue as normal.

My question is this: Is there any simple way to diagnose which project media is casuing the problems?

The project appears to play thorugh OK (albeit very stutteringly) so it's not as if it gives up the ghost when it comes across a particular event. The project is about 4 mins, about 300 clips in Project Media (180 of which appear as events on the timeline) and virtually every event on the timeline is a HitFilm2 project file (created from within Vegas within this project as I find the chromakey options far superior)

Core i7-2600K @ 4.7GHz 8GB RAM None of the CPU threads reach 90% and the RAM peaks at about 6.5GB

Windows 7 Pro 64bit. Vegas Pro 12 build 726 HitFilm 2 Ultimate 2.0.2217.43344 (64bit)

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 11/12/2013, 8:51 AM

Rename media one by one until you find the culprit.

Tim Stannard wrote on 11/12/2013, 9:21 AM

Seriously?
180 pieces of media in use on the timeline.
Assume we'll find it halfway through.
Rename a pieve of media.
Restart Vegas and wait for the error - lets say 4mins.
That's six hours!

Or have I misunderstood?

Kimberly wrote on 11/12/2013, 9:50 AM

[I]The project is about 4 mins, about 300 clips in Project Media (180 of which appear as events on the timeline) [/I]

Idea:
Save current project to a new name, such as "Playground" or whatever. Then try Tools/Clean Project Media. As you may know, this will remove all unused media. Save, close, and reopen. You might get lucky and eliminate the offending media with this approach. But if you really needed all those unused media, well you could try adding them to the project in, say, blocks of ten, then save, close, and reopen. That would narrow the scope as you search for problems.

Of course this may not do anything for you but it's a thought.

Gary James wrote on 11/12/2013, 9:54 AM

Is it possible that you have media assigned to the project media bin that's no longer actually used in the project?

To remove unused media simply Press Alt-5 to display the Project Media Tab if not already shown; then click the little yellow lightning bolt icon in the toolbar directly above the media bin panel.

ChrisDolan (SCS) wrote on 11/12/2013, 9:56 AM

Unfortunately, we don't log the filename in the case of errors like that...

A faster version of musicvid10's advice (still tedious, but faster) would be to move half of your media to a new folder. If loading the project gets you the missing-media dialog but not the track error message then you know that half is good. You can keep dividing by half until you find the culprit. This would take log_2(180) = 8 tries instead of 180 tries.

Another easier approach would be to delete your thumbnail cache folder (AppData\Local\Sony\Vegas 12.0\Media Pool Thumbnails), restart Vegas and then look in Project Media. If the track that can't be read is video, as opposed to audio, then you'll have media with a blank-white thumbnail.

Tim Stannard wrote on 11/12/2013, 9:59 AM

Wow - what a buncjh of quick replies. Thanks guys.

I was hoping to avoid the Binary Chop approach, but that's the route I've started going down. It's a shame the filename doesn't get logged - request for future versions please :)

musicvid10 wrote on 11/12/2013, 10:49 AM

You would look for the odd ones first -- something out of the norm; odd codecs, unknown or questionable sources, possible drm, etc..
It's probably not as dramatic as it seems.
;?)

OldSmoke wrote on 11/12/2013, 10:56 AM

That might sound stupid but have you tried an "Error Checking" on the drive where the media is located?

musicvid10 wrote on 11/12/2013, 11:15 AM

Oh, try it with all resident antivirus disabled.

Tim Stannard wrote on 11/14/2013, 10:45 AM

Thanks again to all who responded. Especially those sho suggested I try blindingly obvious things. It's often the blindingly obvious that I overlook (and I'm probably not alone in that).

Anyway, after choping and chopping i finally narrowed it down to some media (not a specific piece) that wasn't even on the timeline. Would have sworn under oath that one of the first thing I'd done before embaking on this was to clear out all the unused media, but evidently not.

Still all is well, even if I have to wait a long time (30 secs - a minute) when I move the focus back to Vegas.

ChrisDolan (SCS) wrote on 11/15/2013, 10:54 AM

Tim, if you want Vegas to keep the media files open uncheck the General pref "Close media files when not the active application". That will save you lots of re-load time.

Tim Stannard wrote on 11/18/2013, 6:14 PM

Thanks for the tip Chris. Unfortunately the one instance when I cannot do this is when moving between HitFilm and Vegas as Vegas states that that preference has to be checked when editing in another program (I imagine the same for if I edit in SoundForge - not tried yet)

Tim Stannard wrote on 11/18/2013, 6:16 PM

Anyway - a word to the wise. I finally identified the cause of the error message. It wasn't bad media, but Vegas reverse applied to an event derived from a HitFilm projects.

I had a video event that I had sent to HF2U where I’d applied a Chromakey. Back in Vegas, I created several repeats of part of the result to make several identical events.Then (again in Vegas) I reversed every other event. It was these reversed events from Hit Film projects that Vegas was complaining about. I removed the reversed events and the problem went away. I was able to repeat the problem with a fresh Vegas project and fresh clips.

Posted in case anyone else is stupid enough to try the things I was doing and expect them to work :)