Distributed Render Stuck on Start

fflowers wrote on 6/28/2005, 5:56 AM
I've read through dozens of posts with similar problems as mine, but still can't find an answer. So, I'll try a new thread and try to provide you with as much information as possible.

I'm running Vegas 6.0b (Build 115) on 2 machines.

I have 2 machines: the host is Windows XP Pro & the rendering laptop is Windows XP Home. The desktop PC is a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 with 3 Gb of memory. The HP laptop is a 2.66 Ghz Pentium with 1 Gb of RAM. Both have Windows Service Pack 2 installed.

I've started 2 instances of the rendering service on my main PC with these ports: 53704 & 53705. That works fine. When I render, it takes advantage of my Pentium 4 dual processor and utilitzes both.

But on the external machine, an HP Laptop, the render service is stuck in a status of "Starting". This ALWAYS happens regardless of what project I'm working in. I've tried one of the Vegas sample projects with all its resources in the same folder. I've tried a project that ONLY has generated media. I've tried rendering as an AVI. I've tried rendering an MPEG but setting the options to not be final so that it renders each segment as an AVI and then stiches it back together at the end to make the MPEG file. Same results.

Interestingly enough, when the main service tries to start the remove service, an "Untitled - Sony Vegas 6.0" window does come up on the external host. This is the same window as the other 2 that popup on my primary machine and render the segments. But, the key difference is that this one never renders any segments.

Obviously, both machines can ping each other. Both machines can see the same shared drive where the projects and its resources are at. The main service can see the other one. It knows its status is "Ready" until I start to render and then it puts it in "Starting" status where it stays.

I've considered the possibilty that maybe I'm missing come video or audio codec that it needs, but that seems unlikely since I installed Vegas on the laptop and everything seems to run fine there. I can open one of the same projects from the shared drive and render it stand-alone on the laptop.

I don't see any log messages on the laptop other than the ones it gives when it first starts up. I know that others have had this problem, and I think the software should do a better job of helping diagnose the problem, but hey, nothings perfect.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Comments

Liam_Vegas wrote on 6/28/2005, 7:43 AM
I had the exact same problem....

The solution is related to the DNS Suffix (related to your computer name setting)

Follow this KnowledgeBase article for the fix.

Don't worry that the title of that article does not specifically reference the condition you are experiencing... THE SOLUTION is the same.

My original post about this problem... and the solution is here
fflowers wrote on 6/28/2005, 8:56 AM
Interesting. I'm pretty sure that the rendering machine has the fully qualified name as the computer name when I click on My Computer, Properties, Computer Name tab, but I don't think that my main machine does. I'll double-check both of these when I get home this evening and post a reply as to whether this works. Thx.
Liam_Vegas wrote on 6/28/2005, 9:21 AM
The only other thing I can think of checking... is the usual "firewall" issues... There was another reported problem very similar to this... and that was related to the use of Zone Alarm.
fflowers wrote on 6/29/2005, 7:05 PM
Liam - Thank you very much for your continued help and support. You were right. The computer names were not set to be fully qualified. I fixed that.

Setting the DNS suffix DID appear to help because the secondary PC's status was not stuck on "start" this time. It appeared that things were going along fine and were going to work. I am using Zone Alarm, but since everything appears to start rendering ok, I don't think that it's related to firewall settiings. I say this only because at first I couldn't even get the 2 renderers to talk to each other until I had adjusted my firewall settings and opened up the 2 machines as trusted through the setting of a trusted IP Address range.

So, things appeared to go ago, but then things hung. I tried this several times early in the morning before going to work. Finally, I started a 10 second sample project where all 3 renderers appeared to be rendering and all the CPUs were at 100%. I left for work and checked 12 hours later. All 3 PCs were at 100%, and the renering services were hung. I had to kill them with Task Manager. It looks suspiciously like some of the other threads about v6 hanging so I posted a reply to this thread:

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=400193