Frozen render

MickP wrote on 6/2/2008, 5:01 PM
Hi, I'm rendering a project in VMS Platinum 8 that includes a bunch of still photos. The stills are big - they're generally not really compressed and they're high resolution (from a stock photo site) and I need to keep them hi-res so I can pan and zoom effectively.

Problem is, the render starts slowing down once it gets to the part with the stills and then stops completely (always at the exact same frame). I ran it overnight but it didn't ever complete.

Some basic stats:
- The project is about 6 minutes long, combination of DV and still photos
- I have the reduce interlace switch on for each of the stills
- Still photos generally very large, some are around 10MB each
- Computer has 3GB of RAM

Thanks in advance, Mick.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 6/2/2008, 5:31 PM
"10MB" doesn't really tell us much. What are the pixel dimensions of the images?

You could create a separate project with just a few of the stills, do all the panning and cropping, render to a DV .avi file, and use this new file in your main project in place of the stills. It may take some experimenting to find out how many you can handle at a time this way, but eventually you'd get through them all.

This would also shorten your final render time dramatically!
Eugenia wrote on 6/2/2008, 5:31 PM
Resize the photos and then load them on vegas. This is a known limitation and has been discussed here about 20 times.
MickP wrote on 6/2/2008, 6:26 PM
Thanks for the replies.

By "resize" what do you mean? Does the size of the files make much difference, or the resolution? i.e. is a 3000x2000 pixel jpeg usable if saved with say 85% compression? Or does the level of jpeg compression make no difference? Similarly, I'm wondering if it makes much difference whether various effects are being applied to the still - because it seemed to render some very complex bits with large images OK and then get stuck somewhere else for a reason I can't figure out.

I might try rendering some of the image parts on their own.

Thanks, Mick.
Chienworks wrote on 6/2/2008, 6:36 PM
It's the pixel resolution that matters. Compression is pretty much irrelevant because Vegas decompresses the images to work on them. 3000x2000 isn't too terribly huge, but more than a few of them will eat up memory fast and bog Vegas down.

Resize means to make them smaller, like 900x600 instead of 3000x2000. But you indicated you don't want to do that since you still want to zoom and pan. Effects are going to slow things down too.
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 6/2/2008, 10:08 PM
Resize them to under 2048x2048 pixels. It's a known bug.

In the future, you could set your digital camera to this resolution, if you're planning on only to use the pictures with Vegas.
MickP wrote on 6/3/2008, 10:54 PM
Thanks for all the replies on this one.

I ended up cropping some photos and resizing others and was able to maintain the pan/zoom effects I needed and still get it to render.