Selective Pre-Render!

Select the area and do a Pre-Render of that area before you actually render.

I too have this problem at times. VEGAS hangs or crashes when it would reach a certain part. Sometimes it woud even Render and leave that section untouched. Meaning, it wouldn't render any of the effects in that section. Always the same part. My work-around is to Pre-Render the section. Takes a few extra minutes but it's worth it. Works for me every time. Hope it also works for you.

This will not solve your original problem but I find TMPGEnc does a somewhat better job rendering mpeg-1 than the MC encoder that ships with Vegas. I think for mpeg-1 only it's free. Probably if you've got good footage without noise then it maybe a wasted effort but with poor quality stuff to start with the TMPGEnc mpeg-1 encoder seems to produce a result that looks no worse than the original.
Word of warning though, TMPGEnc does take a little getting used to and has lots of almost hidden features.

" I find TMPGEnc does a somewhat better job rendering mpeg-1 than the MC encoder", I agree with farss. you can render source and use TMPGEnc Tools to merge them together. I have used TMPGEnc to merge Vegas and other Meg1 material together with no problems. its great software for its price!

4:2:2 codec? Not sure what that is. I'll admit, I'm new to video. I got started with Vegas because it solved a couple of audio issues for me regarding orphaned software I was using. Never thought I would use the video portions. Don't think I had it more than a few weeks and video jobs started showing up. Talk about learning by doing.

I just finished rendering to MPEG-2 and then rendering to MPEG-1. It worked in the test segment which had always hung up the computer before, but when I tired to do the whole file the MPEG-1 render hung in the same spot 62% of the way through the file - frame 27,997.

I'm going to try using the VCD setting. It has always worked when I tested it on the segment. I guess it is time to see if it will work on the entire file. I"m not happy with the frame size in Media Player. It comes up smaller than the default setting unless I click the lower right corner of Media Player.

This is just one of a whole series of clips I'm doing for my client, and would prefer them to all look the same and fill Media Player without the extra click.

Tell me about the 4:2:2 codec, how to find it and use it, and I'll try a couple of other things. If I could figure out where I filed my V4 disk I would try that too.

I have TMPGEnc on the computer. I have installed it and tried to use it in the past, but I never get very far with it. Typically it tells me my trial period has already expired even though I have never used it, and it shuts down. I guess that has made me suspicious about spending money on it when in theory I was supposed to be able to try it first but can't.

I think it is still on one of the drives somewhere. I'll try one more time to see if I can make it do something for me.

I was able to render the whole file into MPEG-1 using the VCD format. I guess I'll just render all the other clips that way too. That way they'll all look the same. I still have to wonder what is wrong with this one clip in this one particular area that makes it impossible for a default MPEG-1 rendering. I wonder how much of it is the clip and how much is Vegas. I couldn't get any of these clips to render all the way through with V5 or V5b. I'm using V5a to get any success at all.

I would still be interested in additional information on your 4:2:2 suggestion.

I think you need to download a different version of TMPGEnc if you want only mpeg-1. I recall that had mpeg-1 only release that was free. Seems you've downloaded the full trial version.

JimMSG,
in Vegas, you now have a 4:2:2 codec (YUV) that you can render to as opposed to rendering to DV first. This will assure that you keep as much information before the render to MPEG. But for rendering to MPEG 1, which Vegas is not optimized for, it's somewhat of a waste. I only suggested it because it might have worked as an intermediary.
You'll find it in the Render As> (avi)Custom>Video>format dialog box as Sony YUV.

Turns out I was just being a ditz. I wasn't pushing the right buttons, and managed to make the program think I was doing MPEG-2 instead of MPEG-1. After taking another look at the programs offered for download and realizing there wasn't anything other than what I had already grabbed, I had another look at the program, and found the right way to do it.

The only thing I wish I could do is get the project size to the 720x480 I rendered every other file in. I really don't want to go back and re-render all the other files so they match. I guess I'm going to just let it go for now. This was a rush job, there is no duplication involved, so it won't be like there are 3000 copies that aren't right. I can always redo it for the client at a later date if he needs it.

The one thing I might try is to re-render the TMPGEnc version with V5 to see if I can get the larger size again, and to see if having it already in MPEG-1 format will let it get by the problem section in the clip. Of course the quality of the video might really suffer but it might be worth the experiment.

That worked. Quality isn't too bad considering, but now I'm going to have to try rendering the .avi file I used in TMPGEnc. I had changed the length from the original slightly and hadn't read how I could change that in TMPGEnc, so I rendered the edited version to .avi first. Going to have to see if that will render to MPEG-1 without crashing. It would give me the size I'm looking for, and will look nicer too.

Nope, that didn't work. It got hung in the same spot even though it had been re-rendered. I wonder what the problem is. Oh well, so it goes.