I have 2 stills in my project about 5 sec. each. When I render them as an MPEG-2 file and play back throuigh windows media player or whatever the video is just black. Like it didn't render anything?
Check to make sure you don't have your video track muted (the little circle with the diagonal line button). Also, under Options, make sure you don't have Mute All Video selected.
stills can be a little weird in MPEG-2. I make slide-shows and compress them to MPEG-2 and Windows Media. I often get strange glitches with stills. I solved the problem by using TMPGEnc instead of the Vegas internal MPEG-2 plug-in.