I finally crashed Vegas!

John_Cline wrote on 11/11/2004, 10:00 PM

I have a PNG compressed Quicktime .MOV file of an animation with an alpha channel. I generated the .MOV file in Vegas using a sequence of 32-bit Targa files I rendered in 3DS Max. It's a logo for one of my clients and I'll be using this logo on everything I do for them. Rather than keep the 1+ gig worth of TGA files on the hard drive or generate a 1+ gig uncompressed .AVI, I decided to use Quicktime with its lossless PNG compression in order to preserve the alpha channel and reduce the filesize down to 100 meg.

Anyway, all I had was the .MOV file on a track (set to "premultiplied" alpha) and a .PNG background on the track beneath it. I wanted to add a drop shadow, so I went into track motion and added one. Got out of track motion and, as soon as I clicked on the timeline, Vegas crashed. I tried this on some other .MOV files and it crashed every time. I didn't have time to play with it because I had a FedEx deadline breathing down my neck, so I blew off the drop shadow and finished the project. When I get the time, I'll rerender the animation as an uncompressed .AVI file with an alpha channel and see what happens.

I only bring this up because in the years I have been using Vegas, this is the first time it has crashed on me and, moreover, I could get it to crash every time. I'm going to blame Quicktime.

John

Comments

Grazie wrote on 11/11/2004, 10:16 PM

I had a deadline on a piece I was doing that used some heavy 3-D Door swing INs of a video using a bony faced guy, which was being used as an actual REAL Mask against a Starfield. Just as the "face" turn towards me - something like 45 degrees twsit in - Vegas fell over. I narrowed this down to a very small amount, 2 secs I think. I then gave up attempting to go as per, and compromised by taking ranges of "stills" by scrubbbing frame by frame. I ended up with a mass of stills and then brought these back to the t/l and then rendered that out. It worked, the client loved it and the audience clapped .. only I knew what was going on.

So, John, I wouldn't focus your attention just on the MOV, but it might be doing something to add to the overall OVERLOAD, that you/I can give Vegas to deal with. I'm gopnna dig out the project again, I think I too was using the "Mask" mask as a PNG too.

I offer my experience as to indicate that there are other instances that can get Vegas or maybe, my MoBo in a tizz - yeah?

Grazie

John_Cline wrote on 11/11/2004, 11:01 PM

I just re-rendered the .TGA animation sequence in Vegas as an uncompressed .AVI with alpha. I replaced the .MOV file with the .AVI file and the drop shadow worked fine. Apple has never been able to write decent software for the PC...

John