Ideas For Working With A 90 Minute Project?

karma17 wrote on 8/11/2017, 1:21 AM

I am getting ready to edit a 90 minute project on Vegas and just this morning, I had problems with the system freezing and giving me an error message stating that it was unable to render media files or save back up .veg files. The error message also said it was unable to determine the cause of the problem.

Vegas would give the same message when I tried to save the .veg under another name. I have my system set-up with a 1 TB internal HD and two external 1 TB HD. I finally saved the .veg to my internal HD and for the moment, I was able to start rendering again. However, this makes me extremely nervous about starting into a big project and potentially having the system glitch out on me and losing an enormous amount of work. This is not about me not backing up my work as I go. This is about Vegas freezing up and giving me an error that seems to corrupt the .veg files and make rendering impossible.

Assuming that perhaps I'm doing something wrong by having the .veg file on the same drive as the source and rendered files, is there some best practice about where your source files, rendered files, and .veg files should go. Just from my experience, it doesn't seem Vegas likes having the .veg files mixed in with the source and rendered files. I'm only saying this because after I saved the .veg to another drive, the error stopped and I was able to render again.

Also, in order to protect against a glitch like this from causing so much havoc, I was wondering rather than nesting .veg files, which I don't feel comfortable about doing at all, would be it better to render them out 8-10 minute clips as SONY AVC Intra in an .MXF container and then once I'm ready to render the entire project, bring those clips all together in a master timeline and render out? That way I don't think Vegas will stress out the same as if they were .veg files.

My original source footage is AVC codec from a Sony A7S, and it shows as a match on the render page. I figured the .mxf would preserve the most data versus any other setting. Like I said, I just don't feel comfortable nesting .veg files, especially after today when I wasn't even able to save back up copies of my original .veg file.

I have rarely had issues with Vegas glitching like it today, and so I've found this entire incident disconcerting to say the least. I knew it would be a challenge to edit a 90 minute project in Vegas and was preparing to break my project down into small pieces, but did not expect it to start glitching so soon.

Any thoughts and ideas are appreciated.

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/11/2017, 6:33 AM

I've done several long form projects in Vegas over the years and I only have had two types of issue:

1) out of memory issues which were solved by working with smaller & rendering smaller sections (don't think I've had these since I got Vegas 64-bit)

2) issues that wouldn't be considered Vegas's fault like bad hardware, driver issue, 3rd party codec issue, media issue, etc.

Depending on what I'd do with a long form project I'd lay down my media on the TL & do my editing, then save the .veg & break it up in to smaller chunks for more detailed work (sometimes a couple dozen tracks & lots of media, FX, etc).

If you're just on the phase where putting down your media & not doing FX, multicam, etc. to it yet then there's a problem somewhere else, issue #2. I never had 32-bit Vegas run out of memory with just video/audio events (unless there was a 3rd party codec that was messing things up).

karma17 wrote on 8/11/2017, 6:49 AM

Thanks for the response.

Yeah, I'm not sure what happened today, but I just kept getting this error saying "An error occurred while creating the media file. The reason for the error could not be determined." And unfortunately, that type of message was not helpful in terms of trying to pinpoint whatever the problem might have been. Any way, I resolved it for now by saving the .veg to the internal hard drive and not to the external one, so perhaps there is an issue with one of the external drives. The scary part was that I put in several hours of work editing the first section of the project, and the .veg essentially became corrupted and would no longer save and could not be used for rendering. So I ended up having to recreate it all. This is the first time I have ever had this major of a problem with Vegas and unfortunately, it happened right when I was starting this massive project.

So for now, it is working and I can nest .veg files, but I'm still apprehensive going forward.

I guess my only question now is what is if .mxf AVC Intra is the highest quality I can render out in. I'd like to have the highest quality rendition of my clips just in case the .veg files glitch out on me again. I am in the process of getting a new computer with two internal drives, so I hope this never happens again. But I want to not only back up my .veg files, but also create high quality renders I can use to recreate the project if I have to in a pinch.

I'm a huge supporter of Vegas; just a little shaken by what happened earlier because it has never happened before.

JackW wrote on 8/11/2017, 1:56 PM

Much of my editing is of material 90 to 120 minutes in length, sometimes more, cutting material from two-camera shoots. I have found that work is most stable when the source material is on a different drive than the edit drive. Also, when rendering, I always render to a different drive than the drive holding the .veg file and source materials. This seems to avoid render crashes. I"m editing files taken directly from Sony NX5U cameras, no intermediaries.

When I save, which I do often, I save to the current file -- e.g., "Project A.veg" then save as "Project A1.veg" This can prevent a lot of grief if your project should crash.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/11/2017, 5:27 PM

Is your external drive write protected?

karma17 wrote on 8/12/2017, 3:17 AM

@JackW That makes a lot of sense to me. I can imagine that when you have a multi-layer project with hundreds of references to source files that it is possible for errors to occur somewhere in there. Going forward, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

@TheHappyFriar It looks like it was, but I'm not sure how it was working. I did set the permissions now, but still can't save the .veg file that was on there. But that's a really great point to be aware of. I never thought to ck that. And who knows? It might have caused a problem somehow.

For some reason, the external drives just don't seem to do well with the .veg files on them, but I can use the external drives for the source files and to render files to. Maybe the .veg file likes being more centrally located? I don't know, but at least the darn thing is working now.

I love Vegas for its stability and it's just a shame this happened. But I'm attributing it to my system and not necessarily to the software program. I wish Vegas could confirm best practices for setting up your system in terms of files, but short of that, I guess we just have to rely on our collective experiences.

Thanks so much for the responses!!!

karma17 wrote on 8/12/2017, 5:53 AM

Just to update on this.

I did adjust the properties on the External Hard Drive to write and read to everyone. However, the problem I was having can still occur. I've isolated to the error occuring to the one external hard drive and the problem seems to be when a source file is on the drive AND a file is being rendered to that same drive. I got the above error when I tried to render just one short clip to the external drive and the source file was also on that same drive. However, when I rendered from that drive to another drive, it rendered fine. So, forwhatever reason, even with permissions set, a can't use that external drive as a source file and render destination. At least, that's what I've concluded for now.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/12/2017, 6:46 AM

Try doing this:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/245174/restore_access_to_a_write_protected_hard_drive.html

On my external that has always fixed the issue.