Long Rendering/Unable to Mix Audio

Mtnsummit wrote on 11/1/2004, 12:50 PM

Hope someone can lead me to the promised land - I finally finished building my first video, which was originally started with Screenblast 3.0, then upgraded my software to Movie Studio 4.0, and finished up some items in my video. The video contains footage from my DV camcorder, as well as a couple of songs added from CD's. I have two problems -

1) Huge rendering time - It took something in the neighborhood of 7 hours to render this 1 hour video. I do use video, stills, and mp3's, plus a small wav file.

But even then, I was not sucessfull.
I received the message

2) "An error occurred while creating the media file. Unable to mix audio. The operation timed out."

Once I had the movie and sound the way I wanted it, I clicked the "Make Movie" option, checked the fast rendering" box, clicked ok, then the procees starts, but again, get the above message. I told it to burn to DVD. I have a Sony DVD burner.

I have Windows XP professional verison running on a Pent 4 machine with 512 megs of Ram. The hardware seems to work fine with all of my other software apps.

Any help or suggestions how I can fix above problems? I have spent more hours than I care to think of compiling this "show".

Thanks,

John A.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 11/1/2004, 2:17 PM

Can you output an DV-AVI of your project, or do you get an error message then too? (On your machine, an AVi, depending on how many effects you have, should render in 5-10 minutes.)

Unlike an AVI, which can sometimes just copy AVI files directly during render, an MPEG2 must render and compress the entire project. An overnight render time is not unreasonable.

Anyway, if you are able to produce a suitable AVI, you can open a new project, drop the AVI in as one big clip and try producing a DVD from that. It will still take several hours to render, but at least you'll know you're working with a native file that doesn't have any errors in it.

Mtnsummit wrote on 11/2/2004, 9:42 AM

Thanks for your help - here is what I have so far, and will follow up with another post:

I created the DV-AVI file per your suggestion, and received a new message - "An error occured while creating the media file. An error occurred writing the file. Make sure you have write access to the file/folder and that there is enough free space."

On the Make Movie Screen here is some additional info I see:

Format: Video For Windows *.AVI
Template: NTSC DV
Audio: 48,000 hz, Stereo,PCM Uncompressed
Video:29.7 FPS, 720x480, Lower Field First
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 0.909 Open, DML Compatible
NTSC DV Video Files Compatible with Sony Video Capture.

It also showed on this screen the estimated size 12.9GB, Free 28.39GB

The AVI file also took a long time to render, I believe about 6 hours or so.

I also notice the AVI file is huge - 28GB according to windows explorer. Does this seem right? The whole length of the video is 56 minutes, with a couple of short WAV files and two songs thrown in.

I did notice in checking my hard drive space, I now only have 6 megs left - perhaps this is the problem with this new error message?

So, any other suggestions any one may have? I will try to free up some disc space, delete the AVI file, and try again.

I also notice in double clicking the windows AVI file, the movie startes to play in the windows media player, but video is quite choppy - I do not know if this is normal or not. My goal is to burn to a DVD for play on the TV.

Thanks for any further suggestions - perhaps I should go out and buy another hard drive to add to system?

Sincerely,
John A.

gogiants wrote on 11/2/2004, 1:43 PM

You should expect the final .avi file to be about 13+ Gig or so, as it showed on your estimate screen. I can't explain the size of the final .avi, other than to wildly speculate that because the render failed before completion that the file was somehow corrupted.

I do think that MovieStudio will create some hefty temporary files during the render process, which might explain why you ran out of disk space during the render in the first place. More disk space never hurts, but you might try clearing things off your hard drive and completed a successful render first...

Mtnsummit wrote on 11/2/2004, 3:02 PM

Thanks for the input - I went out today and bought a 120 gig hard drive to add to system - will try again and let everyone know what happens.

John A.

Steve Grisetti wrote on 11/3/2004, 2:31 PM

If you can, install that 120 gig drive as a second hard drive and store only your video files on it. This will make for less interruptions to your data flow during capture and output.

Mtnsummit wrote on 11/17/2004, 11:31 AM

Thanks to grisetti and gogiants - with your help and trouble shooting, I was able to create my first video that gets oohs and ahhs. As you mentioned, I created an AVI directly to the harddrive, then dumped that AVI file into a new project. It burned fine.

I do not know why my first attempt at directly rendering the MPEG way did not work, there must have been some file corruption going on. Hopefully future projects will not need this work around.

Thanks again for your time.

Steve Grisetti wrote on 11/17/2004, 12:42 PM

The obvious guess would be that there wasn't enough space on your old hard drive.

As gogiants mentioned, the software needs lots of "scratch disk" space. And quite often with programs that deal with files this size, the space must be continuous. In other words, if there are fragmented files on your drive, the software is only able to use the little spaces in between the fragments.

One of the many benefits of having a second hard drive dedicated to video is that, once you've defragged the captured files (and, later, your editing files) the normal operation of the computer won't defragment the disk.

Finally, to make a long story even longer, your computer can compensate for many lacks, including processing power and even physical memory, but lack of hard drive space is something it can't work around.

Congrats on your first major success!

Mtnsummit wrote on 11/18/2004, 9:03 AM

Thank you again, and a great great point about the 2nd hard drive not getting fragmented due to other programs/files running on it. I had never thought about that, but before getting the second hard drive, had noticed my main hard drive getting fragmented frequently. I should have gotten the second hard drive a long time ago! At $100.00 for 120 gigs, with usb plug and play (external drive), a painless upgrade.