Make Movie in alternative directory

BDA_ABAT wrote on 1/23/2005, 9:11 AM

An acquaintance posted this in another on-line forum without success. Thought some folks here might be able to help.

"I have VMS installed in the default directory: "C:\Program Files\Sony\Vegas Movie Studio 4.0" Everything appears to be working correctly, except I cannot "Make Movie" on my D: drive (which has about a hundred gig free. VMS will only create media files on my C: drive which has about 10 gig free. I can save project files, media clips, etc., on D: but when trying to "Make Movie" on D: I get a dialog box titled "Invalid Path" that says "Read only or invalid path. Please correct it. [OK]" Please note that D is a different physical disk. It's the only partition on a Western Digital 160GB 8MB cache IDE (not SATA). The C: drive in this computer is a 200GB Seagate IDE (not SATA). I am able to successfully save to other partitions on the physical disk that contains C. This appears to be a problem specifically with the D drive, but it works perfectly in the other video editing applications I use (Serious Magic, Ulead, etc.). I'm running as administrator and permissions appear to be set correctly. I've uninstalled and reinstalled VMS. Please advise. Thank you. "

Bruce

Comments

vurbach wrote on 1/24/2005, 11:10 AM

Hi. I'm the guy with this odd "Invalid Path" problem.

My thanks to BDA_ABAT for posting it on my behalf.

I'm considering moving to full Vegas and therefore treating VMS as a trial version. However, if it's this hard to get support from Sony Media techs, I may rethink that plan. It's been 10 days with no meaningful resolution so far.

-V-

IanG wrote on 1/24/2005, 2:28 PM

This is a user forum, not Sony tech support (despite being described as a support forum). Have you tried the phone or e-mail links?

Ian G.

gogiants wrote on 1/24/2005, 2:45 PM

I save to a separate (external) drive all the time. Must be something in your setup.

Here come some basic questions; apologies if you've already tried these things!

When you use "Make Movie" are you specifying a full path, or are you using the "Browse..." button to navigate to the drive and choose the location? In other words, does Movie Studio at least recognize your "D:" drive as a valid location before you start rendering?

Is your D: drive online and usable in Windows prior to you opening Movie Studio? Have you tried saving to the root "D:" location, as opposed to some subfolder?

vurbach wrote on 1/25/2005, 3:38 AM

IanG - Sorry for not being clear. My rant was directed to Sony Media technical support, not the users of this forum. I appreciate all assistance here and do realize this is a user forum. I did send several emails to Sony support, without much coming back from them. I haven't called.

Companies say they want users to send an email with their problems -- rather than tying up support lines -- but when it takes them a week or more to respond...

gogiants - Thank you for your offer of help. In this one post, you've already suggested five times as many helpful ideas as Sony "technical support." However, yes, I did try all the things you suggested. Luckily, I'm still in the playing around stage with VMS and all my other "production" programs are running perfectly. It's a strange problem, and I'm more irked at the slow, unhelpful support at Sony Media than anything else.

-V-

IanG wrote on 1/25/2005, 6:30 AM

>IanG - Sorry for not being clear. My rant was directed to Sony Media technical support, not the users of this forum

No problem, I wasn't taking it personaly :-)

You could try checking what location you've specified for your temp files. Under MS3 I can't get it to change inadvertently (i.e. I specify a location and it stays the same regardless of where my output files go) but your symptoms sound very similar to what happens if you specify a nonexistent folder.

I wonder what would happen if you specified a folder on D: for your temp files and then tried directing the output to C: or D:?

Ian G.

vurbach wrote on 1/25/2005, 1:34 PM

It doesn't seem to matter where I point the temp files. C: or D: or whatever.

Perhaps this additional information will help:

(1) I plugged in an external firewire drive (recognized as drive letter H:). I am able to save files to this drive without a problem.

(2) I have double-checked write permissions and security settings on my D: drive and compared them to other drives in the system. All are OK.

(3) I have checked the drive for logical and physical errors. No problems found.

(4) I ran Norton Utilities diagnostics and CheckIt diagnostics on the system. No problems found.

(5) This is a computer dedicated for video editing. It has no antivirus installed. All drivers are signed. It has been stable for months. No utilities or other programs of that type are running on it. I have disabled the SP-2 XP firewall to debug this problem, but that had no effect one way or the other.

(6) I have run Windows Movie Maker, Ulead MediaStudio, and Visual Communicator on this computer, saving to drive D: with no problems or issues.

(7) Although the problem I'm reporting is specific to my D: drive, it is an issue that occurs exclusively with Vegas Movie Studio. All other applications save just fine on this drive.

To summarize my problem, if I "Make Movie" and "Save it to your hard drive," Immediately after entering any D:\filename or any D:\subfolder\filename, I get the "Invalid Path" "Read only or invalid path. Please correct it [OK]" dialog box.

-V-

Gatman wrote on 1/25/2005, 4:58 PM

Hi Vurbach,

I'm a total newbie here, but I have something you can try that might help. I had a similar type of error when I was trying to install the trial version of the Vegas Movie Studio. I kept getting error messages about invalid paths and no permission. I had to clean out all of my temp directories and then it worked fine.

It may not work but it's worth a try. I went around and manually deleted everything that was in any directory called "temp".

Hope you get it working,

Gary

vurbach wrote on 2/19/2005, 12:34 PM

OK. I finally resolved this very strange problem. I don't know what was wrong, but it's fixed now. I had another 160GB WD drive in an external enclosure and swapped it with the the internal D: drive. The "can't save" problem followed the drive into the external enclosure (now drive H: for the record), and the "new" internal D: drive operated without problem. I then swapped the problem drive back into the SC400 and formatted it. Now it works fine.

So puzzling. Except for Vegas Movie Studio, every other app I have on that computer saved data on the "problem" drive without issue. Now, after a fresh format, VMS does too.