Monitor won't wake up while rendering a 90min video

PODxt wrote on 6/20/2017, 4:37 AM

Hi, I worked on a film of 90 min past Sunday with Vegas Pro Video. I'm not used to work on projects this long, I usually work on 5-8 min videos. So I did a little editing (nothing really heavy) of these 90 min of footage: applied 2 image filters on the 2 video tracks (different angles with vibrance corrections), some titles with opacity effects and that's about it. I started to render my video sunday at 11pm with CPU only (not GPU) and IIRC, the rendering options are Internet HD mp4/aac 1080p , 2 pass encoding with variable bitrate @ 8Mbps , framerate @ 25fps (same as source files). And by the time I'm typing (20/06/2017, 11am) the computer is still working on the render. So that's been 36 hours now.

The problem is that when I woke up monday morning, my display got turned off as if it went into power saving and I can't wake it up with mouse (USB) and keyboard (PS2). The Keyboard is not responding when I'm hitting the CAPS LOCK key (ie it's not switching on the green light for CAPS LOCK). Since I can't see anything on my screen, I absolutely don't know when / if the render will be over in 1h, 12h, 48h, or 1 week. I have an ANTEC Sonata 3 case that flashes blue leds when the HD is working and it flashes once per second so that's not heavy activity but it's writing on disk.

I fear to damage my HD1 by just hitting the power off switch. Is there a way to wake my monitor up so I can see how much hours there are left? Or would you shut down the computer?

Yesterday, I read about Vegas Pro allocating ALL the RAM to the preview thus leaving nothing but pagefile for the render...

Here is my setup:
CPU: Core i7 2600K @3.4Ghz (not OC)
Cooling: Noctua NH-D14
Mobo: Asus P8P67
RAM: 4x4GB RipJaws X Series DDR3-SDRAM PC3-12800 - F3-12800CL9Q-16GBXL
GC: Gigabyte Gefore GTX750 1GB
SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 128GB
HD1: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 SATA 3Gb/s - 2 To 7200 RPM 32 Mo SATA III
HD2: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 SATA 3Gb/s - 3 To 7200 RPM 32 Mo SATA III
PSU: Seasonic SI2 Bronze 620W
Case: Antec Sonata 3
OS: Windows 7 Home

Thanks in advance

Comments

Robert W wrote on 6/20/2017, 7:22 AM

My first suspicion would be that the computer may have gone into hybrid sleep mode. How are you sure that it is still rendering? Can you see any activity on disks? If the machine was left unattended that long it is possible that Windows may also have started an update and killed your render, and possible started up with the screen not properly activated (this happens to me). It is also possible that the screen has just thrown a bit of a wobbly.

I would suggest powering the screen off at the mains in the first instance, and leaving it for a minute or two, then powering it on. If that makes no difference and you can see not obvious activity on the target render disk, I would consider pushing the power button on the machine to see if it wakes the machine out of a sleep state.

Even on a high power setting, machines will by default go to sleep after being left unattended for several hours. A built in feature to override this from Vegas would be handy.

If you are definitely seeing activity on the disk and you think it may still be rendering, I would suggest waiting it out until it seems apparent that the activity has stopped, give it a little longer after that and then try and power down the system and start it up again. Depending on how your system is configured you may find that it hibernates and then starting up again brings it out of hibernation and back to where you were.

PODxt wrote on 6/20/2017, 1:40 PM

I tried turning the monitor off and on but still no display, I think the graphic card went into power saving mode so I can't wake up the display. I think it's still rendering because I can see the blue light is flashing (the blue led from my Sonata case which indicates HD activity, but it flashes only once every second, so that's not intense). I guess I'll wait until tomorrow morning (it will then be 60 hours of rendering for a 90min video...) and cross my fingers not to corrupt any data on the HD...

fr0sty wrote on 6/20/2017, 1:47 PM

this won't help much this time, but next time go into windows power settings and disable all of the auto shut off settings. Manually turn off your monitor when leaving it to render for a while. I've had renders ruined by both the system going to sleep (which at best pauses the render) and the monitor shutting off.

PODxt wrote on 6/20/2017, 2:32 PM

You're 100% right, dully noted, this is the 1st thing I'll do when I'll get my hand back on my system

Adi-W wrote on 6/21/2017, 6:52 PM

I had two times this problem while doing a long render and, like you, my keyboard and mouse were not waking up my PC. Didnot know what to do, so finally I tried the command Ctrl-ALt-Del and immediatly the Windows7 window appear with its 5 choices (note that Ctrl-ALt-Del always bring this window when you are not logout). Then choosing the Option "Open the Task Manager" did make my system back again. Strange in fact that while the keyboard seems to be dead, the command Ctrl-ALt-Del did work.

PODxt wrote on 6/22/2017, 8:20 AM

Hi jwe, I haven't tried the CTRL+ALT+SUPP option, I just hit reset on my computer case. It appears that in fact the rendering stopped 4 or 5 hours later judging from the modification time and date of the produced video file. I immediately ran chkdsk /f /r in safe mode after that and fortunately there were no apparent damage. I immediately changed the power saving option for the monitor;) And also switched from MainConcept to Sony AVC which renders faster!