Thanks KenB. The images are all jpegs. The ones in question are, currently, 16MP digital photos about 4.5MB in size.

Can you explain what this exactly means?

What is the reason that a cropped image in this application sometimes either renders incorrectly or not at all?

What kind of project?
How did you render?
Which (customized) template did you render?
 

This is a short movie composed of digital photos and music.  I attempted to render (save to my HD) to the MP4 format. Some of the crops were okay. The more drastic the crop, the more issues I experienced.

I never experienced this issue prior to Movie Studio ver.12.

Thanks for the info but again: "The more drastic the crop, the more issues I experienced."
What are the issues you see and we don't know?
Btw: for a video with only pictures you don't have to use an interlaced project, because all the frames in that video that you are making are full frames and not interlaced ones.

Sorry, j-v, not sure what "interlaced project" is. My knowledge/familiarity is very limited. Are you able to see the image I sent to KenB? This is what is rendered when I crop my photos in Movie Studio. The cropped images may look ok in the preview timeline but appear this way in the rendered movie. Thanks for your time.

At least you have to show 2 images, one with the desired outcom in Preview of Vegas or your original picture plus one of what is rendered.
How can we know what is wrong if you only send one image if we don't know what is has to be?

Original with the crop marks:

Video preview:

Rendered image:

The cropped images either display the vertical bars on the left or not at all (black screen) in the rendered video.

thanks.

OK, now it is clear what the faults are.
I can download that picture here but than it is not the same as your used source and thats why I cannot try it on my Movie St Pl 14.
Can you upload that picture on a server like dropbox so I can download it as it is to test. You can share here the link to that file.

Here's a link to the original image on ms onedrive: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkAIxFhK7Yox3zrzWMAGbqbX7bHj?e=cn2joR

Hope it works... Thanks for taking the time to assist.

I don't have VMS 14, but your image renders fine in VMS 15 using your project properties and Save to Hard Disk MP4. It doesn't matter how much I crop, it always works.

Ken.

This is a screenvideo how VMS 14 does it, something wrong at the OP's hardware or settings maybe

@j-v When I do exactly your test, rendering on my old PC with the lastest VMS, takes just 2 seconds. In your screen capture it takes a few seconds more (7 seconds for 50%) with also having the impression that you cut the part out after 50% of the rendering capture. Is this difference due to VMS14 or to the screen capture?

That's exactly the same result as on my old desktop with the latest VMS. I cannot compare with VMS14 because it's no longer on my desktop. Probably the slower speed is than caused by VMS14 and not by the hardware.

Just reinstalled VMS14 and indeed the same render test takes 7 seconds, which is caused by the older mp4 codec (Main concept). The new Magix codec wasn´t yet introduced in VMS14. That's the reason for rendering difference.

Also I do get a clean render output without the issues @LesterT described.

Sorry for going off-topic in this thread.

Thank you all for your time and assistance. I installed v.14 on a Surface Pro and the rendering looks ok. I uninstalled/reinstalled on my HP desktop but...same story. I'm guessing it's some hardware issue on the HP.

One thing.. when installing on the Surface, I did see a popup showing "updating mp4 codec" (or something like that. Both machines have the latest Win10 updates. When I performed the uninstall/reinstall on the HP, I did not see that popup. Would you know if there is a way to manually update the mp4 codec on my HP desktop? Though, maybe that's not the culprit...

Anyway, many thanks for your time. Much appreciated. Stay safe.