Comments

ushere wrote on 12/19/2009, 5:05 PM
try rendering out small sections, then combine.

alternatively, try 50/50, and if your render strikes out on the second half, narrow that render down. obviously there's something on your t/l that's throwing vegas into a wobbly.

leslie
maynard wrote on 12/19/2009, 5:57 PM
thanks leslie...i'll give that a shot. if i render out into sections as mpg-2....then combine them and re-render as mgp 2 again....does that hurt my video quality?

i took out the photo that it stopped on and am trying again...we'll see if i get different results this time.
ushere wrote on 12/19/2009, 6:19 PM
i would render to avi if sd, if hd, well, either m2t or mxf.

once you've got a completed project (albeit in sections), then i'd render the whole out to mpg....

good luck

btw, what format / size are the pics?
maynard wrote on 12/19/2009, 7:50 PM
some are jpegs and some are tiffs. sizes range from 1mb to 15mb
ushere wrote on 12/19/2009, 8:25 PM
ah, tiff's.....

i'd certainly convert them to .png (i ONLY ever put png's on my t/l) and see how the whole thing goes....
alltheseworlds wrote on 12/20/2009, 12:16 AM
Yep, those large image files will kill it every time. It won't render until you slim down those files.
fausseplanete wrote on 12/20/2009, 4:24 AM
Yes, it's crap isn't it. Eventually I managed to wrangle it, as explained further below, maybe that explanation will help you.

I spent over a week with Vegas 8.0c (32-bit) anxiously trying to get a render to complete, attempting all the techniques others gave above and more. My project was a wedding video with quite a few photos overlaid, because I didn't know that was a bad idea - Vegas doesn't like stills it seems, at least not in this context. Previous projects (over previous years) consisting only of video have been fine. Only since I have been adding stills has it been a problem. Partial renders (for preview) worked OK, it's just when rendering the whole project (just over an hour) that the freezes occurred. Same kind of freeze - progress info continued counting up/down the time but CPU activity zilch.

It remains to be seen how well 64-bit Vegas (or indeed other NLEs) would cope with an equivalent project (I hope to experiment with this sometime). I imagined that 64-bit Vegas 8, being able to access more memory, should in principle (wonder what happens in practice) be less affected, but on the other hand I have read other forum threads where people having trouble in Vegas 64-bit are advised to go back to 32-bit. What I do want is stability and lack of doubt... Problems have been reported by others with Vegas 9's "disappearing" stills etc., so not wanting to introduce a further layer of doubt/risk (and having run out of project time) I have chosen to avoid experimentation with that version, and like lots of people, hope for a more reliable version 9d.

What did work in the end was a combination of the following:
Convert all JPGs to PNGs.
For Ken Burns effects, render each such photo-animation out as a video clip (then substitute that for the photo in the main project).
Cut it horizontally (batch render (script) - render on regions)
Cut it vertically - mute half the tracks, render, mute the other half (and restore the first half), render again. Now combine all these sections together in a "re-join" project.
Render to a non-Mpeg format (use another one such as Cineform, HuffYuv or DV, my preference is in that order) Have a separate project which only takes that in and renders it out to Mpeg2.

I found that sometimes it helps if the project is embedded as a nested project within another one. On the other hand, sometimes it helps when a nested project is made non-nested. Just have to experiment. Lots of overnight render attempts, lots of setting the alarm clock for weird hours to check when a render might complete (or may have frozen), lots of disturbed sleep.

Thanks to advice from this forum and a heck of a lot of persistence I eventually found the combination that worked (as listed above), but I it was a very experimental, time-consuming (several days) and anxious time (was it ever going to work?).

Looking at the Task Manager, memory use climbed to around 1.5 or 2 GB. I understand that the Windows 32 version of Vegas can access only 2GB RAM (even if computer has more than this e.g.mine has 8GB). I tried Blink's memory hack (modifying all the listed files, having first saved copies of their originals) but it made no difference as far as I could tell. Not sure what Vegas was doing but it looked like memory use only ever increased, not decreased, maybe a memory leak or hog (not releasing it when it could in principle).

Never experienced so many problems before, presumably because I never combined so many stills in a multi-layer project rendering to Mpeg2 before.