Platinum Studio 9 crashes when rendering .m2ts

Steve UK wrote on 2/15/2010, 12:51 PM

I have a short video (just less than 5 mins) and Vegas will not successfully render this. It crashes at various stages. I have successfully rendered a cut down 30 second portion of the video.

I can also produce a Make Movie .ISO output of the full 5 mins, but I want to.m2ts version to write back to the camcorder.

Any suggestions to get the .m2ts rendering to work?

My system is a 4GB Dell, 2.8 MHz, 32 bit Vista

Comments

david_f_knight wrote on 2/15/2010, 4:25 PM

There are two separate issues here: the render problem and the write back to the camcorder intention.

As for the render problem, you may be running into a bug within Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 for which a workaround has been discussed here:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=12&MessageID=695663
which references this Vegas Pro thread:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=4&MessageID=695038

It's a lot to read through, because the final workaround wasn't apparent from the start of either thread. (In summary, this workaround involves a slight modification to five Vegas files and, since you're running 32-bit Vista, a change to your Windows BCD (Boot Configuration Data) store. None of these changes are difficult to do.) Give it a shot and see what happens, and let us know how it turns out for you.

The other issue is writing your rendered .m2ts video back to your camcorder. Chances are that your camcorder will not play back any .m2ts video that you render with Vegas (or any other editor), assuming your camcorder is an AVCHD camcorder. The reason is because there are several other necessary files associated with the .m2ts file(s) that are also part of the AVCHD specification. Simply copying back a .m2ts file without the proper associated files will yield a non-compliant AVCHD structure. However, I can't guarantee your camcorder won't work with it, but I know some won't. In any case, it is easy to try and it might work for you. There are several options for viewing your edited high definition video... I'm assuming you want to play your edited HD video on a HD TV but don't have a Blu-ray recorder and/or player?

Steve UK wrote on 2/16/2010, 4:44 AM

Thanks david, I will follow up on your advice.

I don't have an issue with writting .m2ts file to the camcorder. I have the Sony software (Image Browser) that ensures the necessary files/structure are setup. I have tried this with the short 30 second .m2ts file I was able to generate and this was OK. Hopefully scaling up to a larger videos will still work - albeit the 30 second one took a long time, so I don't like to think how long something of a reasonable length will need.

I don't have the Blu-ray gear in place yet. I was hanging back on this investment until I could be sure Vegas would give a result as initially I was also having problems using Make Movie menu to create Blu-Ray output.

I'll keep this thread posted on how I got on with the fixes you provided.

david_f_knight wrote on 2/16/2010, 8:46 AM

I look forward to reading your follow-up post about your results.

At the risk of jumping the gun, here are the options I am aware of that you have for recording and playing your edited HD video:

1) If your edited videos are less than about 40 minutes in length, you can render and record them in 16Mbps AVCHD format onto regular single-layer DVDs with a DVD writer, and play them on any AVCHD-compliant Blu-ray disc player. (I have done this and the results are excellent. Sony and Panasonic make AVCHD-compliant Blu-ray disc players. There are some hoops you have to jump through to do this because Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 doesn't support this approach natively, but it's not hard to do. I've posted how elsewhere in this forum.) (You can also do this with dual-layer DVDs and/or at 10Mbps for substantially longer HD videos.)

2) If your videos are very long (and you don't want to split them across multiple DVDs) and/or you require 24Mbps playback (the highest AVCHD rate for recording) and/or you require the ability to playback on any Blu-ray disk player (not just AVCHD-compliant ones), then you can render them in Blu-ray format and record them with a Blu-ray writer onto Blu-ray media, and play them on any Blu-ray disc player.

3) You can buy a Sony PS3 (I think) which apparently has pretty robust HD capabilities. Forum member Eugenia has discussed this option in various threads here.

4) You can buy a HD media player (basically an external hard disk and interface circuitry) and connect it via USB 2.0 or HDMI(?) to your computer or HD TV. Forum member michaelt is a proponent of this approach and has discussed it in various threads here.

5) You can continue to record your .m2ts files to your Sony camcorder via the Image Browser software and connect that to your HD TV for playback.

6) You can render your video in progressive mode in any of certain various HD formats and play them on your computer; use this approach for uploading HD content to websites such as vimeo, YouTube, exposureroom, dailymotion, etc. However, 720 lines of resolution is probably the best you can do with this approach. All the other approaches discussed above allow 1080 lines of resolution I believe.

PNguyen wrote on 2/17/2010, 5:28 PM

David and Co,
Whoever figured out the BCDEdit and CFFExplorer tricks deserve a heapful of accolades. My AVCHD projects consistently crashed during rendering and I was shopping for another solution until I ran across this post. Now, I can render with no crashing, no hangs and it actually renders faster. Unbelievable! I just can't believe that Sony hasn't fixed this problem yet.

Steve UK wrote on 5/19/2010, 11:32 AM

If anyone is still following this, I have eventually made the changes and on a sample of one I can now remder m2ts files.

For info - might help others in my position. This is very straightforward and quick once you know how to overcome the Vista security. This is also easy once someone points it out, i.e. Run CFF explorer in adminstrator mode.