i've always rendered to 'new track', since i've used vegas. but the time i've faffed around with the 'event', i know it's what i want (even at preview auto), so why bother with a 'pre'?

leslie

New track produces a "New Track" - I don't want it!

New track produces a "New Track" - with a Generic "name" NT! - I don't want it.

New track produces a "New Track" - produces a new file - somewhere. Ugh!

Leslie, I don't find, with my work at Preview Auto is what I want nor is it good enough for frame rate or clarity.

New track was good for me to finalise a section. I really used to do it. But I have changed my workflow either consciously or subconsciously to using nested sections on the fly to bash on, this works so I can incorporate interim adjusts (I do this very very often now!) and hoping back and forth. Nested takes care of this sloppy editor, keeps him a bit more methodical and I don;t end up with a Generic name and multiple track layers AND additional ADDING audios!

So that's why I use prerenders but now in conjunction with nesting.

Actually, on some occasions I quite LIKE the prerenders disappearing from view, when I do something, but ion other occasions I just wish they were a bit more intelligent and "SPLIT" my event/s at the change. Now THAT would be neat?!?

Grazie

Apart from rendering to RAM all prerenders create a file somewhere and with some generic name. Even nesting creates a file, from memory in the same folder as the project and unfortunately the preview file from a nested project can be dodgy if you've got speed ramps in the nested project.
Agreed using Vegas's way of rendering to a new track is a pain. From memory everytime you do it it can create yet another new track.
Soo, what I do when all of the above bugs me too much is just render the region to a new file that I name, that goes where I tell it to using a custom template that doesn't include audio. I put that on a track that I name, seems smooth enough to me but mightn't suit everyone, doesn't always suit me either, just another idea to have in your box of tricks.

Bob.

"From memory everytime you do it it can create yet another new track. Soo, what I do when all of the above bugs me too much is just render the region to a new file that I name, that goes where I tell it to using a custom template that doesn't include audio. I put that on a track that I name"

This is exactly what I've been doing, as well. Creating a new track for each new prerender is plain silly.

thankfully we're all individuals, just like each other ;-)

i come from a background in broadcast (old time), and i'd be compiling, rough cutting, etc, with burnt-in tc dubs. if i was lucky, it was on betasp, but more often on vhs or low / highband. i've got pretty use to not needing anything more than preview at auto - even with an e6600 i get 25fps, and that only drops when i start doing something nasty - which i can judge just as well at preview quality.

NOW, if it didn't render as i expected i can guarantee i'd be at the top of this forum swearing and cursing (with some of the best of them!).

i see no problems simply naming my 'new track, and storing it where i want for future reference (ie. with or outside of the project i'm working on.

pita creating a new track each time, but what's a couple of button push to repro on a 'new track only' track, and deleting the new track?

works for me, but then again, i now drink decaf, eat my greens, and could audtion for grumpy old men on any subject - incl. bloody new-fangled nle's....

whatever works for you is by far the best technique...

have a good weekend, what's left of it

leslie

I don't render to a new track because to me that way of working is absurd. Lots of times I just want to preview color and level adjustments, or see the movement of an overlay title with motion in real time. If I created a new track for each prerender that I want to do, I would end up with this gigantic project full of tracks one over another. Sure, I could have just one prerender track and move down the new prerender, but that is also a waste of time when you do it over and over.

My point is, prerender should work as advertised, not work for a while and then not work anymore until you restart the program. That's something that I've never saw happen in FCP or Premiere.

"Selectively pre-render video" is an SD only feature as far as I have been able to see. Yes you can select it and go through the motions, but it only works properly with SD DV codec footage.

"Selectively pre-render video" is an SD only feature as far as I have been able to see. Yes you can select it and go through the motions, but it only works properly with SD DV codec footage.

If it were a DV only feature, it wouldn't work at all with the AVCHD or HDV codecs, and it does, until it screws up after a few prerenders.

When I try to use it with AVCHD or HDV codecs, it prerenders everything. There is nothing selective about it. Maybe the reason it is screwing up after a few prerenders is that in trying to prerender everything, it is running out of buffering space.

Well, when you do a prerender a file is definitely created "somewhere". It seems to me that SCS could rethink the prerender metaphor a little bit. Prerenders are essentially on their own specialized track. You can't do anything to them but they ought to ripple and split without giving you problems. And maybe it'd very cool to have an option to promote your prerender to a real track. That'd be a nice trick.

Rob

I wonder if a script could promote a prerender to a new track. Assuming you could successfully prerender, of course.

Another cute trick might be a script to consolidate tracks. Say you've rendered to a new track a couple of times and now have superfluous tracks. Maybe the script could allow you to pick two tracks to consolidate into one. It might have to warn you if it's going to create overlaps.

Rob

Essentially, you can think of a prerender as a render to a specialized track with very limited features. Every prerender goes to the prerender track. There's potential in this view to make prerenders a little more useful.

rob

"That's something that I've never saw happen in FCP or Premiere. "

Ah, but those are different animals in the way they rely on rendering stuff out. In PPro and FCP, things pretty much MUST be rendered out whereas in Vegas there wasn't an emphasis on that. I think that it's one of those features that's been allowed to slide out of sight and mind in what Mike Jones likes to call "forward thinking".

Yeah, I agree that things should work and this is a problem that the Vegas development team would address if you told them about it (over and over again, probably). I assume you've reported the bug and encouraged others on the forum to do the same. Obviously, no one on a user forum is going to fix it.

Incidentally, the small shop where I work has been editing since the early days of Avid and Media100 so we've got a lot of "backward thinking" happening. We're currently running on PPro/Axio and have had a little face to face time with some Adobe folks. They've generally been very open to input but there were many instance where it was obvious they had a certain narrowed vision of how things should work and some of our suggestions seemed to fall on them like a foreign language. That must happen a lot with NLE teams, especially those that need to make their money off of consumer formats. Vegas has certainly suffered with this too and some features have languished for years in the "just barely good enough" category. The trimmer is one thing that comes to mind and I'm thrilled to see it move forward. This is a VERY good sign.

Rob

Ah, but those are different animals in the way they rely on rendering stuff out. In PPro and FCP, things pretty much MUST be rendered out whereas in Vegas there wasn't an emphasis on that.

I think prerendering is something standard for any professional and not so professional NLE. It's a basic feature that just HAS to work. The editor always needs to preview in real time effects and overlay titles, transitions, etc, and the fastest way to do that is by doing a prerender. Not a render to another track, but a simple render of the event I selected, or area I selected. In FCP and Premiere, the only problem I had with prerenders is that either program would crash (Premiere much more than FCP) and that wasn't very often (not even once a day). But it never happened to me, not one time, that I would see the render dialog and then the program wouldn't update the timeline and playback from the rendered file/s instead of the source file. That is just bad programming. That we are at the third revision of Vegas 8 and it still happens shows the lack of care SCS has for its software.

Getting back to the original post...

I've prerendered AVCHD & HDV clips repeatedly, both with color correction,
& they've always showed a bar when done rendering, & shows the render of the event I selected, without rendering to a new track....

& The fastest way to preview is to do a ram preview, not a prerender...

You seem bent on slandering Sony for whatever, yet you're very fond of PPro & FCP from what I've read... what's really keeping you here, is a mystery to me, & some others I imagine...

(read my thread on bugs)

Unfortunately, we haven't really had experience with a plain PPro system. PPro with Axio prerenders and crashes frequently, judging from the constant cries of anguish I keep hearing. The speed at which PPro crashes has only been limited by the time it takes to reboot, as near as I can tell. But let me make clear that this is not a plain software-only installation. Plain PPro might be reliable but I couldn't testify to that.

I totally agree that if you prerender a little of the timeline it should actually happen. Prerender seems to be a feature that worked "good enough" for SD and was ignored thereafter. But the fundamental thinking behind a prerender is different in Vegas in that you can choose the type of prerender every time you do it. In PPro you generally don't get that choice (is there any way to choose the prerender format, or does it just match your project settings?).

Where am I going with this? I think that the prerender features in PPro and FCP are very narrowly defined and designed specifically to guarantee full framerate playback. As such, both of these programs either prompt you to prerender or even force you to prerender. You don't seem to get a lot of choices in prerender formats, and I'd be very surprised if they let you create AVCHD prerenders. Vegas, for better or worse (and probably worse) is not geared to guarantee full framerate playback. It should be built that way but that wasn't the original design requirement and that's really never changed.

Ever hopeful, I'm looking at the fact that SCS finally budged on some of the trimmer requests and I'm really hoping they'll do the same in the way they approach frame caching and prerenders. What could be useful (in addition to making sure the basics work?)

1- storage profiling: if you select a disc to store prerenders, Vegas should test its throughput and then only allow prerender formats that the disc could actually support. There's no point in allowing an HD uncompressed prerender if the storage can't play it back.

2- write frame cache to file: Vegas caches uncompressed frames to RAM as you play the timeline. It'd be handy if Vegas could flush that into disc files, even if it had to compress the data enough to make it playable. Vegas could do it just as it does prerenders, in 100MB segments. The 100MB segments would have to have an alpha channel (or "no data" frames) and it'd have to be able to accept frames here, there, and anywhere within the file as they were dumped out of the cache. The idea is to build up playable full framerate timelines. Obviously, Vegas would have to be capable of validating that file data as you can't have the wrong frames popping up because the prerender doesn't match reality.

Rob Mack

It'd be worthwhile to reproduce this if it's not reliably broken. Sebaz did eventually find a bad stick of RAM but it seems that wasn't his only issue.

Rob

I've prerendered AVCHD & HDV clips repeatedly, both with color correction,

What templates exactly are you using for rendering? When I use anything that has MPEG2 on it this bug shows. So far I have only been able to avoid it using AVI prerenders to Huffyuv, which take substantially more space.

The fastest way to preview is to do a ram preview, not a prerender...

That is only if you're previewing only a few seconds. With 4 GB of RAM in your system, even if you set the maximum to more than 1 GB in the internal prefs, it will only let you go to up to 1.6 GB, which is only good for a few seconds of RAM preview.

You seem bent on slandering Sony for whatever, yet you're very fond of PPro & FCP from what I've read... what's really keeping you here, is a mystery to me, & some others I imagine...

Slander is a a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report. There's nothing false about my complaints, if I didn't have to put up with these bugs I wouldn't waste time reporting them. If users of a product never complained about design failures in it, products would be far inferior to what they are. Besides, having paid for a product gives you all the right in the world to complain about it if it doesn't perform as it should.

My comparisons to FCP and PPro don't imply that I'm "fond" of those products as you put it, I compare Vegas to it because Sony put the "Pro" in its name, and "Professional HD Video and Audio Production" in the splash screen (which is by the way, a beautiful splash screen), so I can't avoid comparing it to other professional NLEs, and in many things Vegas fares very poorly compared to them. Some are things that were overlooked by design, but others are horrendous bugs such as the prerender bug. These kinds of things upset me because in many aspects I enjoy editing in Vegas much more than I did in either FCP or PPro (this one I don't even like too much as an NLE) but when I see bugs that are so obvious, it makes me want to yell at the SCS programmers because it seems obvious that they didn't test this product long enough to release a decent update.

The template is the Mainconcept 1080i, i don't load a bunch of different codecs that are unwarrented...

Ram preview can be several seconds, as I don't see the need to prerender several minutes...

"Slander is a a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report"

("So Sony, how many people did you have testing this thing? Just one high schooler one or two hours a day, right?" )

This is one example that fits your statement quite nicely...

I used Premiere for years, till I finally got tired of paying for bug fixes(upgrade) every 3 months...


Look, no reasonable person minds legit complaints, but you seem to go beyond the point of reason, & start being offensive...

On occassion you do bring up good valid points, but when you start flaming, all that validity goes out the window for me...

there are things that get under my skin to, but words cannot be taken back, once spoken...

Respect can be given, but is much more valueble when earned...

("So Sony, how many people did you have testing this thing? Just one high schooler one or two hours a day, right?" )

That is sarcasm, not slander. I resort to sarcasm because I paid for a product that has such lame bugs that are the product of poor programming and not testing it for even a small amount of time. And fine, I have no way of knowing for sure how long they tested it or not, but when I start with a very simple timeline and I see bugs that are so obvious, such as prerender working for a little while and then not working again until you restart the program, I have to assume this wasn't tested for too long. Or, to put another example, transitions with the Blur Cross Effect applied to them. I like to apply a small blur to an overlay title when it appears and when it fades out. So I apply the aforementioned effect to the fade offsets of the envelopes. When I prerender that to Huffyuv it works. When I render it to Mainconcept MPEG2, it doesn't. It gives me a spastic cross effect, showing one frame without the title and the next with the title, and that repeats for the full second of the transition.. I tried to put empty events around to see if it would help, but it doesn't. And, sometimes it doesn't even work with Huffyuv

So these are fairly common things that should just work. I'm not talking about a tremendously complicated timeline with 50 overlay tracks and effects, just one very simple timeline. So it really upsets me to have to deal with these bugs that show lack of dedication for a software that when it works, it's a joy to use.

I'm skipping reading the whole thread because of one thing: there's no mention of prerender changes/fixes in the release notes. So there's no reason to make a thread saying the bug still exists when sony never said it was fixed in the first place. It's the same complaints & same solutions that aren't acceptable (but ARE solutions) as the last thread about this by the same person a week+ ago.

Using selective pre-renders is obviously part of the workflow you are used to, Sebaz, but it's not essential - I edit all day every day and never use it.

With 1 Gb of ram available, I can, in a full HD project, do a Ram render of 22 seconds, and that's more than enough for me - even if you do occasionally need to see a longer sequence at full frame rate, you can do 22 seconds, then move along to the next.

I'm not saying the feature shouldn't be made to work properly, but you don't need to feel you can't work without it in the meantime.