render in sections - joining them up later.

what are you rendering to?

and of course, what bob suggests...

leslie

I have seen this problem when you have a large jpeg in the timeline.

When the render stops you should see the frame number in the preview window where it stopped.

Shut down Vegas, restart and switch your project ruler to absolute frames. Then you can go to the same frame number and see what is happening at that point in the timeline.

If you have a large jpeg there you could try replacing it with a version at a lower resolution. Many digital cameras create huge jpegs which you don't need for standard definition video.

If you have photoshop you can just reduce the image res. to 72dpi. That usually does the trick for me.

Hope this helps.

"I have seen this problem when you have a large jpeg in the timeline."

Bingo.
This happened to me a while back with some jpegs. I resized them smaller, changed out some transitions and I was off and running again.

This problem has been posted several times over the past years. For me, it was a cpu overheating problem which was easy to fix.

Wow, thanks for the replies everyone. The problem is so confounding it's been making me totally crazy.

Some are rather large, so I'll make a point of resizing them and seeing how it goes. Thanks for the insight (it's the first time I've ever cut this kind of project).

For the record:

- no HDV source, it's a custom pan/scan project of JPGs
- I'm rendering output to the NTSC DVD template
- the CPU isn't overheating (have liquid cooling on the quardcore - works great)

ps: I haven't had any problems cutting with HDV (which is most of what I capture and cut now). I gather others are having problems? Is it patch-worthy, or is there anything users can do to remedy the problems (short of switching to another NLE?)

Thx all...I'll post an update once I get the images resized and see how it goes,

Thanks for your help MacVista (and everyone for their suggestions). It seems that large files were at fault. I scaled down all the source images and lo, it rendered without a hitch.

Thanks to everyone for their help. Next step: close the support ticket. :)

Don't close the support ticket. Make sure that Sony understands that having a large number of large pixel count images is still crashing Vegas. This has been a problem off and on for many versions. Sony did address this issue back somewhere in Vegas 5 or 6 and it got better, but based on recent reports, it is either back in Vegas 8, or else the fact that digital cameras are now routinely available with 10 Mpixel images means that more people are putting really large images on the timeline.

If you are going to have more than a few dozen images in your project, then scale them to about 20% more than the project resolution, and further increase that by the zoom factor you plan to use on any given image. Thus, if your project resolution is 720x480, then scaling down to something like 900x600 would make a huge difference in both timeline performance and rendering speed without changing the quality of the final result at all. If you plan to zoom into the picture by a factor of two (meaning that you are looking at 1/4 of the original picture, so each dimension is cut in half), then you would want double this size or 1800x1200.

Resizing the dpi is NOT what you want to do, although perhaps in some photo editing programs this affects the pixel count. In most programs, however, this just changes the header of the photo file and tells any program that uses it to space the pixels further apart or closer together, but the total number of pixels remains the same. The space between pixels only has meaning when printing, and has no meaning whatsoever to a video editing program.

See this for more info:

Photo resolution for Vegas

in passing....

if i need to use a large still for pan / scan, i generally convert it to .png. never had problems this way with vegas choking on a still....

leslie

if i need to use a large still for pan / scan, i generally convert it to .png. never had problems this way with vegas choking on a still....

While there have been some problems with the conversion from certain formats (TIFF requires Quicktime, for instance), once the file is unpacked (internally within Vegas), I don't think Vegas references the file again. That's why RAM usage skyrockets when using large numbers of photos (because all the photos are stored in RAM), and why lowering the resolution makes such a big difference. My guess is that you have avoided problems NOT because you use PNG, but simply because you haven't had enough total pixels on the timeline, where I define total pixels as the result obtained by adding up the total number of pixels for each picture.

PNG is a great format to use for Vegas, primarily because it supports transparency. Over the years many people have said that it is somehow "native" to Vegas. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it does appear that more work went into making sure that all the subtle things that have to be done to convert an image from one format to another were done more completely for this format than others. Back when we developed Ventura Publisher in the 1980s, we developed all our own file converters (what a pain ...) and there was definitely a difference in the fidelity with which we converted different formats.

However, this is a different issue than the one addressed by the original topic. The render hangs probably will not change simply by saving under a different file format (although I'll admit that I haven't done any testing to prove this one way or the other).

Good point. I've left the ticket open just so they know.

I've actually had a similar problem in the past, but copy/pasting the entire project into a new Vegas session has fixed the problem. I'll just have to remember to cut my files in half (and I'll try converting them to PNG too).

Fortunately projects of this sort are relatively short. That said, it would be nice if the SCS guys would address the issue. One less thing to worry about it always good.