Problems rendering to mpeg, especially mpeg 2

rwsjr wrote on 11/10/2001, 3:29 PM
I'm having a lot of problems rendering to mpeg 2 (DVD Better). Results are very inconsistent. Most of the time, my system reboots half way throught the process. Seems that both of my drives must be recently defragmented (which takes 18 hours with my 60GB drive) and I must render from one drive to another to have a chance to have a successful render. My file is only 10 minutes long. I have a Athlon 900 with 256 MB of RAM and have gone to great lengths to ensure that heat isn't my problem--it's not.

This is becoming a very disappointing aspect of Video
Factory. I've used the U-Lead products and other products that convert avi to mpeg 2 and have never seen so as many stability problems with other products as I have with VF. When the files successfully render, they don't take that long. However, I'd rather have files render all night and get successful results than have the consistent problems.

So here's your chance to turn this negative into a positive. Has anyone had similar problems and overcame them? I've wondered if there was some way to re-install the mpeg plug-in in the event of a corrupted file.

I'm fighting "buyers remorse" over this one. Does anyone have any idea or is the problem truly in the software as I am beginning to suspect?

Comments

wvg wrote on 11/10/2001, 4:58 PM
There seems to be some odd relationship between certain Athlon chips and or some system boards and lock up or random rebooting when running Video Factory. When I first bought VF about a year ago I had the same kind of problem. It only happened when running VF. I solved my problem by dropping CPU speed from 1200 Mhz to 1166 Mhz. The main symptom was VF would crash, every time at totally random points. Sometimes just a few seconds into the render or an hour or more into the render or anywhere inbetween. Since you're seeing a similar problem at a CPU speed 300 MHZ lower, and if it happens at random times and not at the same point, sounds like the same kind of weird thing. I think the issue may be more realted to Front Side Bus speed, or some DLL making a invalid call. When I first had the problem I loaded VF onto another slower (400MHZ) Pentium and it never locked up. Of course doing rendering at that speed is painfully slow.

Defragmentation of a 60GB drive should take no where near 18 hours unless it is severely fragemented (over 30%) If you're using the default defragmentation tool part of Windows it is very slow compared to other products. For example using Norton Utilties it takes me on average 3-4 hours to fully defragment a 80GB drive that's between 2-5% fragemented.