Problems with Vegas output on Mac

Dennyboy wrote on 5/5/2004, 12:16 PM

I am rendering QT Movies in Vegas 5 (Photo JPEG) using the HD preset (1920 x 1080). These play fine on my PC but when I bring them to a client's Mac, QT loads and starts to play them then crashes somewhere into the file - a reboot is needed. The files are typically 3 - 4 minutes long and with the JPEG compression, run between 3 and 5 GB. The drive is formatted NTFS.

Has anyone had any trouble playing back Vegas rendered files on a Mac or are there any suggestions? The Mac is a G5 with all the newest QT codecs - OS X...
Thanks much.
DM

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/5/2004, 2:17 PM

I suspect the problem is with QT6 on your G5. I've had nothing but problems with QT 6, Panther working together. Roll back to the first version of QT 6, see what happens, it likely will play fine.

Dennyboy wrote on 5/5/2004, 3:39 PM

Thanks much. Unfortunately, the Mac belongs to the client and they are happly producing hours of HD each month. Any other thoughts would be appreciated! (Or did you mean I should be rendering from Vegas with an older version of QT?)
Thanks,
D.

Cheno wrote on 5/5/2004, 8:09 PM

all of the video work I did for a non-profit was rendered to QT in Vegas and taken via firewire drive to a Mac to be compressed in Cleaner. No problems here.

Mike

[r]Evolution wrote on 5/6/2004, 8:01 PM

I'm thinking this may also have something to do with it being HD. I render QT's all the time and they play on Mac's just fine. I've never tried the HD settings though.

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/6/2004, 8:23 PM

http://www.macintouch.com/quicktime6pt4.html

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20040102074126379&query=Quicktime+6

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21341

There have been lots of known issues within and without Vegas for QT 6.5. Apple has issued an uninstaller/reinstaller to roll back to 6.4. This may or may not be your issue, but it's plagued us here.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120306

Dennyboy wrote on 5/7/2004, 7:10 AM

Thanks for that. I can't get the client to change his version of QT on the Mac but I will certainly try this fix.
Could be the answer!
D.

Dennyboy wrote on 5/7/2004, 7:13 AM

To Spot
Ugh, sorry. MaxFixit is a subscription service - can you tell me the gist of the article? Is there anything I can do on the PC side to better insure that my files will work on the Mac? Or is it simply the Mac side that gets the fix?
thanks,
Dennis

rmack350 wrote on 5/7/2004, 7:51 AM

I think Spot is saying that QT6 is broken on the Mac.

Will another file format work? How will AVI play for them?

Rob Mack

rmack350 wrote on 5/7/2004, 7:55 AM

Re-reading your initial post. You've got a lot of variables there.

Maybe try rendering a succession of smaller clips that they can stitch back together. It might be that file size is a problem. Also NTFS isn't a native filesystem for them. Maybe the files ought to be copied to a native disk before they try to play? Just thinking about eliminating some of the factors.

You might want to find a friend with FCP to do some tests with. See if you can repro the problem and then see if you can fix it. Just not in front of the client.

BTW, The file is being rendered by Quicktime on the PC. Vegas is just the interface. Blame it on Quicktime.

Rob Mack

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/7/2004, 8:02 AM

The problem is QT on the Mac. PC has some issues too, but not on the authoring side, not that I'm aware of.
Mac's manage NTFS drives just fine, or at least mine do, and most others seem to do well.
Have you tried outputting sequential targas? Try rendering out a short section that way, and see what you get.

Dennyboy wrote on 5/7/2004, 1:32 PM

Thanks to all. I will try an AVI file and also will render some TGAs, which is the native format of my animation software. My goal is to supply files ready for the client to drop into FCP, conform for HD (Blackmagic), then send off to the network. Uncompressed AVIs at HD size are mammoth, but if that's what it takes...
We tried to copy the files over to the Mac's drive and they hung-up at the same spot that they hang up when we tried to play them directly off my drive using QT on the Mac (back home, the same files play fine on my PC...). That's why I thought Vegas might have something to do with all this.

But I agree that it is more about QT. The good news is that Vegas writes the QT Movies using little endian, while Premiere writes them big endian. The big endian files don't even play on the Mac. However, the little endian versions still hang well before they finish, even when we just try to copy them over to the Mac.
All too weird and at some point, probably worth 3k to get a Mac, much as I hate to admit it.
Thanks again for the help.
Best,
DM

danstine wrote on 5/7/2004, 7:21 PM

You can render out compressed AVI, there are several options in Vegas, can't say I know alot about them, but Sony support recommended NTSC DV. In QuickTime Pro, they have an export as (same as render as) AVI, and they additionally support something called animation, which seems to be BMP, Cinepak, and Intel Indio Video 4.4. This is QT 6.5.1.

Dianne

rmack350 wrote on 5/7/2004, 11:28 PM

Another thing you might do just to make the point is render a DV avi file, drop it on the quicktime pro player, and then save it as a .mov file. Just makes the point that the mac quictime player can't read a quicktime movie created by quicktime on the PC. Vegas has minimal involvement this way and it places the onus on software they might be inclined to trust.

Anyway, it sounds to me like if you can't even copy the file from your drive to the mac without it crashing at about the same point in the file then maybe the problem is something more like file size or pathname length or, maybe, they are out of space on their hard disk. I wonder if the mac writes a temp file of your movie as it plays it off your disk? In any case if you have the same problem copying as you do playing then it points to something other than the file format.

Rob Mack