Quicktime (MJPEG) loading problem

fwtep wrote on 8/23/2011, 6:22 PM

I have a project with a lot of MJPEG clips, about 170 short clips (most are less than 3 seconds-- the entire project is only 10 minutes). The clips are 2k (2048x1511). Now I seem to have run up against some kind of limit-- when I try to add new clips it says the files are not a format that Vegas can use. I'm running Vegas Pro 10e 64bit on Windows 7 64bit on a 3.4ghz i7 with 8gb ram.

Anyone have any ideas? The files that give me the error do NOT give me the error when loaded into a blank project or even into a project with less files. And it's killing me because I have another 75 files still to load.

Comments

PeterDuke wrote on 8/23/2011, 9:34 PM

Can you add a few at a time and then render them out to an intermediate format? Then combine the intermediates for the final touch. Alternatively, batch convert to a suitable intermediate format.

fwtep wrote on 8/24/2011, 12:41 AM

Hi Peter,
I need the files to be the way they are. It's a strange bug. And an intermediate format won't help anyway, because I need them at full res/full quality for the final, and if there's no way to load them, then it's no good.

Thanks for the ideas though.

PeterDuke wrote on 8/24/2011, 2:21 AM

I was able to render to Lagarith with 2048x1511 progressive and load into a new project. Why can't you use that?

fwtep wrote on 8/24/2011, 9:07 AM

The whole project is being done in MJPEG, not just on my end, but at the studio. And I don't want to deal with proxies.

I tried it on a different system and it works, so now I'm trying to figure out what's different between the two systems. One is Vista and the other is Windows 7, so that's a start (the Vista is the one that works).

musicvid10 wrote on 8/24/2011, 9:45 AM

You may be using 32 bit Quicktime with 64 bit Vegas.
Did you try it with 32 bit Vegas in Windows 7?
Someone also told me there is now a 64 bit Quicktime version available.

john_dennis wrote on 8/24/2011, 12:07 PM

I see you are chasing what appears to be a bug in the one machine, but have you considered "nesting"?

You could add 1 to n clips, (pick a number that doesn't fail) to the timeline until you have all the clips in a number of projects. Then add the projects into a master project for the edits. Or you could do edits on the individual projects and piece them together in the master project for the final render.

It might be worth a try if your bug shooting stalls.

fwtep wrote on 8/24/2011, 11:15 PM

I tried nesting. Still no luck.

Also, to "musicvid" I'm using the latest Quicktime. It installed into the non-64bit Program Files though so maybe it's not 64bit, but it's the same as on the machine that's working, so I doubt that's the issue.

Still investigating...

musicvid10 wrote on 8/24/2011, 11:33 PM

It was Johnny Roy who told me there are 64 bit QT libs available. I don't know where the download is.

If your QT libs are installed in the 32 bit folder, they may not work right with 64 bit Vegas, thus the suggestion to try your project with 32 bit Vegas. It costs nothing to try.

fwtep wrote on 8/24/2011, 11:45 PM

32bit Vegas doesn't run on my machine. I've heard of others having that problem too. I start it but it dies-- it never even brings up the loading splash screen.

PeterDuke wrote on 8/24/2011, 11:53 PM

Maybe the 32 bit Vegas and the MJPEG problems are related. Maybe not.

Robert Johnston wrote on 8/25/2011, 3:21 AM

I had a difficult time adding 10 minutes worth of 3 to 5 second cllps in MJPEG 2048x1511 MOV (JPEG A) format in Vegas 10e on my Pentium 4 Windows XP machine. Vegas would hang after the Memory Usage reached about 1 Gig. I could add a few clips at a time, but then I would reach a limit or bug and the memory usage shot up and Vegas hung using 50 percent CPU.

It seems that the bug or limit has to do with the number of clips involved. As a test, I took all the clips and joined them into one big file about 8 GB using the QuickTime Pro features in Quicktime 7.7. All I did was open one of the files into Quicktime Player, moved the timeline indicator to the end, then selected the rest of the files in Windows Explorer and drag and dropped them onto the Quicktime movie preview window. I followed that with a Save As. This was "smart rendered."

That one big file loaded into Vegas without any problems, except for 9 seconds of audio missing at the end. The rest of the audio was in sync, though.

I tried using the HandySaw script to split the movie into scenes, but Handysaw didn't like the video format. I then used Vegasaur to split the clip into 3 second sections. I saved the project, closed it, then opened it without problems.

fwtep wrote on 8/26/2011, 11:17 AM

Thanks everyone. I'm still trying to get it worked out. The problem with doing any kind of combining and splitting is that I need the file names. My work-around for the moment is to VNC into the other computer and do the work there. I'm just assembling clips, no video effects or dissolves or anything like that, so it's not so bad. I'd still like to figure out what the problem is, of course, so if anyone has any ideas of what in Windows 7 64bit could be doing it, I'd appreciate it. I know that it's very hard, not knowing each and every specific of my system (they do both have the same graphics card, by the way), but maybe someone reading this will have an "a ha!" moment.

Thanks again everyone; this is why I love the Vegas community. I've been using Vegas since 2000 and have never had any reason to look to another package (even with the current issue).