Strange - and frustrating -Problem: Printing to Tape - V5

Mahesh wrote on 12/26/2004, 2:53 AM

I am experiencing problems printing to tape. This is the 3rd project where
* when printing to tape, the application stops doing things!
* The progress bar still ticks over with elapsed time but nothing is happening in background.
* There is no CPU activity.
* The project is 55 minutes long. It seems to stop at 95% during rendering of W64 file.

It has happened before, stalling during the render of W64 file.

I copied the project and its associated media files to another hard drive.
Used another PC to print to tape from local HDD.
The project stalled at 95% of W64 file.

After a series of PTT using selected sections, I have established that the render of W64 stalls at the start of a 4 second event. There are 3 four second DV clips on each track. Each clip has Chroma keyer Fx applied to it.

I can print to tape if render the said events to new track. I can also print the last 10% of tthe timeline as a selection, the selection encompassing the suspect event.
(There is for than enough space in prerender directory.)

The 2 PCs are
MOBO 1: ASUS P4PE with 1Gb RAM
MOBO 2: ASUS P4B with 500Mb RAM
running Vegas 5.0b (build 160)

Thanks in advance

Comments

riredale wrote on 12/26/2004, 8:52 AM

Don't know what the problem is, but here are two things you can do:

(1) When, in the past, I would get strange "print to tape" problems, I simply rendered to a new avi, and then used that clean avi to print to tape.

(2) This is a long shot, but the issue could be heat-related. My system would hang about 75% through an MPEG2 render. I discovered that there was a year's worth of dust on the CPU heatsink. After vacuuming it off, system rendered fine. In your case, since it's having problems in exactly the same place every time, I doubt it's a heat issue, but the simple test is to just render once with the PC side cover off.

randy-stewart wrote on 12/26/2004, 9:01 AM

Sounds like that 4 second clip is the culprit. Try rendering just that clip to .avi, reinsert the new .avi clip into your timeline and then PTT. Also, how long did you let it run before? Since you have applied FX, it has to render those clips before PTT (as I'm sure you know) and some of them take quite a long time especially if there is a lot of motion. That's a long shot as you said the CPU activity was nil so probably not the case. Good luck.
Randy

Liam_Vegas wrote on 12/26/2004, 9:08 AM

More info on this same issue over on the cow forum

Mahesh wrote on 12/26/2004, 10:31 AM

Thanks guys for responding.

Riredale
I did render the last 10% to get over the problem. I do not think the problem is hardware related because I enclountered the same problem using 2 different PCs and two different hard drives.

Stewart
The 4 second clip is the culprit. It took me several hours of doing PTT to home-in to that clip. Vegas 5 definitely stalls because when I cancel the PTT progress bar, V5 unceremoniously shuts down.

Liam
I have replied to your post in the other forum.

I thought W64 file renders audio only. The suspect clip is video only.

I understand that I can render the whole thing to get over the problem.

I am just curious to find out why a normally solid application crashes in this case.

Mahesh wrote on 12/27/2004, 6:28 AM

Update: I replaced the suspect clips with empty events.
Result: Still no PTT.
I can PTT from beginning to start of the suspect event.
I can PTT from start of the suspect event to the End

BUT I can not PTT from beginning to end.

It just occured to me that another common thing between the 2 PCs is the OS.
Both PCs are on Win2K - SP4.

Liam_Vegas wrote on 12/27/2004, 8:47 AM

I recommend you open a support incident with Sony - and send them the Vegs. I think it should be clear enough by now that we are being of very little use in terms of actually helping you solve the crashing while doing a timeline PTT.

As your crashing is repeatable (on multiple machines) I would suggest to you that Sony might like to get a hold of the Veg files. Just document for them as much as you can as to which events/frames in the veg cause the problem.

It sounds like you do now know what part of the Veg causes the crash? What is going on there as far as FX's? Anything different from other parts of the project? Try messing with the FX's there to see if it makes any difference.

Mahesh wrote on 12/27/2004, 11:49 PM

Thanks Liam for your positive response. Really appreciated.
I shall post to Sony support.
Hopefully they may be able to help. Back in September, I had posted a simillar problem to Sony and they were unable to help.