Stuck in 4K60 rendering hell? Here are some tips

Quindor wrote on 6/22/2019, 8:40 AM

This isn't so much a complain/please help me topic but more to give people stuck in the same 4K60 hell I am often stuck in, a way out. 😇

If you are working with 4K footage and rendering in 4K60 in Vegas Pro 15/16 you know that rendering your footage is pure luck if it finishes or gets stuck somewhere and just "hangs". Vegas doesn't stop responding, you can even hit cancel and you'll get a pop-up but the rendering engine has frozen and it and Vegas will never unstuck without killing it.

(Yes, I've tried everything mentioned here, this happens on multiple computers with multiple installs, drivers, rendering formats, etc.. My PC has an Ryzen 8 core, GTX1080, 64GB of RAM, 5TB of SSD storage, etc.)

Doing multiple runs, each time restarting vegas and restarting your computer, changing cache settings, threads even turning GPU on and off makes no difference. Rendering without cache (0) and no GPU isn't an option anyway because then a 10 minute video would take 14 hours to render, and stop in between anyway.

*aargh* Not a complain topic.

Want to get out of this hell and get your project out?

Tip 1:

If you are like me, you render multiple 720p or 1080p quick passes of your project to check it on a TV, make notes, improve the video until you are done. Surprisingly those renders work just fine every time! No problems whatsoever.

Then you want to render your project in 4K60 while you are sleeping, start up Vegas, start the render but when you come back after having a nice sleep, the project is stuck somewhere randomly in the render process. You try again and again, but whatever you do you can't get it to complete the whole video, stuck for days, hoping for a miracle.

How to fix:
80% of the time the fix for this is odd, but simple. Start Vegas, wait for it to load all your footage, render a pass in 720p and then once it finished, without quitting vegas, render exactly the same video again 4K. Most often, now Vegas renders your project in 4K60 just fine while before it was impossible, whatever you tried.

Tip 2:

This tip kind of builds on the first tip. I sometimes have complex projects, lots of different footage, 10 video time lines, protitle, etc.. For some reason, although editing has become fairly stable (and advanced save on 1 minute saves helps a lot too) rendering such a big project in 4K60 will just never happen.

For these kind of project (Latest one is 25 minutes) the above tip often doesn't help anymore either and you are stuck unable to get your project out, whatever you try.

How to Fix:
There is an Option called "Render to new track" where you can define a region which Vegas then renders and adds to the editor again as a single video. If I'm stuck with this kind of issue that option is a godsend. For a 30 minute video I do this 10 times and after a few days of work, most often I can finaly render a final with all the video in there! Quality degradation seems manageble by exporting in very high quality (I use 4K60 80Mbit HEVC).

This still suffers from what I described above, so select a region, render in 720p (normal render) for that region and then use the "Render to new track" option to render to 4K60. If you have the patience to go through this hell for the whole time and babysit it for a day or two, you'll get your video out!

I've had this issue with all builds of Vegas Pro 15 and Pro 16. I've complained about it before (albeit at the wrong spot) but it seems that this issue (or how to fix it) isn't very well known. I hope this helps anyone reading this get their project rendered. It seems to be the only way to get it actually done for me.

p.s. Although tips are always welcome, it isn't a PC stability issue, my PC doesn't crash. I can run Aida64 stability test, OCCT, Prime95, etc. for hours without issue. It's Vegas itself, or rather it's rendering engine in the background which gets stuck and never continues again until you hard kill it. You can't even quit, because hitting cancel just gives the pop-up if you want to stop rendering but it never does, no matter how often you push that button.

p.p.s. I'm hoping they are going to focus a lot on 4K editing and rendering for Vegas Pro 17, otherwise I'm out. I love the editor and how I can put a project together, and it works "ok" for simple projects (with above workarounds) but doing larger projects and needing to spend days to get what you have worked on rendered out and you can't because it just crashes/hangs/freezes, I just can't justify it anymore. :(

Comments

D7K wrote on 6/22/2019, 9:32 AM

Specs on your project files? How many tracks? Bit rates? From what camera? While drinking my coffee, I put together a 10 minute 60 FPS 150 mbit (Panasonic) file and rendered it. Had 4 FX added to the time line (color correction and a few other things). Even on my "hobbyist: i7700 4200, 32 gig of ram and 500 GB render disk, I rendered at 2x length perfectly (notice that is much less than 14 hours on a machine far less specked than yours). Can you list what camera you are using, the data rate oif the file, which FX you added? Which plugins you are using?

john_dennis wrote on 6/22/2019, 11:13 AM

I was going to launch into a historical narrative about "voodoo economics" and finally get around to how it relates to your workaround, but I have to go to shoot something.

There is a seed of truth to your methodology, but you could cut through a lot of the crap with a simpler workflow.

Assuming you have a project that is complex and promises to be a long or troublesome render:

1) Divide the project into regions.

2) When you're satisfied with a region, render it to a file using a lossless intermediate such as UTVideo, MagicYUV or heaven forbid uncompressed avi. XAVC-I would produce sensible file sizes while "smart rendering" when placed back on the timeline with other regions and rendered to an XAVC-I total video file.

3) Create a summary project where you assemble the uncompressed regions that you use for final review and/or final render to your delivery format.

Thought for the day:

Does every editor that works on a feature film struggle with a project containing the whole two hour movie?

Quindor wrote on 6/22/2019, 11:37 AM

Sure, I don't mind discussing. :)

Project has 21 lines in total. Most are video and either have a dedicated purpose (3 for lower third for instance, etc.), others get re-used for different things. There are 4 audio timelines (Original clip, Sound recorder, Intro, Music)

Project files are either from my Panasonic G7 (4K30_100Mbit H264) or from an IP camera in this case (Transcoded with FFMPEG to CBR (4K30_50Mbit H264). During editing I use proxies for everything because it's impossible to work with otherwise, but that's not just because of having some videos on the timeline. I do use clip resampling, but not on all clips.

Don't get me wrong here, just cross-fading some videos and color correcting is ok and vegas handles that pretty well during rendering but I also do a lot of compositing.

I make heavy use of transparent PNG's with the "Layer Dimensionally" with drop shadows and glow enabled. I do a lot of pan/crop and there are about 200 cross fades between clips and timelines. Sometimes I will have a lower third, 2 transparent PNG's with layer dimensionally and some footage playing. I also use the ProTitler a lot for all kinds of texts while other stuff is going on too. Most often I will also speed up some footage, but not in this project.

I don't use any plug-ins other then what comes with Vegas Pro 16 (tried all builds, currently on 424)

I exclusively use NVENC H265 encoding using my GTX1080 since that speeds things up a lot. Previews are done using 1080p30 "good" or 720p30 "preview" to judge work and do corrections. Final projects get rendered in 4k60 "best".

I have attached what a part of my timeline looks like. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that it's slow (it is), I'm complaining about being unable to ever render this project anymore unless I spend about 2 days painstakingly following the above procedure to get the software to render the darn video. Especially because normally (this project is a bit much) rendering exactly the same video works fine rendering in 1080p30.

p.s. If anyone is interested I'll link my YouTube channel where you can see some of my videos but this isn't meant to spam that. ;)

Quindor wrote on 6/22/2019, 11:38 AM

@john_dennis Hahah, no I suppose it doesn't, but this bug isn't related to project size. I'm having to do it in 3 minute or 5 minute segments because otherwise the problem becomes unmanageable. But essentially I am doing as you suggest, cutting everything up for Vegas into tiny chuncks and rendering those out (twice, because otherwise it will hang 100% of the time).

But if I would have to divide my 30 minute video into 10x 3 minute clips, that would be totally impractical and in my opinion unworkable because of shared elements, etc.

fr0sty wrote on 6/22/2019, 2:26 PM

Try Waag's Happy Otter Scripts over at tools4vegas,com. It has a mode called render plus that frameserves your video to an external (and higher quality) x264/HEVC encoder, and may bypass your issues with rendering. Worth a shot. It also has a better proxy system than the one built into Vegas.

Zkuggi wrote on 6/22/2019, 2:31 PM

I had similar experience as Quindor.

Trying to render around an hour long video, 12-15 track 4K60fps video in either HEVC or H264 and it never finishes. Had the exact same rendering behaviour as he describes. Nomatter what I tried.

My source material is 8bit MP4 4K 60fps from Panasonic GH5.

Someone here at the forum suggested that I took Dynamic RAM Preview max down to zero MB. He stated that the settings had bad effect on longer rendering process. I dont know why but it fixed this issue for me.

It occasionally happens since then but then I always manage to fix it by updating NVidia drivers.

VERY frustrating to start a all-night render at the evenings and have no idea if it is going to finish or not.

Never had this issue with Magix's other editor. Video Pro X.

Musicvid wrote on 6/22/2019, 4:13 PM

This is the only rendering tip many people need - unload your undo buffers!

Before rendering, save, close Vegas (I even reboot), and reopen your project. Then render, with all of your available memory at hand, not just a fraction.

Quindor wrote on 6/22/2019, 5:22 PM

I appreciate everyone's open minded comments. :)

@fr0sty Great suggestion (Otter Scripts) but I tried this a few months back and it looked promising, but same issue sadly enough. I think it's the compositing engine that crashes and Vegas never recovers. That's probably also why the issues happens in 4K60 but not in 1080p for instance with the same project. I believe there are serious issues with the compositing engine running in 4K.

@Zkuggi I have experimented A LOT with the buffer memory at 0 or a different value. I have 64GB of memory and whatever I set, Vegas doesn't ever use more than 14GB max, I do see Windows using more but often that doesn't go above 24GB in total either while rendering.The 0 setting does fix some rendering issues but it also makes rendering so slow it's not usable for large projects. With or without cache can sometimes mean a 5x in render time (at least in my tests). I'll take it as long as it finishes, but still, not a fix for all situations in my experience.

In my years with Vegas Pro I've tried lots of different drivers and combinations, nothing seems to influence this behaviour. :(

@Musicvid lol, your suggestion is actually the reverse of mine. I'm saying that the only time I can get it to render a complex'ish 4K60 project out is that I first need to do a render in 720p or 1080p, those work 95% of the time and then immediately render a 4K60 version (without closing Vegas) after that Because then the caches have been created and it fixes "something" that is seemingly broken doing it directly in 4K60. My PC has 64GB of memory, my videocard has 8GB, although running out of memory is a real thing, I shouldn't with this configuration.

Although, if you are reading this, don't bother buying 64GB memory if you are running Vegas, 16GB is ok, 24GB is enough, 32GB is nice, there are internal limits within the currents versions of Vegas that it will never use more memory, even if you have it. I have gotten out of memory errors with certain settings and combinations, where there was 40GB free memory in Windows. ;)

And again, that is just the thing, if you work with 1080p, you're fine. I often make 5 to 6 test renders during building my video projects, no issues whatsoever, 95% of the time they render the first go. But opening up the exact same project and rendering it to 4K60 and it will get struck 90% of the time. Render a 720p or 1080p and then render a 4K60 and often it will work (except for my current project which seemingly is just too much to handle for it).

I believe the 4K rendering pipeline and compositing engine within Vegas Pro is quite broken anyway, because performance wise it also makes no sense whatsoever, but I'm going to do some more testing on that and report back.

If anyone has any other suggestion to try, I'm all ears. Currently doing my method and getting through the project but it's going to take quite a while, still, I'm getting to the final video in the end, so that's ok.

Musicvid wrote on 6/22/2019, 5:31 PM

Thank you for sharing your story. It sounds like a unique impression, but If you decide to elevate to a bug report, you may be asked to include quantitative test data, just a heads up.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/important-information-required-to-help-you--110457/

karma17 wrote on 6/22/2019, 7:18 PM

@Quindor

I would like to see your work, if you don't mind providing the link. I always like seeing what other people are doing in Vegas.

D7K wrote on 6/22/2019, 7:21 PM

Will be working on a longer project soon, so I thank everyone who has participated in this thread.

fr0sty wrote on 6/23/2019, 1:59 AM

One thing that could help us get to the bottom of exactly what is causing the bug is if you could upload a problematic project for us (or the Vegas team) to replicate. Unfortunately, with a complex project this usually means uploading a ton of media along with it, but if you can pull it off, I can try to repro it on my end... and if I succeed, I will pass it along to the team with detailed instructions on how to reproduce it so they can address the bug. I've felt the pain of having Vegas crash during complex project renders, so anything I can do to help kill that bug once and for all, I'm glad to help.

OldSmoke wrote on 6/23/2019, 2:47 AM

@Quindor There are issues with Vegas in certain situations and hardware combinations when it comes to compositing. There is an old threat about it, can’t remember where. Try setting the render threads under preferences to 1 and see if that solves it. Slowly increase the number and see how it goes. This was not so much related to crashes but solved wired flashes and showing of lower track frames in composite mode. While that was with a 1080p project and it could be even more servers and cause crashes in 4K project.

Quindor wrote on 6/23/2019, 8:57 AM

Holy shit, don't hit enter when the @ highlights a name, everything you've written will be gone. Ok, again. :P

@Musicvid I'll consider filing for a bug report, these are annoying issues to work around but I also have projects where I don't have near as much issues (less complex) so never really get around to it.

@karma17 My YouTube channel is called "Intermittent Technology" you can find it at https://youtube.com/intermittech . A comparable video to what I'm working on now is my: , the current complex project I've been working on is a 2019 update to that video and is a bit more complex because I sometimes do triple cam overlays, etc., it combines a lot of stuff like overlays, multiple video tracks, lots of generated text, several audio tracks, etc. etc.

@D7K The suggestion @john_dennis made is I think the best, segment your project every 5 to 10 minutes that way it's easier to handle issues per segment instead of having to deal with the whole which at some point will render in one go anymore. If you can't and want to edit it as a whole (which I can very much understand) cut it up into multiple project files. Just note that when copying between vegas instances you lose all track settings such as equalizers, noise filters, volume set points, etc.. I ended up doing that anyway because with my method mentioned above I couldn't go back and make some small changes anymore which was a problem at the end which wasn't fully finished yet, but I also needed a test render to get it there. :P

@fr0sty I'll think about it and although I don't know how much footage I am currently using the "OriginalFootage" folder for this project is around 200GB. ;) Once I'm done with it I'll do a save "with media" and see how much remains. But as I said, I've tried it on multiple installs myself and kind of get the same result everywhere and it's not consistent either, that's why I keep rendering, praying it finishes at some point. ;)

@OldSmoke Interesting you mention that! I've attached a screenshot of a cross-fade issue I sometimes run into. During editing and preview but even in 720p and 1080p this transition looks just fine, during the final 4K60 render it shows this problem. It has something to do with the colors in the picture (not the actual pictures) and that triggers a bug somehow. In older versions I was able to workaround it by using the Intel renderer, but that one isn't included in Vegas 16 anymore. I'll try the Ottor Scripts to see if that fixes it, hadn't thought of that until now since that puts some processing outside of vegas, like the Intel path did! But check the screenshot, this seems exactly what you are talking about, I hadn't mentioned it since this topic isn't about that issue.

I generally have my threads set to 16 or 32, but I'll try a lower number to see if that fixes the issue for that part! :)

p.s. I'm currently done rendering 4 parts of 6. To get through those parts in 4K60 I had to turn GPU acceleration off and cache memory to 0 and even with doing my 720p run first it was sketchy (100% no chance without it though). So I'm getting there. Part 1 took 5h20m, Part 2 1h30m, Part 3 3h40m and part 4 3h25m. As long as I can get it out in the end, I'm ok with that!

john_dennis wrote on 6/23/2019, 11:18 AM

@Quindor

UHD at 60 FPS was wasted on me. My Internet connection dropped many of the frames...

It was more tolerable with FHD@60 FPS.

john_dennis wrote on 6/23/2019, 11:46 AM

"Just note that when copying between vegas instances you lose all track settings such as equalizers, noise filters, volume set points, etc.."

If you have assets in a project that you want to use in new projects, you could try nesting. Most of my animated graphics are nested projects that are reused.

It produces this result...

fr0sty wrote on 6/23/2019, 12:02 PM

Quindor, there is an easy way to purge your project of unused media for sharing. Go to file>export and then choose to export the vegas project (top option I think). In the following dialogue, you can choose to include media, but under that there is an option to exclude unused media. This will result in a folder being made with your project file and a copy of all the media used in your project, which you can then upload.

200gb is a lot, though, I'd understand if you didn't have the file storage space online to share, or the time to upload.

Quindor wrote on 6/23/2019, 12:40 PM

@john_dennis That's the beauty of YouTube, you can watch in whatever works best for you. I suspect you don't have a 1440p or 4k monitor either, so it wouldn't do too much good anyway.

And yes, that's a good tip (nesting projects), I've done that with time lapses and other things before (when it would again be too much for Vegas to do it in one project). Other things I use a lot (intro, outro, etc.) I pre-render in very high quality and then include them, bonus is that they all have proxies so work nice and smooth! :D

@fr0sty I'll have a look at it, maybe I can share a part of it since I have now cut up the project into 6 different parts so I could still edit them. I know it can also cut up the source media files to only the parts that are used so that might make it portable enough!

Having 6 parts in one video makes it quite a bit more complex than handling it in one project though. Lots of repetitive work, file but then I'll never get it rendered out.

I'm testing with the corruption I showed earlier. Now that I've rendered part 4 and 5, the problem is MUCH worse, making it completely unusable again this way. Lowering render threads didn't see to affect much but rendering only a portion of the project did. Currently trying Otter Scripts to see if that changes anything.

I said this wasn't going to be a complain topic, but this is what I'm dealing with. Video was done to be rendered for a final inspection pass on Friday and I've now spent 2 days with 10h+ each day of me trying to get this rendered out. The video that was supposed to come out this weekend isn't going to.....

On a positive note, the two problems I am now encountering again are basically the only rendering problems I often have! I sometimes have hangs during editing, but that has improved a lot over the more recent versions that it's workable now. Again, I don't think Vegas Pro is a bad program, I love the editing in it, that's why I'm fighting so hard to hang on to it, it's just being made really hard to keep using it like this. :(

p.s. If you don't use 4K footage and exports, you are probably fine, but to me it seems there are quite a lot of "show stopping" issues that pop up if you do use 4K.

Former user wrote on 6/23/2019, 5:18 PM

@Quindor

Most of the time my problems with video and audio recognition and rendering are solved by temporarily disabling the so4compoundplug plugin. However, keep in mind that certain video formats are no longer recognized by Vegas if so4compoundplug is disabled.

If you disable this plugin and Vegas can still recognize your video files using another internal encoder, then maybe this procedure works for you, too.

More info here:

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/avc-xavc-s-issues-in-vp15-16-try-disabling-so4compoundplug-dll--108345/

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 6/23/2019, 6:17 PM

At the risk of getting anyone neck deep... you might want to check the bios revision loaded into your video card and do a search on techpowerup.com and see if there's a later version. I was getting a bomb-out like you describe doing 90+ minute multicam renders with an older amd card requiring me to split it up to get a clean render. I noticed I didn't get the problem with a newer model board on a different machine. A flash update fixed the older board. I don't have an Nvidia card myself but I see they have lots of flash-update revisions for all the different incarnations of the gtx1080 for use with the Nvidia NVFlash tool. Suggest you only attempt if you save your current video-board bios and have another video board to recover with if it goes sideways... which tends to happen if you choose a bios set for too high a clock rate.

Quindor wrote on 6/23/2019, 6:24 PM

@Former user A good tip! Although I don't post too much here on the forums I do read sometimes and I have been toggling that option on and off since 15 when performance tanked very hard with it enabled. Still, yes, that could have been the issue, but it seems unrelated in my experience. :)

@Howard-Vigorita No worries, I'm pretty experienced PC wise and have multiple video cards in the house, including one's I've ripped BIOS'ses offef for doing GPU passthrough for a live streaming VM, etc.. So I get what you are saying and that's a very interesting one!

On a side note, I've been testing using the "Otter scripts" and although this does not prevent the hanging issue for which I opened this topic (to inform people) it does seem to fix the corruption bug I showed earlier or at least, results are looking pretty good so far! Still testing with that and I'll report back about that once I have all sections rendered. :)

Musicvid wrote on 6/23/2019, 7:23 PM

[Edited Comment Below]

fifonik wrote on 6/23/2019, 7:56 PM

Yes, I've tried everything mentioned here, this happens on multiple computers with multiple installs, drivers, rendering formats, etc.. My PC has an Ryzen 8 core, GTX1080, 64GB of RAM, 5TB of SSD storage, etc.

I recently got something similar for 1080-60p renders. I've found that it was caused by updated GPU drivers (I posted my investigations in one of the thread mentioned in FAQ).

Unfortunately, the claim "I've tried everything" (I suppose you mentioned everything mentioned here) is a bit tricky and you should let people know what exactly have you tried. For example, what exact driver versions you tried. Have you tried to disable GPU in Vegas options. Have you tried run Vegas in Windows 7 compatibility mode?

Too many things mentioned there and quite easy to miss something important that will work in your case.

P.S. Thanks for your findings anyway. Someone may find them useful as last resort.

Musicvid wrote on 6/23/2019, 8:08 PM

Video was done to be rendered for a final inspection pass on Friday and I've now spent 2 days with 10h+ each day of me trying to get this rendered out. The video that was supposed to come out this weekend isn't going to.....

There's the whole thing in a nutshell. For a talking head showing product stills, and low-motion b-rolls, 1080 p30 is the production sweet spot. We call it "optimal" because it is not (very) wasteful -- of production and uploading time, re-editing, bandwidth, deliverability, and quality. Following production best practices, your product review would have gone "live" long before this weekend, without compromising a thing, or causing yourself so much anxiety.

On the other hand, "hyperoptimal" resolution, frame rate, and bitrate (3840x2160 p60) is the domain of hobbyists. It has never been proven any better for consumer production in controlled tests, it just takes much longer, and is still only marginally deliverable, which OTOH can be a contract-killer for a producer if even one remake is needed. A hobbyist, or even a safe producer, doesn't have many deadlines. Breathe out.

Also, before your "final inspection pass" (by whom?) one will of course need to normalize all of his video assets, camera angles, stills, cutaway, titles and logos, to legal, compliant REC 709 YUV video levels (or 8 bit 2020 if you go that route), just in case it's picked up outside Youtube. Your camera blacks aren't "too" bad, might even pass muster locally, except that the whites are all over the place, and repeatedly blown out. Titles and graphics are uncorrected, in-your-face RGB. I'm sure this was just an oversight in your first experiment.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/pc-to-tv-levels-a-comedy-of-errors--107325/

Taking the road less traveled (lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!) is fine, but putting your head in a vise by trying to do way too much under a self-imposed deadline, isn't likely to impress anyone, even if it succeeds.

We do appreciate your wish to offer "tips" and suggestions to others, but framing them in the second person gives the impression of a lecture. A more refined persuasive writing style is to frame your examples in the first person (I, me, my, instead of you, your, yours).

I suggest you get your piece delivered, then concentrate on quantitative testing for a bug report, but not try to do both at once. Welcome to the forums!