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. :(
