TIF & Vegas

stewade wrote on 8/9/2006, 3:19 PM
This one has me stumped.

I was doing network renders on a rather large project divided into several segments.

One of the segments - let's call it S2 decided to stop and fail on Machine #2 as it was gathering the media.

All other 5 segments worked.

After much fidding and asset eliminating I narrowed it down to a single TIF image used as an overlay for an "Action replay" segment.

Once deleted, the network render worked fine. I put the TIF back and it failed but only on machine #2. The host ran over it with no problems. (BTW: the path to the TIF was the same as the AVI assets)

I solved the problem by converting the TIF to PNG and presto, it network renders fine.

But what I wanna know is why would a TIF image stall a render??!!

A free virtual chocolate frog to the person that can solve this. I will be using TIFS frequently in this project and I don't want to convert all of my stills. Is there a licensing issue involved here? Some piece of software not installed?

Comments

jrazz wrote on 8/9/2006, 3:29 PM
How big is the TIF's file size? That could be your problem.

j razz
stewade wrote on 8/9/2006, 3:31 PM
Only 1.3 Mb so I can't imagine that would be an issue. 1Gbps network has been handling assets in excess of 3Gb with no troubles...
johnmeyer wrote on 8/9/2006, 4:14 PM
I think TIF in Vegas requires that Quicktime be installed. Take a look at the network render machine and see if it has Quicktime.
tumbleweed2 wrote on 8/9/2006, 5:53 PM
..this might help..

"QuickTime® is an Apple movie format, the viewer for which, when installed on a PC, takes over the viewing of all tif files, but then cannot read the most commonly used tif format, group IV fax. If this occurs, when you click on a group IV tif image you will see only an icon for QuickTime that has been "broken," indicating that QuickTime cannot handle the image. To correct this problem, go to Start>Settings>ControlPanel and double-click the QuickTime icon. Then select "Browser Plugin" in the menu and click the "MIME settings" button. Scroll down the list and double-click the .tif and.tiff entries (this will remove the "+" from that entry so that your default file association will be reinstated. "
mrBun wrote on 8/9/2006, 10:36 PM
Don't know if this helps, but...
I was told that everytime Vegas hits a "tif" file on the timeline it needs to open a "photoshop engine".
I was told this at a seminar some time back so it may no longer be true.
btw. If you have photoshop, you can run a batch rename (record an action on one file)...convert to "tga" or "png", if alpha/transparency is an issue.
rmack350 wrote on 8/10/2006, 12:35 AM
I think what the seminar person is talking about is that when Photoshop was installed there was a dialog asking to associate image file types with photoshop. It turns out that when you do this, other applications have to refer to a Photoshop DLL to get additional info about the file. For instance, Photoshop can return camera info whereas Explorer doesn't.

The current version of Photoshop desn't do this. Instead, you're expected to use Adobe Bridge to browse files. The older DLL strategy would sometimes cause problems. For instance, I have a few folders with thousands of images in them. With Photoshop being the default handler, Explorer would crash before displaying all the file icons in that folder. The solution in this case was to completely uninstall Photoshop and then reinstall without associating the files with photoshop.

Explorer was going to the photoshop dll to fetch metadata from the image file, and it was probably fetching a lot more info than it would have otherwise.

This is not to say that Photoshop is the culprit here. It could very well be (and is likely to be) quicktime, since quicktime would be the system that vegas relies on to decode tiff files. It may get more complicated if quicktime and photoshop are both installed, I don't know.

And, yes, Photoshop can do a fine job of batch converting tiffs to png. The batch tools aren't immediately easy to use but they're well worth learning if you already use Photoshop on a regular basis.

Rob Mack
TorS wrote on 8/10/2006, 12:58 AM
PNG is lossless, has alpha channel and is handled natively in Vegas. Forget about tiff.
Tor
Chienworks wrote on 8/10/2006, 4:14 AM
Vegas certainly doesn't need Photoshop to process TIFF files. I've never had Photoshop installed and i use TIFF images quite well.

I also disagree with the complaint about Quicktime not handling the "most popular" TIFF variant. While it's true that there may be more group IV fax TIFF images in existance, these tend to be transient files used for fax transmission, often low-res low bit depth intended for document transmission only. It's highly unlikely that any of these will ever make into a Vegas user's media pool to be used on the timeline. Anyone who deals with these types of files already has the appropriate document viewer installed as part of the fax/email software used to create, send, and receive them. The types of TIFF files that will be used in editing are full color full bit depth images that Quicktime handles very well. I think this would be a complete non-issue.
johnmeyer wrote on 8/10/2006, 7:20 AM
Vegas certainly doesn't need Photoshop to process TIFF files. I've never had Photoshop installed and i use TIFF images quite well.

Yes, but apparently, as I stated in my first post, it does need Quicktime installed. I have seen this posted many times. Here is one from Spot:

RE: TIFF files unreadable
Xander wrote on 8/10/2006, 7:37 AM
I have converted all of my .tif to .png using Photoshop batching. Vegas runs quicker and has better memory management when using .png v .tif. Defnitely recommended.
rmack350 wrote on 8/10/2006, 9:43 AM
Excellent point, but tiffs have a huge base of people who are used to them. They were standard fare for many many years. And tiffs can also use lossless compression. Just no alpha, asa far as i know.

Rob
rmack350 wrote on 8/10/2006, 9:48 AM
Yeah, I think the real issue was probably that the two systems had different quicktime configurations. Probably no quicktime on the problem system.

If Photoshop comes into it at all it would just be in the form of an added snag. My explorer crashes were on folders with thousands of jpeg images when jpegs were associated with Photoshop on the system. It wouldn't cause an outright failure in Vegas though.

Rob Mack
stewade wrote on 8/10/2006, 1:54 PM
>> Yeah, I think the real issue was probably that the two systems had different quicktime configurations. Probably no quicktime on the problem system.

And this was the problem. I have since installed QT on the "problem" system and the TIF img/s now render fine using NR...

I'll certainly take on board the png batch conversion suggestion. It is/was a solution but I don't think any of us become the wiser if we are forced to use work-arounds instead of solving the actual problem.

I appreciate the help and assistance from all...

@jm - I got hungry and ate the frog - sorry.
rmack350 wrote on 8/10/2006, 11:48 PM
I don't know that I'd exactly call batch conversion to PNG a workaround, mainly because this is a preferred format and natively supported by Vegas. The fact that it includes an 8bit alpha channel makes it supperior to Tiff. It's just that tiff is such a widely used legacy format.

Vegas supports tiffs well enough through quicktime so as long as you have it installed you're good to go.

Rob Mack
John_Cline wrote on 8/11/2006, 7:27 AM
The TIFF file format is actually quite versatile, unfortunately this also means that there are a wide variety of "flavors" of TIFFs. Not all software supports every conceivable variation of the TIFF format. As has already been suggested, PNG is the native image format for Vegas. PNG is a full 24bit, lossless format plus an alpha channel and its format is much more "standardized" between graphics applications. If you have a choice (and the time to batch convert from another format), PNG is your best bet.

John