Okay, here's a question. When configuring Lagarith in Vegas, I note some options are not checked by default. Shouldn't "Use Multithreading" and "Prevent Upsampling When Decoding" be selected?


...Jerry

Use multithreading should be checked if you have a hyperthreaded or multi-core CPU. Upsampling has to do with color space conversion, if you use RGB, which is what Vegas uses then, as far as I know, this setting should have no effect.

Well I updated my Lagarith codec to 1.3.22. I am running Windows 7 pro64bit on an i7 x980 3.33GHz with 6GB ram.

When I tried a render with Lagarith out of Particle Illusion all I got was a black screen. Before the Lagarith update all was well.

All of my drivers are current.

Later in the day Particle Illusion locked me out of the program - even though I've been a registered user for years. I have put in a support ticket to Alan at wondertouch (now under GenArts) but have no solution yet. I'd rather not do a system restore if at all possible.

Any ideas?

I've often found that PI suddenly won't work. Did you plug in a USB drive that wasn't there when you activated PI? A new mouse? Keyboard? Updated your graphics driver?

My problem is that I keep at least 6 hard disks permanently connected to various SATA ports (currently, 8 SATA hard disks), plus some 4 or so more connected by USB3 for backup. Unfortunately, one or another fails ever couple of months or so.

Even though I disconnect all USB drives each time I activate PI, it seems to me that PI stops working whenever I replace a hard drive or other hardware component. Once I'm pretty sure PI stopped working merely because I updated some driver on my system. It's so frustrating that I never install it until I have accumulated a number of projects that need it, then I re-install and re-activate and I don't touch a thing in my OS or hardware until I get caught up - knowing that I probably won't be able to use it soon.

At the moment, I'm (again) needing to make a phone call to get more activations available.

PI is the only software that I use on a regular basis that I truly hate - I can't count the number of lost hours of productivity due to their fussy activation scheme.

Next time I activate it, I may disconnect all but one of my SATA work disks, then make an image of the OS, then disconnect that work disk and store it away until the next time I need PI. It's a drag having to create an image of my OS, restore and old one, use PI, then restore the new image. But that may be the only way that I can save time and avoid their tedious activation process.

I'd give a bundle to buy similar software that wouldn't waste so much of my time.

Well GenArts got me up and running again with PI but even though I can use the program - it still won't render anything but a black screen.

They're still working on it.

Grrr.

@Reberclarke I get the same from PI. I've tried different alpha option settings but it's still dark in here.

@LightAds - I've done some experimenting and have reached a solution (sort of). The problem does not seem to be the Lagarith codec. I believe it is in the way PI calls PI Render inside of PI for larger sizes.

I was able to render with Lagarith inside PI at 720x480, but at larger screen sizes (when PI Render is called) I would get the black screen.

I decided to try something...so I SAVED my project as an .ip file then closed PI.

I opened PI Render on its own and navigated to the saved file. It then rendered just fine to all sizes.

So, and I'm no expert, I think the problem is in the way PI calls PI Render.

I have a support ticket in at support@wondertouch.com and have let them know what I'm doing and my results.

Hope that helped!

I got it to work. In configure I selected RGBA on a 1280x720 project and it alpha'd ok this time.

Woah, big trouble for me with version 1.3.22. I rendered a short video with this codec. Now when I attempt to upload a video to YouTube in either Firefox or IE8, the browser crashes as soon as I browse to the folder with the Lagarith video in it. The browse window is coming up in thumbnail mode. Maybe this is something to do with thumbnail creation. I'll email the author and point him to this thread. In the meantime it's back to 1.3.20 for me.

I emailed Ben Greewood, the creator or Lagarith, and he replied saying he would be looking into this.

@NickHope:

[I]"In the meantime it's back to 1.3.20 for me."[/I]

Do you know where I can download that older version? Thanks.

@ReberClark Did you render out the alpha using RGBA from the mode selection? The author mailed me back saying i should use RGBA and it works fine from PI now.

@ reberclark Try here or here.

"Woah, big trouble for me with version 1.3.22. I rendered a short video with this codec. Now when I attempt to upload a video to YouTube in either Firefox or IE8, the browser crashes as soon as I browse to the folder with the Lagarith video in it. The browse window is coming up in thumbnail mode. Maybe this is something to do with thumbnail creation"I'm not sure if this is good or bad news, but I tried to repro this and could not. Win 7 64bit, IE9 & Firefox.

..Jerry

@LightAds - have not tried a render with Alpha yet. Works okay (see above post) RGB (default).

@Nick Hope - Thanks, I was able to get it from the Softpedia site.

I will wait to replace my new Lagarith with the older one. I don't have anything pressing time-wise and all parties seem to be looking into it. In the mean time I will try the RGBA setting and try rendering with Alpha. I will post results but it may be next week.

Thanks for all the help.

Well I did something stupid (somehow that's easy for me).

I started a second instance of particleIllusion while running another one minimized and got the "file damaged!" screen then was locked out of the program again, losing the last of my previous 3 activations!

So...I emailed Alan again at particleIllusion and am awaitng a new set of activations to continue the investigation.

particleIllusion is a GREAT program and I am sorry that this is happening. I love my particleIllusion and am confident this will be straightened out soon.

This is mostly resolved. Lagarith does not appear to be the problem.

Indeed I had to check the RGBA option in Lagarith to render with Alpha but I was still getting black screens on renders of large format (1920x1080) project from within particleIllusion.

pI3 would create the .ip3 file just fine but when calling pIR from within pI3 the render would fail (black screen).

If I started pIR outside of pI3 (independently runnning) the project would render perfectly.

So...still working on it (why when iPR is called from within pI3 the renders are black) but now have a solution for obtaining renders of large format projects.

If something is figured out about this I will post.

Just tested on a 1920x1080 project from within PI and it called PiRender and gave me the alpha, no problem this side.

Are you sure you clicked "Save Alpha" then "remove black........." on the PiRender window? It's grey'd out on the normal PI screen.

Everything has been resolved.

particleIllusion Render was set on "use software rendering." When that was reset to "use Open GL acceleration" or "hardware rendering" all worked as it should.

I had been using software rendering for a long time. I don't know what changed except for that installation of the new Lagarith codec.

So I have no need for the old Lagarith codec - the new one works just fine now - but I appreciate the link.

Alan at wondertouch is still tinkering with why the black renders and crashes were happening. Anything additional and I will post. Thanks guys, this forum is invaluable!

Ben has updated the codec again to 1.3.23, which fixes my crash.

Download
Change Log

Nick,

Here's something interesting. I just did a Vegas Render using the Lagarith 1.3.23 Codec. Tried runing MediaInfo to get the properties and MediaInfo hangs. MediaInfo works fine against a 1.3.20 rendered file. Unfortunately, I deleted all my 1.3.22 renders.

...Jerry

Just tried a quick test here and no problem with MediaInfo.

If you're getting a repeating error you can report bugs to the author Ben Greenwood at sir_lagsalot at hotmail dot com. I would check it out well first though.