Seems now to be stable again (fingers crossed!!!). I've pulled out AJACaptureFilter, of which there was only one instance (in NEO HD).

Now, it isn't correct to say NEO HDV is (or was) "crap". Has always worked well for me, although there were occasions of failure during capture. Black frames wasn't something I saw. Now I'm using NEO HD, and although there have been some teething problems we seem to be over those. And Cineform are very active in investigating individual problems when they do occur. The advantages of the Cineform DI are clear, but it is true that it is not essential for a good looking result.

I suspect that John Meyer's & farss's comments about Registry errors and/or other broken links are correct. Registry Mechanic found many errors, although past experience suggests that many of these are just a question of a preferred way to configure things.

NEO HDV was 'crap' for me for over a year ... I simply gave up on it and bought a quadcore ... now I use m2t's ... why go with an 'intermediate' codec when you can just use the real thing ... looks great and the qaud handles them just fine ...

I don't have any registry errors, I check the registry regularly ... just to make sure that Quicktime or some other virus like Nero Startsmart hasn't tried to install some 'itunes downloader' or problematic 'file indexing' program into memory ...

The problem is Vegas Pro 8 ... I'm back to 7 and guess what? It's freaking stable as a ROCK ... keep those fingers crossed and maybe try crossing your toes as well ...

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

>>>NEO HDV was 'crap' for me for over a year <<<

Fair enough statement because that was your own experience. It's just not so generally.

I've been using V8 for some time without problems, so again our experiences differ.

Everything I post on this forum is about my own experience ... how could it not be?

That's why I wrote 'NEO HDV was crap ... might be better now but I'm strictly m2t from here on in ...'

Yes, I make comments about the issues I'm having with Sony and other related software on my system ... that's a given. Some people have similar issues ... others don't. That's just the way it is.

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

I use a mix of native m2t and Neo HDV. I never rerender or prerender anything into m2t, only Neo HDV. On the other hand I see no real reason to convert my raw footage to Neo.

Also, be aware that while native m2t is smart-rendered in Vegas, it's only the video portion that is smart-rendered, not the audio. A couple of successive renders may not degrade the video, but it does degrade the audio. Think of it as successive mp3 audio renders.

Seems now to be stable again (fingers crossed!!!). I've pulled out AJACaptureFilter, of which there was only one instance (in NEO HD).

Don't forget to get rid of this file every time you update Neo. It won't be hard to forget: you'll update and things will start crashing again, and you'll have to look up which file you have to delete again... at least that's how it happens with me. Good luck anyway.

How can the audio degrade with successive renders? If I'm rendering a 48khz 16bit audio file over and over ... it's going to stay as a 48khz 16bit audio file ...

????

"does anybody know of a way to render just the protype title sequences from V8 with a transparent background for use over the top of the project tracks in 7?"
Add a transparent event to the T/L, to get to this add say black gen media and turn the transparency slider down to 0. Add the PT FX, do your design, render out to uncompressed AVI. Haven't tried it myself buy can't see why it will not work correctly.

Bob.

>>>>Everything I post on this forum is about my own experience ... how could it not be?<<<

I think you're finding criticism where none was intended. I guess I'm just a bit picky about whether a statement is intended to be globally true or just specific to an individual, because it's in my training to be particular in making such things clear. We don't learn only from personal experience. Otherwise why anyone would post a question here.

I'm a mere male and I don't understand what you're talking about.

However ... I have proved in the last couple of hours that my project (when EDL'd back from Vegas Pro 8) crashes halfway through an m2t render in Vegas 7e as well ...

So ... in desperation I installed Vegas 7d ... which I remember as being very stable ...

And ... my project is now 80% through the first 10 minutes and still going strong ...

Same project, same files, different version of Vegas ...

Save yourself a headache ... EDL your project back to Vegas 7d and enjoy.

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

done a couple of long form doco style projects in 8b without any problems. mind you, other than a few titles, some minor cc and a few pip's the video part was all raw m2t or png graphics. audio was sync, fx, nar, and music all on their own tracks (all in wav).

haven't had any problems with 8b, but from 7e onwards i soon learnt to feed vegas what it likes - and if i could acquire it 'natively', i simply transcoded it to png, wav, m2t.

i'm on a plain old e6600, 3gb ram, xp 32. and as far as i'm concerned, likely to stay that way for some time. it ain't broke, so why bother fixing it.

darren, i sympathise with you, but i tend to agree with bob, any larger project should be worked through logically (the logic being you own), but trying to do everything at once, or on individual tracks seems a receipt for disaster.

then again, i like a simple life,

leslie

Thanks for the feedback ... I really appreciate all the comments and apologise if I sound a bit cynical at times ... it's just been crazy over here since I installed Vegas Pro 8.

Leslie, that still doesn't explain why Vegas 7d is sitting here right before my eyes rendering all my m2t stuff, all my grades, all my audio tracks and it's doing it like it was asleep .... even the way my quad procs are handly the data when viewed in Task Manager is different ... I'm seeing the procs sitting chugging away at somewhere between 25 and 58% usage ... while in Vegas Pro 8 they were maxing out hitting 100% EACH on EXACTLY the same project!

No way ... don't give me that 'you gotta cut your project up' crap ... I"ve already cut it down to 9 x 10 minute segments ...

There is something wrong with Vegas Pro 8 ... the way it handles memory ... the way it talks to MainConcept ... whatever, I'm not a computer programmer and I don't want to know ... Sony simply needs to fix Vegas Pro 8.

I'm absolutely delighted tonight that Vegas 7d is doing its job ... I wish I'd never entered the Vegas Pro 8 beta testing group ...

I'll miss the mixing console and the protype titler ... but I won't be touching anything from now on for a VERY long time ...

and I want my money back for Pro 8 ... but that can wait til tomorrow.

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

Dont; get me wrong, when I say to break things down I'm in no way making ANY excuses for Vegas's problems. They advertise unlimited tracks and they damn well should deliver unlimited tracks with NO crashes and they simply don't.
My point was more along the lines of a) It's an easier way to work and b) if things do go south it makes for an easier exit stratergy.

Bob.

Yeh, you're right Bob! Talk soon, I'm going to finish my project in Vegas 7d ... man, I'm so relieved I got a render out tonight.

Cheers,

Darren

V8 is rock solid for me.

How can the audio degrade with successive renders? If I'm rendering a 48khz 16bit audio file over and over ... it's going to stay as a 48khz 16bit audio file ...

The reason is that in mt2, both the video and the audio are compressed. Vegas added a feature for smart-rendering the video, but they haven't yet for the audio. Thus the audio is uncompressed then recompressed every time you do a smart-render.

Right now if you want there is no way to "smart-render" compressed audio in Vegas.

I suspect that John Meyer's & farss's comments about Registry errors and/or other broken links are correct.

I didn't recommend doing anything with the registry. Registry cleaners are potentially very dangerous and probably completely unnecessary. While I would rank them up with defragmenters (which are TOTALLY unnecessary and a complete waste of time), they are close, and unlike defragmenters which will waste time and stress the disk, but probably won't hurt anything, registry cleaners often let you remove or alter registry settings that actually matter.

So, I definitely didn't recommend doing anything to the registry. I only recommended uninstalling all plug-ins and third party products, including Cineform, that are installed into or run inside of Vegas. Scripts, fX, third-party rendering codecs, hardware controls (like surface controls) etc.

John, true, true; you didn't. Actually it was something Bob mentioned about re-installing Vegas and Sony's recommendations once you start down that path. So getting that thought into my mind I decided on a clean as a first possibly less painful process.
So the process involved was cleaning the machine (although there wasn't much there to do), scan the registry, install the latest version of NEO HD, remove AJACaptureFilter. V8 now working fine on a fairly involved project. Which did the job? Don't know because I did all the "fixes" before testing.

Given how many people mentioned the AJACaptureFilter, and the fact that Cineform has been implicated in many previous threads, my money is on that as the culprit.

Thanks for the help. And I do have in mind your advice re 3rd party software, although I've little of that installed in Vegas. Certainly there can be problems with Cineform (I've had a share that were clearly identified) and upgrades do require uninstall before install (as they state). How well does Vegas handle multi-threading, in particular on 4 and 8 core machines?

With the odd codec exception, I'm finding great quad-core utilization, from the preview through to rendering. Some stuff just absolutely flies.

It's a nice feeling doing in an hour or two, what used to be an overnight render a few (couple?) of years ago.

Hi

I would like to share my experience with all those who have problems with Sony Vegas at startup. Firstly I would like to say that I do not have much knowledge about computers. However, I purchased Sony Vegas Pro 8 and loaded it on my Desktop (XP) and Laptop (VISTA). I also purchased some transition and FX plug-ins. Once I loaded Sony Vegas and all my plug-ins and add-on’s, I found that my Sony Vegas freezes at start-up. To be exact, the moment Sony Vegas got to “initializing audio engine” it just did not wanted to go any further. No amount of uninstalling and re-installing solved the problem.

I then opted to re-format both my desktop and laptop and loaded Sony Vegas first. Each time I loaded another program, software, plug-in or add-on, I opened Sony Vegas to see if it opened completely. I then realized that when I loaded certain software, it made Sony Vegas freeze at “initializing audio engine”. What made it ironic was that it was fairly newly developed software.

I then decided to inform the developers of this software and told them about this problem. I was quite surprise when they informed me that they had this problem in the past and that they fixed it on the backend.
I was then informed to reinstall the eCommerce engine (updater windows ews.exe) of which they forwarded me the link. I loaded Sony Vegas first, then the eCommerce engine, and then all my plug-in and add-on’s.

I am glad to say that this has solved my problem completely on my Desktop (XP) and on my Laptop (VISTA). I hope this information will be of benefit to some of you as these Sony Vegas forums has always been of great help and benefit to me.

(I was not sure if I could use other software developer’s names on these forums, however, I am fully prepared to mail you the eCommerce engine – updater windows ews.exe link / file on request). If more information is required, do not hesitate to mail me immediately.

Regards

Lance
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