I'm suspecting maybe heat. Only a guess but anything that involves intensive rendering or encoding is about as savage a test as a CPU will ever get heat wise. Frien has a new G5 with iDVD, much the same thing, it'd die at 70% of an encode. Wasn't heat but RAM that wasn't seated all the way, maybe the heat was enough to jiggle it out just enough.
Either way I'm a great fan of breaking things down, rendering bits out etc. Apart from it feeling a bit safer I find I get less Bob created stuff ups that way.

I prefer rendering in sections, based on activity. action scenes can be at max bit rate, while low action or stills can be rendered at low rate. multi pass rendering is good, but you can have greater control of size and qty this way. Always put 3d effects in a diff veg for rendering. As note in this forum, 3d really kills rendering times for the entire project, a 3d 20 sec scene in 20 minute project, goes from hours to days. Of course, size of project reflects benefits of this approach, also having extra vegas lic's for addition computers, cut rendering times accordingly,

. .. hmmm .. I wonder if a Script could be created that would "Map" a project to work out the settings that SHOULD/could be used for creating a "rendering" process/sequence/event - then go away and do it - neat idea?

Grazie

what plugin was it saying that had trouble? Could it be a DX thing?

Usually when it starts stopping during the render it's a memory or heat problem. I render out the complex stuff first piece by piece then do the final render after another reboot to reset the memory and the paging file then in the task manager end a ton of third party apps that you do not need including sound card stuff, printer stuff, shuttle pro, etc. Then I make sure the room air conditioner is on. The final render seems to fly right through no problem. I have two gig of ram and when the task manager starts to show 1.4 gig being used render stoppage is imminent and usually lock-up occurrs.

JJK

I think the ideas of heat and perphaps resources for pages could be the problem. That has been the age old problem of many editor systems. My VM is a hardware/software system and the drives and cards HAD to be monitored for temperature. Most us have digital sensors on the system and as it approaches 46 degrees C it starts to crash. Also, had multiple tasks going on and rendering causes resource shortages. Had to do just what the others here suggest and short renders, reboot to clear memory etc. So look there. I suspect Vegas is just as susceptable to this as any other computer based system. XP seems to handle it better than previous OS systems but any thing made has its limits. We just keep pushing them out more with each new system

Gary

Heat is a good guess, but another possibility is that some gremlin has crept in. The past three months, I have had to fix dozens of client computers that have become infected with "spyware." Run one of the spyware removal programs (like Lavasoft's Adaware). They're free, and fairly quick to use.

How does the spyware interfere with the rendering? I thought everything was supposed to be kind of off during the render.

JJK

I think in the past two months spyware has started winning the battle. I have been battle some spyware for a few weeks, that the usual recommneded tools, Spybot and Ad-aware did nothing to catch. The new method spyware is using is that each time it launches it generates a temporary file that does the deed. So if you find the file that is hijacking or launching a dialer and you delete it, you have not got ridden of the problem since you have only deleted the temporary file.

I looked on the web and even the security forums did not mention the pages that were launching or the problems I was having. I found a similiar fix that a programmer had created, but just recently, he gave up updated the program becuase the variants of the same hijack started to profilerate and he couldn't keep up with them. The problem I was having was start.chm hijack.

I use Panda Platinum antivirus and firewall. It's usually on all the time, but sometimes, it goes down. The firewall did a good job of catching outgoing attempts, but until today did not identify the trojan programs when doing a scan. So it took them at least three weeks to catch up. Today, I ran another Panda virus scan and it found several files that were start.chm and several that were inst.exe trojans. They were in my temp file folder under various other names.

Does it fail at the same point every time? Then it's not heat-related.

To test for heat issues, simply take off the case side, which will drop temps by at least 10 degrees. If it still fails, I would next check memory by swapping in a different ram stick, or removing one at a time if you have multiple sticks.

If the failure occurs only after a long time, then I don't see how any software gremlins could be involved. BUT, could some other process be starting up, such as an autodefrag, or an auto-virusscan?

My system has tons of processes running in the background, and is solid as rock (knock on wood). A few months ago I noticed that it began rebooting by itself late at night; I later found that it happened when it ran the Retrospect backup program at 3 am. What was happening was that when Retrospect did its backup, it would finish up by rebuilding its catalog file, which worked the CPU as hard as any render would. The temperature of the CPU die would gradually rise to the point where suddenly it would crash, and XP had been configured to reboot after a crash. Hence the rebooting.

I discovered the CPU fan was occasionally behaving badly; MotherboardMonitor showed that, normally, the fan turned at 4500rpm, but once in a while it would drop to just 2500rpm, causing the overtemp during the backup.

I get the feeling that my job here in front of the keyboard is more along the lines of Sherlock Holmes than George Lucas at times...

(...) I like the idea of doing small renders, building up the pieces for the long render..
(...) I'm a great fan of breaking things down, rendering bits out etc.

Can you please tell me how to do that?
Thanks in advance ;)

One more thing: about the remark on trojans, try The Cleaner. It does monitor the registry.

i've had the same thing for a while. Run those (spybot & adaware)on safemode & use cwsshredder & hijack this. it's one of the unknown thiggies but it is detectable. I got rid of it once already.

Safemode is important. When not in safemode they can't get everything.

Thanks for all the responses.

I did the first 15 minutes and it rendered fine. I started on the next 15 minutes and within one minute all the error pop ups started. So I tried shutting down Vegas (again had to do the CTRL+ALT+DEL and reopening. It seemed to work. 99% done - timer at 0:00:00:00 and what happens? Yup.

Now here is a brand new error - I have never ever seen this one before.
Not enough storage is available to process this command. xIImageNative.cpp 733"

I hit the ok button and off we go with all the "normal" error pop ups. (And I will say that there is more than enough hard drive space available. )

Now let me talk about what a few people here have said - long renders and heat. I doubt it because I have rendered out this project in the past - the full thin - with no issues. For htis cut I have updated a few things. Added a few little audio bits, replaced one bit of footage and cut out another. Render wise it has never done this before with any project. Last week I did a full render of another project that was longer with no issues. So what I am saying is this is all some sort of new issue, and sadly a Vegas one it seems.

Nothing has changed from the last render I did - no new plug-ins. Now new SP2. Now other weird MS updates. Just random errors. After 3 days of renders - only succesfull render was the first 15 miunutes.

So I am going to try one final thing - saddly back to multi renders which I was hoping I would not have to do. So I am gonna try the 24p output first. Than color correct. Than final audio output and final render.

Still trying to keep calm.

Did you save the project to a new veg file? Storage on your destination drive is ok but how about the temp directory?

Just throwing in ideas.

Best/Tommy

The "not enough storage is available to process this command" error has nothing to do with disk space. It is an OS error indicating that the operating system has run out of internal memory buffers (it maintains a pool of handles to bigger memory blocks used by applications) and is usually indicative of a memory leak. A memory leak occurs when a program allocates memory but then doesn't properly return it when done. Eventually the system chokes because it can't do its own housekeeping.

How much RAM do you have in your system? The size of the internal pools is a percentage of how much total RAM you have.

This may have to do with what kind of video or images you have in your project at that particular point. Are they unusually large, or a different format than what your output is? If so, maybe you can first render those separately to get them to your final project size, and then include them in your project.

I usually pride myself on being pretty saavy about computer hardware and software problems, but even so, there have been numerous times over the past few years when a problem could only be solved by throwing up my hands in resignation and going back to a recent backup. Software has gotten so complex that sometimes it's the only way to get back in business. In those instances, I do a backup before going back, so when I reset my system using DriveImage to an earlier, solid version, I can then go out to my sick backup and pull back my email files and such, so I haven't lost anything important.

In this instance, if it ain't a hardware issue, then perhaps your only option is to reinstall Vegas, or go to an earlier system backup.

At the moment I can't remember which it is but having either windows media files or perhaps it was mpeg files on my timelines always leaks memory. Not that I expect Filmy to use either-they aren't good sources of media anyway-but it's a good example of a leak. I open up task manager and watch Vegas memory usage climb as I shuttle around the timeline. That's all I have to do.

Rob Mack

... Maybe the newly introduced footage is the problem.
Could be corrupted. Try replacing the first one up on the timeline by a file you are shure of and then render.

Gilles

Filmy: Is xlimage installed on your machine? Was it installed since you were able to successfully render the problem Vegas project?

Video Render HD nicley defragged? . . .er .. I'm trying, I'm trying . . .

Grazie

Well - about one week to render - that is/was a first!

To touch on a few things here -

I did the 24p render first. Worked with no issues. *Entire* project rendered fine.
So now I opened a brand spanking new poroject (And the 24p was a brand spanking new project as well) and do the "rest".

A> Vegas timer is reall screwy. I think some other people talked about this in the past, but for me it really has never been any sort of issue - at least not this noticeable. Time says it will take, say, 20 hours to render. Come back and it still says 20 hours. After about 19 hours it suddenly goes to a brand new time, as does the past time..so after about a day it will say it has only been rendering for an hour and has 4 hours to go for example. Makes no sense.
B> As before, about 24 hours into the render the error pops up start.
C> After about 2 days only 29 minutes have rendered. So I load that up and continue on. After about 30 seconds the errors come again. So I shut down and reboot.
D> Open up Vegas, load project files. Start new render - starting from where last failed render left off. Timer says something like 15 hours to render. After 3 more days timer says 20 hours left and only 3 hours have past. In any case render ends fine with no more errors.

So now I load up "final" render. Check it out. 2 sections/clips/scenes (At least that I have noticed thus far) are a bit off. So I re-render just those 2 spots. The first re-render is a shot that lasts maybe 15 seconds. All errors happen in the first 60 seconds of the render. So this puts to rest any sort of time/length issue...same errors trying to render out 65 minutes happened to a 15 second section.
Re-load project and re-render both sections with no issue.

Ok - so now with these 2 fixes in place I want to render the *full* thing. Parts 1 and 2 and the 2 small re-renders. All files are same format. All files are untouched. So really there should be no "render" in the sense of changing the files. In a perfect world!!!

Hit render - all source = output. Timers starts off, and it is telling me it will take something like 15 hours?!?!?!?!?!

So I go over this new render only project with a fine tooth comb. And I find on track set at 99.6% opacity. Nice (!!!) the vegas gremlins attack. Considering I did nothing but drop media onto the time line things like this *REALLY* piss me off.

So I set this back to 100%. Now it goes much smoother. HOWEVER - it should be pointed out that this still took 1:46:44 to "render" a 1:06:05 project. Not even real time and this too is unacceptable for a project that has nothing being done to it.

So for right now I am checking into Premiere Pro. This has been an eye opener for me as far as Vegas goes. This project needs to be ready to screen in October so I could maintain some "I can deal with this" attitude. However 99.9% of any project I have ever worked on needs to be done "yesterday". Clearly, for me, Vegas is not the tool to do this. At least not long form.

Yes a dual Xeon would work better in some reguards. SATA drives and network renders would also free up the system. 5 gigs or more of RAM would go a long way as well. However the core issue here was not the system - the system wasn't crashing, Vegas was. Render time can be delt with by planning - this is not a new issue with any NLE. The NLE crashing after 20 hours of a supposed 30 hour render *is* an issue however. Planning on a 30 hour render and have a 64 hour render *is* an issue. Wasting time troubleshooting a render issue because the software has magiclly set opactiy to less than 100 *is* an issue. (And now I am *REALLY* wondering is the first render Vegas also did this and the entire project was rendered out at less than 100% opacity.)

Hard drives were defragged, and were again done after the first round of errors as I started this thread. I did check memory usage during the render and it showed that Vegas was only using 128 megs of RAM during this render. I have more than 128 megs of RAM so if all that was being used was that even if I had 5 gigs it wouldn't have seemingly mattered.

And to answer SonyEPM -
Filmy: Is xlimage installed on your machine? Was it installed since you were able to successfully render the problem Vegas project?

Sorry to sound really dumb here - but what is "Xlimage"? I just thought it was part of Vegas because I did not install anything called "xlimage".

Filmy,

Two things.

First, I created some scripts to "audit" your project prior to render to find some of these gremlins. See this link:

Audit Script

Here are the direct links to the scripts:

Audit Script

Audt Script 2

Second, I too am sharing your increasing frustration with Vegas because of all the "little" things that can inadvertently go wrong, such as:

1. Flash frames (just ruined one full day of work that I then had to re-do);

2. Events that won't let you "grab" the fader control until you shorten the event by one frame;

3. Events where the audio is short by a fraction of one frame (I usually ignore these because I can't hear any problem, but it makes me feel like something is about to go wrong);

4. Chapter markers that don't align on frame boundaries once imported into DVDA (which is one problem), and which don't align on GOP boundaries in DVDA, thus allowing a few frames from the previous scene to show up in the new chapter (which is a separate problem);

5. Unbelievable chaos -- even after three years of using the program -- when using ripple edit.

Want an example of ripple edit chaos? Try this:

Turn on auto-ripple, all tracks, markers, and regions. Put an event on the timeline, and click on that event to select it. Now, drag the cursor above the timeline to create a loop region somewhere within the event (i.e., the loop region is entirely within the selected event). Press "Ctrl-X" to cut the loop region from the event. You will now have two events, with the middle having been cut out, and the ripple edit function having moved all events to the left to close the gap.

Now, click on the video for the second event to select it, and press "Ctrl-X" to cut it.

Congratulations, you have just created an unbelievable mess, but one that you won't see right away. To see what has happened, turn off auto-ripple, grab the remaining video event, and drag it to the right. Whoa! There is the audio from the event you just cut, sitting on top of the audio for the remaining video event. The killer is that you did exactly the same thing -- pressed Ctrl-X -- but when you did it with the loop region active, and only the video event selected, it cut the audio too. Without the loop region, it cut only the event that is highlighted.

I can give many other examples, and I understand fully that this is how the product is designed, but what I am saying is that this design causes a huge number of problem because it fails the consistency test: The same action results in totally different results depending on which track(s) are selected, which event(s) are selected, and whether you have an active loop region. What's worse is that there is no visual indication of your goof.

The solution? There are several. At the heart of any solution is one word: Consistency. If I want to do something different with the audio and its associated video (like an L cut), then I should have to explicitly tell Vegas that I want to decouple them (notice I don't use the word "group").

I'd like to see Vegas 6 contain a "one-action" de-couple mode that would not stay in effect after one command (like Ctrl-X) is executed, or perhaps have a key that, while it is held, would de-couple the video event from its associated audio, so I don't have to remember to later re-couple it.

Also, the whole concept of "grouping" needs to be rethought, because some actions (like moving events) affect all members of the group, whereas other actions (like cutting) do not. Again, the consistency thing. With most programs that have a grouping function (like vector drawing programs), when you click on one member of the group, all members of the group are immediately highlighted, and any action affects all members. Why doesn't Vegas have an option (in the Preferences dialog) that makes the program highlight ALL events in a group when any group member is selected?

Before I finish, do you want to have some more fun? Try this: Turn off auto ripple and start a new project. Put an AVI file on the timeline. Make a loop region within this event, as before, and now press "S". You should now have three events. Move the first event to the right or left. The audio moves with the video. Undo this action. Now, select the video for the first event. Press and hold the Ctrl key and select the video for the third event. Release the Ctrl key and then press "G" to group the first and the third video event. Now move the first video event. Surprise!! The audio for both events has been ungrouped from the video. Did I tell it to ungroup the audio? Now that you have the first and third video events grouped, don't even think about turning on ripple editing, creating a loop region across the end of the second and beginning of the third event and then pressing Ctrl-X. Ouch! If you have only the third video event selected, then the audio and the video get cut to different lenghts. Even with ripple edit set to only work on Affected Tracks, you get all sorts of strange results with the loop region across part of the second and third events, depending on what combination of events 1, 2, and 3 you select.

The Sony Vegas editing paradigm is close to being absolutely brilliant and much of the time it works extremely well. However, these inconsistencies can cause major problems, many of which are not immediately evident. It can take hours to undo the problems created.