Vegas 11 595 Still Renders Frames to Black...

TheRhino wrote on 3/12/2012, 9:30 AM

Last week I rendered-out a client's project using Vegas 11 595. This was not the final edit but a chance for the client to see our preliminary ideas. Today the client reported that brief flashes of black appear in one of the scenes. I checked my copy of the files, and sure-enough, Vegas 11 595 rendered portions of my Blackmagic M-JPEG clips to black - but this time I did not catch them as they were very small - the longest was about 2 seconds and some were fractions of a second...

One of my complaints with V10e was that Vegas would sometimes render 3rd party clips to black, like Cineform or Blackmagic M-JPEG. (I hear the problem is worse with still images...) However, the thing about 10e was that the black portion was always large-enough to detect. If I cut the offending clip into smaller sections, closed & reopened Vegas, I could usually get it to render-out correctly. VERY annoying, but I never sent a project to a client that had missing (black) footage....

So I am back to using earlier versions of Vegas. To date Vegas 8c is 100% reliable - no black clips. Vegas 9c 64 is also fairly reliable but 9e and 10e consistenly render to black. I have multiple OS images and have tried booting to a drive with ONLY Vegas installed (plus the latest Blackmagic & Cineform codecs - nothing else...)

So here we go again...

Comments

VanLazarus wrote on 3/12/2012, 5:58 PM

I haven't confirmed renders to black with Cineform clips (which I've been having major problems with), but I am getting black frames in the preview window with the latest Neoscene 5.6.2 and Vegas 11 b595. I'm also getting weird garbled portions of my composited image. Previews only so far.... haven't yet seen this in renders, but feel that it will take only a matter of time.

I can (usually) avoid the black frames by loading up a fresh copy of Vegas and only loading this project just before rendering.

Below are some black and garbled preview frames.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/651378/b595%20Black%20frames%202.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/651378/b595%20Static%20frames.jpg

TheRhino wrote on 3/12/2012, 6:15 PM

I started feeling comfortable with 595 because I haven't had footage disappear on the timeline like with 10e or earlier releases of V11... Like I always do before a render, I restarted Vegas 11 595 and then went straight to rendering... Older GPU, so GPU enable is not even an option. However, Vegas 11 64 only uses about 60% cpu during the render whereas Vegas 10 64 used 95%... This means it takes V11 about 40% more time to render the same project...

There has been discussion about this on the CC forum, so I know it's not just me or a problem our workstations... The advice is always to restart Vegas before any render. Seems SCS should have a fix by now but it may require more collaboration with 3rd party providers. Vegas seems to handle black differently than PP so maybe it is how the 3rd party codecs are making assumptions about how Vegas will handle the black...

berkesnd wrote on 3/12/2012, 7:29 PM

I have been fighting this problem since the release and install of v11. I just finished a project with stills and found that I could play the video tracks and see flashes (or holes) of black. Obviously these flashes and holes would then show up in the render. I also experienced playing a section through with no flashes, and then replaying the section and finding flashes and holes where there were none. It took hours to finally achieve a clean render. It could be my imagination but it seems worse since 11.595.

TheRhino wrote on 3/12/2012, 8:09 PM

Yes, the difference with 11.595 is that the black appears in temporary flashes - some lasting for less than a second. In comparison, with 10e the black areas were long-enough to easily notice if I placed the final render on the timeline.

This is really disappointing as I am still stuck using 8c (32) and 9c (64) to get any work done in a timely manner...

BTW, one of my systems multi-boots, so I have 8c on an isolated Win7 64 drive and 11.595 on an isolated drive so that no other programs can conflict. These were based on fresh OS installs from the ground-up, followed by SP1, driver updates & fresh Vegas install. The problem repeats itself on more than one workstation so I know it is not my memory. I can run 8c & PP 24/7 from a 3rd boot drive that has CS5.5, Office 2011, and all of my other essential programs. I tired installling V11.595 on that drive & get the same results, so I went back to the earlier image without V11...

VanLazarus wrote on 3/12/2012, 9:13 PM

I don't understand these claims of Vegas interfering with previous versions of itself. Has this been proven to be an issue?

TheRhino wrote on 3/13/2012, 5:45 PM

I have 8c, 9e and 10e all working nicely together but I wanted to keep 11.595 by itself until I had more time to test it out. Running it on a clean OS install means that the errors are related to Vegas and not something else. I also keep 8c on a separate boot drive that has been rock-solid stable for over 3 years. If I get some bad footage that causes crashes with the other editions I can usually use that version of 8c to fix/re-render it without crashing.

ritsmer wrote on 3/14/2012, 2:55 AM

VanLazarus wrote: I don't understand these claims of Vegas interfering with previous versions of itself. Has this been proven to be an issue?

I have called SCS to answer this several times in this forum thinking it should be quite easy for them to explain briefly if there were any interference between the versions or not - but I have not seen an answer.

Might be my fault, though - as I am happily editing along with Olde Faithful 10.0e -where I have not seen even a small hick-up for months....

alltheseworlds wrote on 3/14/2012, 4:26 AM

@VanLazarus NeoScene ? Pffffft. Had huge problems with that and their support people were pretty much useless - then closed my ticket ! I wrote off my Neoscene investment.....

Rommeliser wrote on 8/22/2013, 3:20 PM

Hi there .
I had massive problems with bars of green and bars or screens of black randomly appearing. After much mucking about I found the solution. Firstly I rendered the video with the Full resolution rendering quality to "draft" .Instant success (located in Project,Properties,Video page).Yes quality suffers, but if you use HD sources and go to 5MBPS WMV for uploading to youtube, then this is fine. The help file specifically suggests this as a way to remove artifacts. Works for me. I also try to leave the PC alone whilst rendering, messing around on the net severely disrupts the picture too. It did take quite some time and effort to figure this out, and every time I replace my hard drive and re-install ...well it drives me nuts.