Vegas 6 hanging while rendering

Skyhawke wrote on 10/12/2007, 3:53 PM
First and foremost, I accept the title of noob. I am using Vegas 6.0b build 126 and my problem is that while rendering, it hangs up and freezes the program. If I use the 'make movie' button, it hangs up at exactly 35% every time. If I use 'render as' it hangs up at 32%. It is a mixed media project, with Wav, MP3, JPEG, and video. At the point of hanging up, it is on a series of JPEG, but not the first series of such, meaning the first part of the project also included JPEG, all from the same source (ie, camera) I have completed four other projects before without incident and no additions to the computer. I am running Win XP, service pack 2, with 1G RAM, Pent 4 3.0 GHz. It hangs while rendering either MPEG or AVI. The e-mail help suggested reducing resolution of pictures (720x480)and register MPEG-2 plug-ins, and I actually don't have a strong clue as to how to accomplish this. I don't understand how reducing the resolution will help, when the project has already used 35% of the same size JPEG. And if I reduce the resolution, is there a way I can do it per file as opposed to per image? Resizing some 200+ individual images just doesn't go over well. I went to call Sony and Friday 12 Oct seems to be a corporate holiday. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 10/12/2007, 4:35 PM
Your problem has been discussed many times here.

You must resize all your JPEG pictures to project's size before you put them in the timeline, not just drag n drop huge megapixel pictures. This crashes Vegas.

>I don't understand how reducing the resolution will help

It does, because Vegas doesn't have to deal with GBs of uncompressed data instead of what's really needed and nothing more. A small bug in memory handling, and boom.

>I actually don't have a strong clue as to how to accomplish this

Download the freeware Gimp (http://gimp.org/windows/), or another freeware graphics application that let's you do "scale image" and simply save all your pictures in the 640x480 size using "cubic" as the interpolation method (with a new filename so you don't overwrite the big pictures). For optimal quality results you might need to sharpen the images after resizing them (on Gimp, click Filters/Enhance/Sharpen at 10%) and then save them.

Then, you drag these new pictures in your project instead and you will be fine.

Gimp supports scripting, so theoretically you can write a script to read all files from a given folder and do the same resizing for all of them in one go.

>I went to call Sony and Friday 12 Oct seems to be a corporate holiday.

They can't do anything about it, except give you a better upgrade price for Vegas Movie Studio 8, which according to some people it has this bug fixed. You will have to either do the resizing job, or upgrade Vegas.
Eugenia wrote on 10/12/2007, 4:52 PM
Here's what you need:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/learnmore/tips/eschelman2.mspx
Resize many pictures at once. Make sure you don't select more than 10 at a time though, or Windows might get into a weird situation too.

From that dialog, select 640x480 as this is the best size for 4:3 pictures on a 720x480 Vegas project.
Skyhawke wrote on 10/12/2007, 11:02 PM
Thank you very much...this information will help a lot. You have given me a good course of action to follow, including the necessary link I need also. Thanks again
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 10/13/2007, 2:01 AM
Gimp can be a bit overwhelming in its features. I you want to keep it simple, use Irfanview instead. It also allows batch conversion, so you can resize all your images in one go. Google for it, it is free.
azhot wrote on 2/21/2008, 9:04 PM
Did version 8 fix this problem? I didn't have a problem last year with my pictures -- using the same camera, etc. Kept all my pictures as they were after editing with Photoshop Elements. But suddenly it has become a problem? I am now, however, using Paint Shop Pro. Would software houses please hire hackers to test their software? Maybe then we'd get software that stays compatible for over a year.