My final project is ~10 hours in length, comprised of 20 sub-VEGs, 360 GB video data, ~80 HDV video files.

So it's a big project, and I notice since Vegas 9.0d things have run slightly more smoothly, Vegas has lots of problems with large projects.

Render MPEG-4 via MainConcept? I can't seem to output files longer than 5 hours. I'm forced to use single-pass rendering with SONY's own MPEG-4 compressor.

There seems to be some limit on the number of Aiptek 720p H264 clips I can import. While the cap on videos-per-project must have moved up beyond my concerns in Vegas 9.0d, I'd guess I've reached the new cap by nesting VEGs.

If SONY needs a hard drive full of LARGE test projects to check their builds against, I'm happy to ship them a hard drive. The move to 64-bit has certainly helped, but it is still way too easy to put tons of time into a particular workflow, only to find roadblocks towards the end.

Currently I'm renaming the H264 video clips so some are MOV, and some are MP4. Maybe this makes once codec decoder process some, and another codec decoder process others. Why the bleep that should have any impact on the number of video clips I can use, I don't really understand. But it appears to be removing the nested-VEG errors (until I make bigger projects and hit it again).

"My final project is ~10 hours in length"

How in the world are you going to deliver 10 hours of video?

Even cinema projection systems peg out at around 4 hours without a reel change. The longest tape format is 3 hours.
Break the project down into reels of some more sensible size. Even if you can somehow crunch all the program onto one BD disk or some such you can render reels / scenes / segmentsand link them on the disk. The whole thing then becomes manageable. You're creating a nightmare for yourself for no purpose that I can see.

Bob.

Well said Rob!

Bob/farss & Wilqen,

My issue was I wanted to post a series of lectures on YouTube, and I didn't want to have a dozen videos popping up on the account. This has been somewhat mitigated with the introduction of YouTube "unlisted" videos (obfuscated by non-public URLs), which do not get added to a channel's feed.

But it is still something I'm planning to do for this project (I may use a series of obfuscated videos for future projects).

Yes, generally I don't make 10 hours videos. But if I want to make a 10 hour video, and I've got enough memory and hard drive space, it would be nice to see Vegas not erroring.

Just now, my MPEG-4 MainConcept 2-pass render chugged for ~24 hours, then at the end of the render reported...

An error occurred while creating the media file XYZ.mp4. The reason for the error could not be determined.

...just as it did for long videos using Vegas 9.0d and earlier. So I'm probably forced to either break it up, or use SONY's AVC MPEG-4 renderer which only supports CBR.

I've rendered bigger files with MainConcept MPEG-4 (this one is only 4 GB), but long ones error.

Doesn't YouTube generally limit any upload to a 10 minute video and 2GB.

I'd also suggest avoiding VBR mpeg-4. I'm not certain of this at all however some of the issues users of different NLEs have had with streaming content could well be related to using VBR.

As for your general problem I simply have to wonder if you've not hit a brick wall with the container or some such. Vegas does not handle this very elegantly. Some time back in a hurry for a client I rendered something very simple directly to his USB drive and Vegas kept crashing out. After a lot of frustrating retries it dawned on me, the damn drive was FAT32.

A lot of media formats do have file size / program length limits. Apart from .wav which is limited to 4GB most are pretty large so users rarely run into them, maybe you have.

Bob.