i've never had issues with vegas & png's, or tga's. I've loaded up thousands as an animation. is this what they're doing? Or is it in the tens or hundreds?

It's really important to keep the resolution close to what you need and not allow it to get too high because Vegas will just have to resize every frame to the correct output size anyway. If they are doing animation for SD, the PNG files should be 655x480. You should not have a problem at this resolution.

~jr

If the size is 655 X 480 and you are getting crashes it may be the result of an ICM crash. Happens with some programs. Transfer the file to Adobe Image Ready first and save it there. Then try it. Alternately transfer it to another program first like Paint Shop Pro and save it there.

John

Never had a PNG ping on me.

I always have tiffs with TIFFs.

What are the specs/reso of the PNGs?

I have done an animation using about a thousand PNG files in Vegas 7 without a problem, but they were each relatively small images (SD frame size). I've also done individual PNGs with transparency, but I haven't done large numbers of PNG files with transparency, or super big ones (> 2k resolution).

Okay, so the questions are, what version of Photoshop, what dimension PNG, how many of them?

While I can't remember why, it seems to me that older versions of Photoshop created kind of odd PNG files. Or it could have been my level of experience at the time.

There was also a problem with photoshop 6 and probably 7 where if you set photoshop to be the default handler of a file type when you installed pshop then you'd have troubles later on. Big folders full of lots of jpegs would crash Windows explorer, for example, when it tried to get the thumbnails using Adobe's DLL. This is why Adobe had to write and include Bridge, to provide an alternative to the way they were breaking Explorer. This might also apply to PNG files. Unfortunately, the solution was to completely remove Photoshop from the system and then reinstall it without associating image formats with it. (The CS versions don't have this problem, BTW.)

I don't have this sort of trouble with PNG. Seemingly not with jpeg either. I recently imported every jpeg photo I had (A bit more than 2100 files, largest size was 1600x1200). VP8 loads and plays and the memory usage stays stable, but I've only got jpegs in the project file. Takes a while to leave vegas and then come back to it while Vegas unlocks and lock files.

If you find the problem maybe this will turn into a teaching opportunity.

Rob Mack

A lot of the animation projects i've been working on lately involve between 600 and 10,789 .png files at 1920x1080. Vegas 7 and 8 handle these just as fast and reliably as an .avi file. No issues at all. I will note though that i'm using uncompressed .png at about 6MB per image. Perhaps compressed files cause substantially more work for Vegas.

You're talking about importing as an image sequence, which is probably what Barend has his students doing.

I was just throwing all the images I had onto a timeline to see if I could break Vegas. The best i could do was make life a little unpleasant when I switched over to other software and back to Vegas. Vegas normally closes all it's files when it loses focus, anfd opens them back up when it gets focus again. This takes time.

It'd be great to have some sample crashomatic projects to try just to see if they crash all systems or just some.

Seems like HDV media is a common thread.

A point about image compression. You could have the same image as a 100k jpeg file and a 600k PNG file but I think when they're uncompressed into RAM they're probably the same size.

Rob Mack

I reported a problem with V8 crashing my old V7 projects that contain a couple of large png's (6500x2200 and 4000x2200pixels).
This was after upgrading to V8 and trying to use 32bit.
(Never had a problem with Vegas and big png's before).

Support confirmed V8 in 32bit crashes using these png's but offered no resolution to the problem other than to say use smaller png's.
I have a better solution - go back to 8bit.
Why that big png's? I only do pan and scan.

Thanks everyone, for your help.

Small mistake on my side: we use both PNG and BMP files. Here some info about the BMP files:

Streams
Still: 992x564x24, Uncompressed

the PNG are very low res:

Streams
Still: 168x112x32, Inflate compression

We're working on Photoshop CS2. I'll try resizing the image files to 720x756 (PAL) and see if that fixes the issue.

The problem doesn't occur straight away. After approximately 10 minutes working suddenly there are error messages popping up. I have only had this when working with still images. I think in average we have 20 images, not more.

Barend

Hi Barend,

I had exactly the same problem as you. Vegas 8.0b would crash both while previewing the timeline and for a 6 minute PNG animation project, rendered with Blender - it would crash some times in the beginning of rendering - and sometimes in the middle - it just stops rendering and the program doesn't repond and needs to be closed with shift-ctrl-esc.

However it seems that if you nest your project in another vegas project it will render just fine. That's how I solved this issue.

Jacob.