Vegas Hates Video

Derm wrote on 12/29/2008, 2:06 PM
Months of frustration with Vegas 8 Pro make me say this. I have 2 large projects "trapped" in Vegas. This is costing me money and an awful lot of time. I say "trapped" because they will not render to MPEG2 using the provided templates or any variation. These projects are too large and detailed to transfer to another application. If this was an option I would have taken it a long time ago. I have a brand new quad core machine running XP with 4 GB of ram. I am having all of the problems that I had on my old system.
So is it a a hardware component or is it something in my video?
I use mp3 & wav audio at the usual standards. I use jpegs (RGB mode) .avi,.mov &.psd files. I also use newblue video fx.
I do not have any crash logs for the new pc as it usually just freezes up or vanishes off the screen completely.
This program is driving me mad.
I know some are using Vegas successfully, what's the secret, what do I need to do to make it render a project?
Help badly needed, current spec below.
Derm

Operating System
Platform: Windows XP
Version: 5.01.2600 (Service Pack 3)
Language: English
System locale: English
User locale: English

Processor
Class: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9650 @ 3.00GHz
Identifier: GenuineIntel
Number of processors: 4
MMX available: Yes
SSE available: Yes
SSE2 available: Yes
SSE3 available: Yes
SSSE3 available: Yes
SSE4.1 available: Yes
SSE4.2 available: No

Display
Primary: 1280x768x32

Memory
Physical memory: 2,097.1 MB
Paging memory available: 4,194.3 MB
Virtual memory possible: 2,097.0 MB

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 12/29/2008, 2:13 PM
Any time I have ever had a problem with Vegas it has always been as a result of Quicktime. The latest versions of Quicktime has been a buggy mess. I "dumbed down" my QT back to v7.2 and it works better, not great, but better.
ushere wrote on 12/29/2008, 2:23 PM
i NEVER put anything unfriendly on the t/l. stills as png, video as original dv / hdv, and any additional formats (eg. mov, dvix, etc., mp4) transcoded to whatever, eg, avi, cineform, etc.,

other than a bad tape glitch that caused problems once i have never had a problem. prior to this i had all the usual difficulties experienced by many here.

vegas is a great editor, as long as you use vegas friendly formats. i think we all expect a nle nowadays to work with whatever we throw at it - but this is simply not true in practice.

leslie
Derm wrote on 12/29/2008, 2:29 PM
John:
QT was fine( I think) until recently, when it wouldn't show up in the timeline, installed the latest update and it works again.

Leslie:
Are you saying that there some file types which we should not use with Vegas? All file types I use are supported. I have found that Vegas only likes jpegs in RGB mode

There must be others using several media types within a project and have it playback and render successfully.

Derm
Logan5 wrote on 12/29/2008, 2:43 PM
Derm, are you rendering you MPEG2 with a Constant bit rate setting?
If you are, change it to Variable bit rate.
Give that try.

Hope that helps.
DavidMcKnight wrote on 12/29/2008, 2:50 PM
Derm,

How many stills, and how large are they (pixel-wise)? I would stay away from tiff format; I would use png but jpeg should work as well. They should be no more than 2000x2000 (I think - search the forum for large photos on the timeline).

For troubleshooting, I would divide the project up into smaller chunks and render each chunk to see if it a specific item causing the crash or a cumulative effect of the size. IOW, start by dividing it up into two - the theory being that one might render and the other would crash. Do the same thing with the one that crashed, and continue until you can (hopefully) narrow it down. Good luck.
kairosmatt wrote on 12/29/2008, 2:59 PM
Another thing you can do when it freezes or crashes is go see if the partially rendered file is there. You can then see how far it got, and hopefully find your culprit.

I have been having lots of render issues myself, and accross four computers! Its always been HDV clips, even those captured in Vegas. Converting them to Cineform or Raylight and using Project Media to swap them out solves my particular issues.

Good luck,
kairosmatt
blink3times wrote on 12/29/2008, 3:18 PM
The last time I saw this happen with some one else's machine, it had to do with some antivirus software conflicting with Vegas. One minute Vegas was there... next it was just gone. Go through your start up files and make sure you're not running ANYTHING like antivirus, Nero, Quicktime....etc.

If you're overclocked then back WAY off on the overclocking as well.
farss wrote on 12/29/2008, 3:42 PM
My first concern would be the PSD files, can you convert them to PNG or JPG?
If I read your post correctly you have no HDV on the T/L?
Have you tried rendering to anything else?
Try using the sony YUV codec, biggish files, HDDs are cheap.
Are you using 32bit mode, if so ditch that.

Bob.
Earl_J wrote on 12/29/2008, 4:00 PM
Hello everyone,
I agree with farss. . . since I've moved to png - away from psd completely and large jpgs, stills no longer cause any problems for me.
I use exclusively avi ... and render to avi and mpg2 . . .
_ _ _ _ _
I'm not a heavy user, five or six projects a year since Vegas 4.0, so not any sort of expert by any stretch ... but never run into the problems you describe about disappearing projects and programs...

Please keep us posted on your progress and any solutions you discover - especially if you can determine the causes as well. With so many difficulties and so many options to try, it will be extremely troublesome to find the solution to each cause ... if each cause can be determined in the first place.
I suspect that you'll try two or three suggestions at once (no psds and no mov) to save time and the problem will go away ... you'll be so glad to finish your project, you'll forget about the causes and solutions until it happens again (it always does with me grin) ...
If you can take your time and try one solution at a time while the project waits to be completed, you are certainly a better videographer than I.

Good luck ... until that time ... Earl J.
Derm wrote on 12/29/2008, 4:18 PM
Logan:
I'm mostly sticking with the Sony templates, DVD Pal widescreen for here (Europe). I have tried also altering the bit rates to get a better quality. I will try your suggestion

David:
I'm not using Tiffs. There's probably about 300 image/video files.Some of the jpegs may be over your referenced size, I think this is something I looked at before. I'll check again.
I have split the timeline and come across "rogue" files, but there is a great inconsistency, some days it renders to that point other days it gets past it. Why? There is one particular section where one video gets stuck on .psd's. I'll try convert to png. Ironically it got past this point today only to freeze a few seconds later.

Kairosmatt:
No HD here, i did try some Digital Juice HD stuff but reverted to SD as the preview is just terrible even on a quadcore (this makes syncing to music very difficult)

Blink:
Not overclocked, no anti virus. I run nothing while trying to render.

Bob:
No HD, tried to render to wmv, still freezes/crashes. More success rendering to .mov, but this stuff is for DVD, I need the MPEG. Not using 32 bit

Earl:
I will try all suggestions to end this hell. Removing .mov is not really practical unless there is a lossless conversion process that I could use.I cannot depend on Vegas to do anything that has several tracks and a lot of files. I save after every edit, thats how nervous I am, the program will often vanish from the screen without warning.

Thanks everyone for the input.
Derm
PeterWright wrote on 12/29/2008, 4:35 PM
May not be the same thing, but for a current project a client has been supplying jpgs created on a Mac. For some reason, they often crash Vegas.

My solution is, as soon as I receive these files, to Open them in Paint Shop Pro and Save as a new jpg file in XP, and use these new files exclusively in Vegas. No crashes since I did this.
Derm wrote on 12/29/2008, 4:40 PM
Peter:

I did experience a lot of difficulty with jpegs in the past .The solution was to convert their profile to RGB in Photoshop and save. As mentioned earlier in this thread, size may also cause difficulties.

Derm
Xander wrote on 12/29/2008, 4:47 PM
Create a new project and insert the project that crashes as a nested .veg file with nothing else in the timeline. Try and render that. I have used that technique on a couple of troublesome projects before. It will take longer to render, but will hopefully not crash.
CorTed wrote on 12/29/2008, 4:54 PM
I used to run into this problem on larger projects, all the time. It seems the RAM is filling up as you throw stuff on the time line and as you proceed at some point the program crashes.
I still have this problem (again) on larger projects and to solve the problem I broke up the .veg file into smaller sections then render them out to AVI, then when done you 'stich' all of the AVI's together and you render the final result.
I know this is cumbersome, but it got me going.

Also, the problem went away (sofar) after I switched the larger projects to Vegas 8.1. This does require 64 bit OS, but it appearently handles the larger memory projects far better.

Ted
busterkeaton wrote on 12/29/2008, 8:26 PM
Yeah, the first thing I thought of was a large number of big images causing memory problems.

If you are not panning or zooming on the photos, they don't need to be larger than the intended project output size. If you are zooming, they probably should be twice as large as the output size. Unless you are doing very large zooms, twice as big is all you need.

Vegas is optimized for png files, so if you can, I'd consider doing a batch convert of the files to render them as png and resize them if you need to. Mega-megalpixel stills are overkill for video.

I also support the render small parts to avi and then render all the avis to mpeg.
Coursedesign wrote on 12/29/2008, 10:06 PM
...for a current project a client has been supplying jpgs created on a Mac. For some reason, they often crash Vegas.

Vegas is not handling the EXIF information in JPEGs correctly. On Macs, EXIF is normally stored in big-endian mode, while on PCs it's always little endian.

I bet you the Vegas developers don't know this...

John_Cline wrote on 12/29/2008, 10:33 PM
"I bet you the Vegas developers don't know this..."

How much?
Coursedesign wrote on 12/29/2008, 11:15 PM
Well, the question of how to establish the knowledge or lack of it comes to mind...

It is understandable that a group that has been drinking exclusively the Microsoft Kool-Aid regarding Video for Windows (ye olde VfW) etc. wouldn't see a need to for example spend any time worrying about how the few people on other planets might handle the EXIF information in JPEGs, especially as their home planet hasn't had any significant interest in hardcore video pros using FCP or Avid.

Skuzzy wrote on 12/30/2008, 5:30 AM
OT: Actually Coursedesign, I would think it is more the Intel versus Motorola koolaid. Apple had to jump through some hoops to maintain the endianess from the Motorola days, when they switched to Intel.
Coursedesign wrote on 12/30/2008, 7:43 AM
Oh, I remember that alright.

I was just trying to say that it doesn't appear that the SCS developers have looked outside their own world.

This is different from for example Adobe, which put some effort into interoperability between FCP and its own PP and Encore. That effort is paying off for them.

The reality is that there are 1 million FCP licenses out there, and they are primarily in professional environments.

Wherever two or more people are working on a post production project, it's a good bet that at least one of them is using FCP.

This means that unless the product you're using can talk to FCP, you can't work with them.

Vegas has no support for team efforts even with an all Vegas team, and that will not change ever, I believe.

It's a top NLE for individuals to edit DV or HDV.

Sebaz wrote on 12/30/2008, 8:22 AM
I take it that you're using Vegas 8.0c? If so, then that could be what's wrong. 8.0c is a colossal piece of junk. I've had nothing but problems with it. Last night, for example, I left a 10 minute HDV project rendering to Windows Media Video 9 , 720p at 6 Mbps, using one of the supplied templates. This morning I woke up, and surprise, 8.0c had crashed. I use 8.1 on Vista 64 bit, which is also full of design flaws, but it's far more stable than any previous version of Vegas. Just don't do a pre-render using a template that has a different frame size because then it will turn your project into that size without any warning.

Either bug Sony to send you 8.0b, which is far more stable, or add a hard drive to install Vista 64 on it, and then transfer all the project files and see if that works.
UlfLaursen wrote on 12/30/2008, 11:38 AM
I feel your frustration...

Would it be possible to render to some kind of AVI and then take this file into another project and then render to MPEG2?

/Ulf
FilmingPhotoGuy wrote on 12/30/2008, 12:10 PM
Derm, try this. Set your work folder to something other than your C:\documents and sttings...........folder. You need to render to different disk. Your Windows OS already has the Windows "Pagefile" on the C: drive. In Vegas go, Options- Preferences. Then on the General Tab at the bottom of the page "temporary files" folder.

Imagine rendering your output file to the C: drive as well at the same time, "She canna take the strain Jim!".
cliff_622 wrote on 12/30/2008, 2:38 PM
Oh yeah,...these rendering problems are the story of my life, ever since I got new Quad Core. Most of my projects have .jpg stills and I never am able to render them without fighting with Vegas tooth and nail.

Do the usual:

Mess around with the preiview RAM. (raise it up or pull it down)
Disable your Quad CPU in the BIOS and make it look like a dual in Windows.
Drop your rendering threads to 1 as a last resort- (makes it extremely slow)

Yeah,...this bug is very very tough. Hopefully the Sony guys will fix it soon. I wish they would FINALY fix that interlaced .AVI file issue in DVDA5 too.

CT