i often work with pic 3k x 2k or greater - but always as png's. along with avchd, transcoded to mxf. no problems as far as i can remember in 8 and certainly not in 9b....

I can drop a hundred 3kx2k jpg's on my 8c timeline right now & I won't get any issues. Could be the jpg + avchd. I normally mix them with DV or HDV.

Any well-known workarounds (apart from shrinking the images), like does the memory use hack solve this kind of problem?

Shrinking the images isn't so bad if you use a program like http://www.irfanview.com/IrfanView[/link] to batch shrink all the pictures at one go.

The 64bit version of Vegas does a little better with large images than the regular 32bit version,

OK thanks all, I'm going to go with the .PNG option.

I had previously had similar problems with a project involving just straight HD footage (no AVCHD) and a multitude of large .TIF files exported at 300dpi from PowerPoint (after registry hack), and indeed that problem went away when I exported them instead as .PNG, so I assumed any compressed format would do, but obviously not JPG, so .PNG it will be now.

...and a multitude of large .TIF files ...

TIFs are one of, if not the, most difficult format for Vegas to deal with.
Something to do with TIFs having to make a call to QuickTime each and every frame which slows things down considerably.

Mike

And good to know of the IrfanView option.

Also I just tried selecting a bunch of images and right-clicking that selection in XP's Windows Explorer and it had a "Convert To" option. That prompted for an "Install on Demand" which I accepted, for a "Pixillion Image Convertor". This accepted a selection and looks like it converted them OK.

I note in passing that the PNG file size for my photographic image of 0.5MB JPG is 5MB. But hey, what does that matter amongst half a TB of video?

Here is a fun spot for just $20...

http://www.pictureresize.org/index.html

all that you're asking for... and a five-day trial offer as well... took less than a minute to download and install. . . I just found it as a response to your inquiry...

Looks like fun... until that time... Earl J.

Here is a fun spot for just $20...

Earl, save your money.
IrfanView is free and does everything this app will do and more.

Mike

Hello Mike. . .
Cool... I can get a six-pack on the way home... (grin) - I'm really a non-drinker - okay, a rarely-drinker... but the savings always come in handy... I should know better and go check out any recommendations from the forum before I go off gallivanting around looking for a better solution ... the forum-quorum of knowledge just can't be beat... you guys are the greatest...

Now, let me go peek at this IrfanView thingy. . .

Until that time. . . Earl J.

My pleasure Earl.
Grab the plugins (same site - separate download) while you're on the IrfanView site.

Mike

Been using Irfanview for all my scanning, batching, sizing, and printing needs for so long now, I can hardly think of using anything else.

Besides being able to open anything you throw at it (with the right plugins) I use it often to grab hi-res images from PDF. You just can't beat that kind of versatility. Oh yeah, and it's free.

I had a similar issue, back in Vegas 7 days, with a wedding and a large number of JPGs from DSLRs, along with my HD video. I only had the one HD camera for this, so I was using still from the THREE different professional still photographers for cut scenes and B-camera stuff.

When I began the rendering, things were very slow and very crashy. I found that I wasn't even pegging the CPUs (AMD64x2 CPU in those days), which always indicates some kind of rendering problem.

First cure was to render out to a different HDD from my source drive, but ultimately, it proved to help as well to move all the still to yet another drive. At that point, I could get full rendering speed and few if any crashes.

I did no resizing of the original photos (6Mpixel and 8Mpixel).. I did convert all RAW files to high quality JPG (batch export from Adobe LightRoom). Obviously, lots of pans, crops, rotates and stuff ... the whole "Ken Burns" look. I guess today, if given some more modern DSLR output (20+ Mpixels isn't uncommon), I'd probably downsize them a bit ahead of time if I was having any issues... anything over 1920x1080 fully zoomed in a waste, right?

Sony claims Vegas 9 is much better at this.. I haven't done any new video of this type (well, not over a few minutes in length) since I got the Vegas 9 update, so I can't swear it's been fixed. But some good resource management will make it work much better, even with the older versions of Vegas.

...for anyone having problems rendering projects containing still photographs (eg from camera or mobile phone at high resolution)...

In a wedding project I had some large images upon which I wanted to do some Ken Burns (panning etc.). So the idea of reducing their size was not appealing. Instead, for each such image, I rendered the KenBurns(Image) to its own micro-movie.

In a tutorial by Walter Biscardi, Jr. (for another NLE, with other limitations), this kind of workaround is called "Baking". The motion effect had been baked-in to the micro-movie.

Now this micro-movie was used to replace the "offending" image (remembering to remove the pan/crop motion, since that had been baked-in). Result: Vegas had one less reason to freeze up.

Silly, but if it helps, it helps. Better preview-framerate also.

Interesting situation and not one I have encountered after doing lots of Ken Burns type edits combining both stills & video. I use Vegas Movie Studio, not Pro, but I'd guess they would be the same for this type of function.

My stills are HD format JPG files @ about 10 MP each. The files are usually 3 - 5 MB in size. My video is also full HD format MTS files. I've had no problem combining these and rendering full HD/5.1 output.

One thing I do is tell Vegas not to re-render stills. I think this is a default setting but I'm not sure. I can tell by the frame rate that Vegas speeds up a lot when it renders the stills compared to when it renders real video. Of course this is not the case when rendering still pan/zoom/rotate actions.

The baking idea seems like some sort of work-around that should not be needed. I wonder what it really does that helps Vegas; in other words, what is it that the work-around in fact works around? Low memory? Slow disk access? Or something else?

The "baking" workaround was one of several measures I found necessary (in combination) in order for rendering to complete, otherwise it repeatably froze or crashed. I posted it here in case anyone else had similar difficulties.

The freezes and crashes seemed due to memory being exceeded, because in each case I monitored the rendering process (hours) and just before each of these problems, memory usage rose towards 2GB, according to Task Manager (and I never saw it decline, suggesting a possible memory leak).

I understand that 2GB is Vegas's 32-bit normal maximum memory use. I tried Blink's memory hack to try to extend that to 3GB but it did not appear to achieve anything. The machine had 8GB RAM, but as I was running XP 32-bit, the OS will only have seen 4GB. But of this, as I understand it, Vegas ordinaire only gets 2GB. A great shame that Vegas (32-bit) does not officially support 3GB.

I have used Vegas successfully on a smaller machine (Athlon, 2GB) for lots of projects over 3 or 4 years, mainly multicam projects of HDV+DV. This was my first wedding video, it differered from my normal projects (mainly presentations) in terms of its inclusion of many stills, though also I used a bigger machine (Pentium 8GB) and additionally made use of HD source media. As far as I could tell, the stated problems regularly happened in the vicinity of stills. Most of these stills were faded in/out (transparency envelope on a track above) or else animated (pan/zoom) or involved masking (for vignetting), all of which I guess imply some kind of image decompression and compositing/rendering actions inside Vegas.

Incidentally, the other anti-crash/freeze measures I took included rebooting the machine (following any freeze/crash), dividing up the project (horizontally and vertically on timeline), nesting the project (or avoiding nesting the project - depending which project), replacing all JPGs by PNGs, not running any antivirus etc., rendering to an intermediate (Cineform) instead of directly to Mpeg2. It took me about a week to experiment-out this combination, but in the end it worked.