Vegas renders to Temp directory in C: drive regardles of output folder

Youda008 wrote on 5/18/2021, 4:34 PM

I'm working on a large video that takes several hours and the result need 30+ GBs of disk space. I have my drive divided into smaller C: partition for Windows and apps and larger D: partition for user data.

Even though i clearly selected a D: drive as the output folder in the "Render as" dialog, the rendering process produces output to "C:\Users\Youda\AppData\Local\Temp". The selected target directory "D:\" indeed contains a file correctly named as the chosen output file name, but this file stays 0 bytes large during the whole rendering process while a file in "C:\Users\Youda\AppData\Local\Temp" named like "sde4.6.tmp" keeps growing until the partition runs out of space.

I looked up Options -> Preferences -> General -> Temporary files folder, but that's a different directory than where the output goes, and changing it to "D:\Movie Studio" has no effect.

Why does Movie Studio ignore my target directory choice and temporary directory choice and stores the intermediate result elsewhere where is not enough space for it? I'm not able to reserve enough space in the C: partition, it's was not meant for that. Is there a way to override the Movie Studio's defaults so that the intermediate results go somewhere else where is enough space for it?

Comments

Youda008 wrote on 5/19/2021, 2:13 PM

Alright. For anyone facing the same problem, i figured out a workaround. It's ugly, but it works.

The Movie Studio apparently uses environment variable %TEMP% to store some of it's working data into. You can modify the Movie Studio's shortcut to change the value of this env variable just for this application.

  1. Right-click on Movie Studio shortcut and select Properties.
  2. Go to the field "Target" and replace its original content with
    C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c "set TEMP=D:\YourAlternativeTempDirectory&& start /D ^"C:\Program Files\VEGAS\Movie Studio Platinum 17.0^" MovieStudioPlatinum170.exe"
    Explanation: https://netlicensing.io/blog/2012/06/15/set-environment-variables-in-windows-shortcut/
  3. Click "Change Icon" and select "C:\Program Files\VEGAS\Movie Studio Platinum 17.0\MovieStudioPlatinum170.exe".
  4. Confirm by clicking "Ok".

This shortcut should now start Movie Studio with the Temp directory redirected to your alternative location, where you have enough space.