I've been struggling for 3-4 days trying to render a HDV photo montage with about 200 pictures using Vegas 7e. Up until this first HDV project, I've never had a problem rendering SD over many hours overnight with this P4 2GB RAM PC. I've rendered a small 12 minute HDV video project without a problem. I then added a nested montage and that's when the problems began.

The photos are in png format and are 2592 x 1944, 2848 x 2136, and 2848 x 1602. I have not resized the original pictures. In Ultimate S I've cropped them to 16:9.

I initially tried rendering the montage with jpegs amongst the video in a nested file. This caused Vegas to close before the render was complete. After several more attempts, rebuilding a new montage with all png photos, rebuilding the master nest file, and optimizing the dynamic ram and threads (now at 16 and 3) using rendertest-hdv, but still no success. The rendering template is MPEG-2 HDV 1080-60i.

I then tried rendering the montage to a new track but that failed to at 72% complete with the error "Not enough memory to load gradient!" The only way I could clear the error was to go into task manager and force the error closed.

I'm not doing any color correction or masks. Transitions are a combination of 5 Spice transitions. There's only 3 tracks on the montage. All photos are being panned and zoomed. Audio has no fx or corrections.

Any suggestions? Are the pictures too large? If that's the case, what size should they be? Or maybe the Spice transitions are a problem with the HDV rendering template?

Thanks for your suggestions. I've pretty much hit a wall as what else to try.

Not exact situation but similar...
Had a large photo montage in 7 and wanted to try rendering it in version 8 using 32 bit and it has crashed everytime.
I had no problems in 7 rendering it in .m2t format and all the photos were .jpeg.
Used ultimate S but did not use Spice, so it could be a Spice thing.

David, I think the reason is the size and number of your images. It probably stresses the system resources too much.

I could suggest resizing and cropping your pictures in Photoshop to 1440x1080 size or slightly larger, but try to put together your montage in separate project first and export the sequence as a single file. Then come back to the original project and import it. That might work.

Thanks guys. After much troubleshooting I was able to render the project without any Pixelan Spice transititons and just crossfades. I was also able to render it with a combination of 5 different Sony transitions.

I exchanged emails with Pixelan and they feel it's an out of memory issue due to the size of the stills.

I've finished this project with the crossfades and I'm assuming the cause was the large photos with complex transitions. For 200+ photo montages, what size stills do you recommend using for a 1080i HDV timeline?