Unable to render HDV project with 8a

[David Jasany]

This is my third HDV 1080-60i project with Vegas 8a. My current 1080 project from a Sony HC7 has 28 tracks with a small amount of fx. No stills. I'm unable to complete a render to .m2t with Vegas 8a. I'm using the standard MainConcepts MPEG-2 with m2t encoder and the HDV 1080-60i template.

I've tried many things but I'm now at a loss and really need help. At first the render would halt everytime at 3,886 frames at about 11 minutes with no error messages and I would have to force Vegas to close in Windows Task Manager.

This is what I've tried:
Reinstalled Vegas 8a.
Copied all tracks to a new project and reapplied plugins. This helped but now the render stops every time at 23,656 frames. Time for rendering is 1 hour, 5 minutes.
Changed render drive.
Reduced dynamic RAM preview from 128 to zero with no affect.
I've monitored Pentium 4 cpu temperature and it stays relatively constant at around 147-150 degrees during rendering. BIOS power management is off so CPU will not throttle down. The PC has 2GB RAM.

Every time the render stops I have to force Vegas to close, and again, no error messages.

I've done many Vegas projects and two 1080i projects on this same PC and have rarely had a rendering problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.
Dave

[Seth Bloombaum]

Originally Posted by David Jasany

...At first the render would halt everytime at 3,886 frames...
Reinstalled Vegas 8a.
Copied all tracks to a new project and reapplied plugins. This helped but now the render stops every time at 23,656 frames....

Dave, have you looked at the media at those times? Possibly, you have some corrupt media on the timeline that may preview OK, but doesn't render.

Easy shortcut:
Right click on timecode display in upper left of layout, pull down to time format and choose "absolute frames".

Ctrl-g (goto time) and type in 23656, then <enter>. That will take the cursor to the exact frame where Vegas is tumbling.

Look at the media, check all tracks (28 is a lot with minimum efx!), is there something bogus there? Perhaps you could recapture the clip if it is needed, or perhaps it's lurking on an unused track.

Otherwise, I think you are looking at continuing to experiment with render threads and dynamic ram. But this sure sounds like it could be corrupt media.

[Simon Denny]

Hi David,
You might want to check how hot your computer / processor is getting as this might be causing the thing to lock up?
Take the back off your computer to let more air flow in & out of it or try a fan nearby to cool it down a bit. This might just help the render, it did with mine.

Regards
Simon

[Ted OMalley]

Originally Posted by David Jasany

This is what I've tried:
Reinstalled Vegas 8a.
Copied all tracks to a new project and reapplied plugins. This helped but now the render stops every time at 23,656 frames. Time for rendering is 1 hour, 5 minutes.
Changed render drive.
Reduced dynamic RAM preview from 128 to zero with no affect.
I've monitored Pentium 4 cpu temperature and it stays relatively constant at around 147-150 degrees during rendering. BIOS power management is off so CPU will not throttle down. The PC has 2GB RAM.

I have been having severe problems as well.

I've reinstalled vegas 8a
I've copied all elements to new projects - which helped a constant crashing problem that was resulting from an obviously corrupt veg file.
I've changed render drives
I've tried reducing the dynamic RAM preview to zero
Project was set at 8bit by default and I tried 32 bit - no difference
PC has 4 GB RAM
I'm running a quad-core processor that is not exceeding 40 degrees - Hard drives and northbridge and graphics all stay very cool also - tremendous ventilation in this system. Drives are never hot to the touch!!

My project has HD m2t, SD avi, mpg, mov, wmv, JPG, PNG, PSD, AVI and WAV files - Crazy!!

I've only got 9 tracks, one of which is a child for masking. I have a few embedded veg files from prevous projects. I can't render my project as an AVI, and MOV, a WMV, or an MPEG without it crashing or hanging Vegas.

At first, things were seeming identifiable. Even though it would crash on a render, the percentage indicator was very helpful. If I was rendering out a 60 second clip and it crashed at, say, 65 percent, I'd go to the 39 second mark in the project and discover a piece of corrupt video. Cool - I'd replace it and move on.

Next, however, it became increasingly touchy. Suddenly I could not use velocity envelopes or stretching without vegas hard crashing during a render! I removed all of my velocity or stretching where possible. At places where it was vital, I clicked the solo button and output that second or two of video only as an AVI (Yes, oddly, if I selected only the problem element, it would render just fine). Then, I 'd bring that new AVI back into the project, bypassing the need for velocity adjustments.

Once all of these changes had been made, I was able to render out a minute at a time of my five minute project without a problem. However, rendering all five minutes is still impossible. So, of course, I've been rending one minute clips, opening a new project, importing my one minute clips, and rendering that out which works perfectly, though with extreme clumsiness.

Oh, and one spec I didn't mention was that I'm running Vista, which I DO NOT recommend to anyone yet. I wish I hadn't yet, as it has brought with it a whole set of issues even though 99% of the time it is perfect. I was building a new machine, though, and thought, heck, Vista has been out over a year, I'll go ahead and build with that. My bad.

I suspect that Vegas may be having problems working with the quad core processing as it is a pretty new player. My gut feeling, though, is it is related more to an overall "buginess" in Vegas.

Any thoughts, suggestions? I'm all ears.

[David Jasany]

Thanks for the help guys. After 1-1/2 days of troubleshooting by process of elliination, I found the cause of the render crash. It was caused by Izotope's free vinyl plugin.

Once I found the track causing the crash I disabled this plugin and that solved the problem. It was the first time I used this plugin so in hindsight I wished I would have disabled it earlier. The strange thing is that I'm using the same plugin elsewhere in the project on another track and it didn't cause a problem. In any case I'll be a very uncertain about using this plugin again.

[David Jasany]

After I got a good render with 8a and Izotope Vinyl unselected, I upgraded to Vegas 8b. I then removed the plug from the track's plug-in chain. Then I added the plug-in again and did another render. This time it worked. So, I don't know if the the problem was resolved by removing and adding Vinyl, or by upgrading to Vegas 8b. Either way, problem solved.