Vegas CRASHES rendering a large MPEG2 file

[Oliver Darden]

Ok, so a while back Mike Kujbida helped me with a question I had about the best way to render using Vegas 7.0 and DVD Architect 4.0 and the results were great. But now I have a new problem that maybe some of you Vegas users can help me with.

When rendering a 15-30min video with the following setting everything goes well:
Rendering to: DVD Architect NTSC video stream / MPEG-2 and AC-3 / Quality at Best
Custom bitrate: CBR of 6,000,000 or 8,000,000

BUT when I try to render 90mins of footage (exactly the same footage, just more of it) my computer Crashes / Frezzes around 19-22% every single time....When I say crashes I mean the video on the preview screen stop moving and after a while Vegas gives me an error and just closes. It asks if I want to send a report and as soon as I click "don't send" it closes.

My computer is a Dell Hyper Threading P4 with 4GBs of ram. I am rendering from a USB hard drive (this is the drive with all the footage) to another USB hard drive as a "scratch drive" (this drive has lots and lots of hard drive space).

Any ideas?

[Mike Kujbida]

Oliver, I've rendered to an external drive several times without problems but never from and to an external.
Is there any way you can move the raw footage to an internal hard drive?
What's around the 20% mark (i.e. stills or video)?
Are you using any large still images, either scanned or from a digital camera?
If yes, try reducing them in size (pixel size, that is).
As you know, a lot of newer digital still cameras can shoot around 4,000 x 3,000 pixels and, unless you're doing a very deep zoom, this is far too large.
Twice you project resolution is the recommended practice.
Also, if they're JPEGs, change them to PNGs.
IrfanView is an excellent (and free) image viewer tool that allows batch processing of both image size and file format conversion.
Finally, make sure the various render/temp folder locations in Vegas and DVDA aren't pointing to C:\My Documents as these can get filled up if your C drive is small.

[Oliver Darden]

I will try all of that Mike and see what happens. I just did a test (at the highest quality), and instead of rendering it ALL at once, I split it up into 3 equal part and it never crashed / froze. That tells me my computer cant take rendering such a large project...

Obviously this wouldn't be practical for the final render but at least I know it's not corrupted files or an error within Vegas. It really must be my computer not being able to handle it...

I will let you know the result Mike. I am going to buy an internal sata drive and copy my usb drive to it and see what happens when I render from there.

[Oliver Darden]

I went to a friends with the external USB dirve with all the Vegas and project files (he has Vegas also) and tried to render it on his Mac pro quadcore 2.66 with 8gbs of ram running boot camp with windows home edition and it worked perfect.

Guess its time to upgrade...

Thanks again for your help as usual Mike. I am going to stick some internal sata drives in my current setup anyway just to see what happens. I will also lower the size of those pictures, because even on his setup, when it got to the part of the project where the pictures were it really slowed down.

[Will Hanlon]

This thread seems closest to the problem I'm having. I'm trying to render a large MPEG2 file (DVD Architect template), and it always fails around 50%. Dynamic RAM preview is set to 0 and rendering threads is set to 1. I changed the temp folder so it points to another drive with 141 GB of free space. I'm rendering to a different internal drive than my system one. It's an HDV 720p project. I've got 2.87 GB of ram. I'm going to try some extra cooling on my system (it already has a fan right next to the drives) and killing an extra processes I don't need, but I'm not sure what to do. Vegas just says, "An error occurred rendering media festival.mpg. The reason for the error could not be determined," and there's no more information than that. I'm using Vegas 7.0e. I've been able to render this project before. Thanks for any help.

[Edward Troxel]

Does it always stop at the same point? If yes, that could indicate a problem reading whatever is on that particular spot on the timeline.

[Paul Cascio]

I just finished a 45-minute project with lots of edits, using 9.0B/64; Win7/64. I had a few problems with crashes and so I've been experimenting with some variables and found some things that seem to help.

1. I do a reboot before starting Vegas whenever I'm about to tackle a long render.

2. Change all stills to .png format.

3. Reduce preview memory to 128.

4. Close the monitor window.

My mpeg2 render for DVDA takes about 5 hours with no problems. The render to MP4 for a Blu-ray takes almost 24 hours, but again, no problems. I have a Quad6600 with 8GB RAM.

Another option is to render Regions. This way if it crashes, you won't lose it all.

I had my Quad6600 overclocked but was getting some Windows crashes occasionally too, so I am now running stock until I can tweak the voltage. However, with a 24-hour render I don't want to have overheating.

[Will Hanlon]

It stops around the same area but not the exact same point. And there's really nothing special there that should cause any more problems than anywhere before it (it's just 720p video, no stills).

I did a reboot before trying this last render, and it still failed. I also made sure nothing else was running under processes. I'll try closing the monitor window. I only have two jpgs at the very start of the project. I'll change those to png. My preview memory is at 0. Any other possibilities? I have paging files set up to help with the memory.

I would render regions, but that won't work for me as far as making the DVD in Architect since I only have one long AC3 file. Maybe I could try rendering certain parts in uncompressed AVIs, load those back into Vegas, then try to do an MPEG2... that'll be a pain, but if it can work. Any more ideas? Thanks guys, I'm quickly running out of time to render this since I've got a festival this weekend.