MBL, 4 minute video, random crashing and lockup

[Ian Planchon]

I have a 4 minute piece that I have never succesfully rendered. It has a LOT of magic bullet looks, which I think is the culprit. the first 80 times I tried to render was using a laptop (I was in the field) now I am home and am trying my desktop, and it still wont render. its never in the same place twice, it just stops rendering all of a sudden, then vegas crashes when I hit cancel. no error message or anything.

it will render fine without the effects, but obviously I want to figure out why it wont render the effects. It does it on both vista and XP.

anyone else have this?

[Mike Calla]

I'd rather shoot myself than figure out the shear amount of variables that make computers do what they do!

In the past when I've HAD MBL problems (knock on wood!!!!!!!) i'd render in small little increments. that helped a lot. You might even find your "problem section" this way as well.

I did find a problem once: I had three clips at one point on the timeline, all with varying degrees of opacity and it just crashed MBL every time. However i could never recreate it.?.?.?

MBL can be temperamental to say the least... but its such a powerful tool...when its working!

mike

[Ian Stark]

It's that random thing that is most frustrating. If it crashes in different places in the render then it's unlikely to be a specific bit of media that's causing the problem. It would also rule out things like combinations of Looks and other effects, envelopes, etc. It happens on two different PC's as well, adding to the difficulty in finding the problem.

I use Looks in one way or another in pretty much every project and often with a new instance of Looks on each clip, potentially resulting in hundreds of instances. Sometimes it might just be a simple single tool (eg spot exposure or the wonderful swing-tilt focus) and other times it may be full blown looks with multiple tools. But to the best of my recollection Looks has never been the root cause of any failed renders.

Is the media on an external drive that you have used both on the laptop and the desktop or have you transferred it to a local hard disk? That might be worth looking at - dodgy drive or USB cable. Just a thought.

Does Looks play nice on other projects or do you have similar problems?

Red Giant support is very good and I'd recommend a call in to them, meanwhile Mike's suggestion is a good one. I'd be inclined to break it into 30 second chunks.

[Mike Calla]

Originally Posted by Ian Stark

But to the best of my recollection Looks has never been the root cause of any failed renders

yep, with any problem i had (bad preview artifacts in the MBL preview window) it still rendered.

Now that i write this, it reminds me of a poster, here possibly, that would render to TIFFs or a similar format. In this way if the render failed, comp crashed, they would just continue rendering from that point on. I'm pretty set in my workflow but its any interesting method.

All problems aside, MBL is one hell of a program! love it.

[Steven Reid]

Originally Posted by Ian Planchon

I have a 4 minute piece that I have never succesfully rendered. It has a LOT of magic bullet looks, which I think is the culprit. the first 80 times I tried to render was using a laptop (I was in the field) now I am home and am trying my desktop, and it still wont render. its never in the same place twice, it just stops rendering all of a sudden, then vegas crashes when I hit cancel. no error message or anything.

it will render fine without the effects, but obviously I want to figure out why it wont render the effects. It does it on both vista and XP.

anyone else have this?

Yes, Ian, this exact thing happened to me. (Vista 64 Ultimate, 8GB RAM, Vegas 8 Pro, HDV 1080 source footage and 1440x1080 24p project, 32 bit color, MBL looks on every event, total project length ~7 minutes.). Never seemed to stop rendering in the same spot, although it was close, and Vegas never rendered to completion. Drove me nuts.

I switched to 8 bit color and that cured the problem permanently. I wondered if memory allocation had something to do with this, because before I switched to 8 bit color, I noticed that changing the RAM preview settings in Vegas seemed to affect where the stop-render point occurred. Since I found a workable solution, however, I did not investigate the RAM preview variable further. Does any of this help you?

Steve

[Ian Planchon]

steve. I was already in 8 bit, and the RAM preview turned down to 100. I dont think that was the issue. I think what may have been the culprit was the sections in the video where I did multiple boxes in one frame, so I had 4-5 clips stacked on each other, each with MBL grading. I wonder if that was enough to trip up the render?

[Ian Stark]

Originally Posted by Ian Planchon

I think what may have been the culprit was the sections in the video where I did multiple boxes in one frame, so I had 4-5 clips stacked on each other, each with MBL grading. I wonder if that was enough to trip up the render?

But it falls over at different times in different renders. That's the weird part.

Why not try creating a timeline with JUST a section contain the stacked clips you mentioned and see if it renders OK or falls over.

I was wondering whether it's some other process on your pc - antivirus, email send/receive, disk monitor, I dunno - that tips it over the edge. Or maybe a memory leak that gets worse at the render progresses. But again, you'd think it would fail at the same point (ish).

Again, just wild stabs.

[Ian Planchon]

Originally Posted by Ian Stark

But it falls over at different times in different renders. That's the weird part.

Why not try creating a timeline with JUST a section contain the stacked clips you mentioned and see if it renders OK or falls over.

I was wondering whether it's some other process on your pc - antivirus, email send/receive, disk monitor, I dunno - that tips it over the edge. Or maybe a memory leak that gets worse at the render progresses. But again, you'd think it would fail at the same point (ish).

Again, just wild stabs.

I appreciate the wild stabs. I ended up rendering out smaller bits, I did find that there was one problem area that would only render if it was under 15 seconds...weird...I need to put something together thats similar in length and style of editing, and see if has problems. I think there might have been two many weak links that lined up, and caused the crash. I never had a problem like this until this edit.