I need help

[Bob Safay]

Here is my problem. I have Vegas Pro 12. Tonight I went to render a video. It was a 1920 x 1080 video with a clip in it that was shot and rendered in SD. Anyway, Vegas locked up n me. I re-booted the computer several times and tried to open Vegas. It goes through all its start up routines until it gets to "Creating Windows", and then it locks up. Any ideas? Bob

[Harold Brown]

Try renaming your veg file so Vegas doesn't keep trying to open it and throw the error.

[Bob Safay]

Harold, thanks. I will give that a try. I will also try to move my .veg files to an external back up drive and then delete then reload Vegas. I really hope I do not lose all that work I have put into it already. Bob

[Juris Lielpeteris]

Try resetting to default Vegas settings (press and hold down CTRL + SHIFT while you click the Vegas icon).

[Bob Safay]

I am getting desperate. I tried all the above and nothing worked. I even uninstalled Vages and deleted all .veg and video files. I reinstalled from Sony online. The program still will not load. It gets as far as "Creating windows" and then just locks up. Please does anyone know how to fix this? Thank you. Bob

[Bob Safay]

Here is the really crazy part. I reinstalled Vegas 10 and that opens with no problem. Except, I created my last two .veg files in Pro 12. Same problem. I go to open Pro 12 and it gets to "Creating windows" and freezes. Please, any ideas! Bob

[Graham Bernard]

What's your free space on your system drive looking like? Ditto your other drives?

Also, if you remember, where is your TEMP folder for Vegas? It could now be chocked-up with a mess of BAKs and UNDOs and REDOs. Something is definitely choking Vegas loading. You've had VP12 working before - that's a good thing. Now it wont load - that's a bad thing - BUT something has crept up on the loading procedure of Vegas.

G

[Edward Troxel]

Well, it's extreme but you could rebuild the system from scratch. Reset the computer back to the way it was when you bought it and the start reinstalling all of your applications.

Otherwise, your only real option would be to talk to Sony.

[Al Bergstein]

No, don't rebuild your system, yet. First off, have you let the machine set in that state of "creating windows"? I found that 12 sometimes, for reasons that I fail to understand, takes a huge amount of time to get past that point. Once it took about 3 minutes. Fire it up and let it load, if it goes beyond 5, then something is wrong with Vegas.

One assumption we are all making is that your internal hard drive is not almost full, and that you have more than 4 GBs of RAM on a Windows 64 installation. It would be really useful to have you post your computer setup at the beginning of this thread in the future, to make sure we aren't all working under assumptions that are wrong.

That being said, what is your graphics card, and are you using a current driver for it? That can create problems for Vegas 12, as it is more and more reliant on the GPU for doing the work.

I would make sure that you have actually uninstalled *all* of Vegas' components before reinstalling it. Also make sure you have deleted any temp files it may have created. Adobe for example, has a comprehensive uninstall program that eliminates all vestiges of that program from the computer.

IF you decide to reinstall, buy a separate drive, load Windows 64 and Vegas on that, boot to that drive and use it to do your rendering, then when you get a moment, go back to your old machine and figure out what's wrong.

Before buying a new drive, create a new user account and load a new copy of Vegas there. It is possible you have corrupted your Windows user account in all this, I have a machine that had that happen, it is a rare but not that rare occurrence in Windows, all versions. You can keep your old account around and migrate your programs and data later. No harm in it at all.

If you are in a dire predicament time wise, and this is a paying gig, you could load the veg and the media to something like Amazon's S3 site, which is one of the more secure web sites on the planet, and either pay or find a volunteer to download it and render it for you.

Do rename the veg file so it's not being loaded at startup.

I also suggest, that if you get your machine working with it again, that you render the SD to HD first. Take the SD footage and *don't * drop it onto the timeline with the HD footage. It sounds like it had a problem handling that. So render it to the same footage type as your other HD footage, and then add it to the timeline.

Good luck.

[Bob Safay]

Al and others. Thanks for the tip. When I uninstalled Vegas I did not uninstall DVD 6. Could that be part of the problem? I did uninstall Vegas 12 and media manager and reinstalled those, but not uninstall DVD 6. Bob

[Garrett Low]

Bob, first thing to try is to do a system restore. Try to restore your system back to a point before the error occurred. If that doesn't work, if you are fairly computer savvy, you might need to go into your registry after uninstalling Vegas and wiping any traces that the uninstall program is leaving.

In case you don't know where to find the system restore, it's under Backup and Restore in the Control Panel in Windows.

Leaving DVDA6 on your machine should not in theory affect Vegas but it may. If all else fails it it worth trying to uninstall it.

[Kevin Janisch]

Not very helpful at this time I know, but when you get the issue resolved and things are running smoothly, invest in some imaging software such as Norton Ghost. I too spent 40+ hours trying to troubleshoot an issue with Adobe Premiere with a big project in the balance. Ever since, I create an image that I can restore to where I know the system is stable. I create a new image every 3 months or so. This has saved me quite a few times.

[Jeff Harper]

I would reformat my hard drive, reinstall Windows. Install Vegas 12, run it If it's fine, great, then reinstall programs one at a time, running Vegas after each install until the issue arises again.

If instead you simply try to troubleshoot, by the time you are done troubleshooting, you could have reinstalled windows and you would be up and running. Good luck.

[Seth Bloombaum]

Originally Posted by Al Bergstein

...That being said, what is your graphics card, and are you using a current driver for it? That can create problems for Vegas 12, as it is more and more reliant on the GPU for doing the work...

This might well be involved.

Also look at dotnet (.net) updates through microsoft update. If you have system settings that prevent auto update or notifications, you might have these system components askew or not updated with routines that v12 uses. Vegas uses lots of .net...

Given the uninstall-reinstalls you've already done, this may well be a versions issue with graphics or .net, which is further indicated by v10 working.

[Al Bergstein]

Yes, agreed that your Windows Update might point to a newly installed silent upgrade if you don't have your machine set to simply load but not install them. The fact that Vegas 10 runs fine is telling you though that it's *not* likely to be your computer's OS level stuff. 12 has been very problematic, from my personal experience. I've had the *same* problem you had with the load failing. I thought that Sony had addressed that in one of the incremental updates to Vegas. I downloaded the latest trial *yesterday* and it actually did load, which previous versions had not. So my version of the load problem had been fixed. However, mysteriously, my Windows 7 showed as *not legal* this morning, and it took me an hour with MSFT to fix the issue. This after I downloaded and installed Vegas 12 just yesterday afternoon! I have *never* had the issue of windows validation before, but it could be a coincidence.

I don't lean towards telling you to reinstall the whole machine. That's vastly time consuming for most of us. I would start with the creation of a new user if you are that desparate. That creates an entirely new reference point for the programs, and you then can reinstall Vegas once that user is created. It still uses the same graphics drivers but not the application. It creates a new directory for everything that user uses, including programs (that aren't installed across the whole machine). Vegas is one of those programs. Windows user profiles do get corrupted, and always have had this issue, rare but it is real.

Once this is solved, yes, install something like Ghost, or simply learn to use the Windows disk image program. Do it lock clockwork, once a month is a good period to set aside. Set your Windows Updates to *Not* install automatically. Use Windows Secrets web site to check that they don't foul stuff up.

The goal is to simply restore a non working system as quickly as possible. Or have a backup machine. They are damn cheap these days.