Vegas Pro 18 Bug and Solution

[Patrick Tracy]

I had a rather disturbing experience today. I opened a Vegas Pro 18 project on my desktop and it gave an error message ("Unable to find Vegas project file" or something) and got stuck in some sort of loop. The "building peaks" progress bar in the lower left corner was stopped on 0% and the program stopped responding to input. The only options were "Close program" and "Wait for program to respond" (which it didn't do after about five minutes).

This is an audio-only project that I had spent a lot of time on. I had done quite a bit of detailed fine tuning that I could never quite reproduce, and I had just gotten approval to consider it done and ready to release.

I tried reopening it several times different ways (e.g. opening another project first then via recent files), but no luck. I also tried copying the file with and without all the source files, but that didn't change anything.

Fortunately, I had just recently loaded Vegas Pro 18 on my laptop. I connected the USB drive with the project folder to my laptop and opened the project. It gave the same error, but also opened the window you get when you drop one Vegas project in another in a nested fashion. I canceled that operation (which took a while), then deleted unused source files from the Project Media list and saved the project. When I moved the drive back to the desktop, the project opened with no problems other than two instances of a plugin that I don't have on my laptop.

The cause appears to be one of the last things I did. I had just re-recorded one small piece of a vocal part at the studio (on Vegas Pro 13) and I was flying that audio clip into my project at home. But I accidentally clicked and dragged the .veg file (that was just above the audio clip I wanted) onto a track, nesting the project within itself. At the time (yesterday), I canceled the operation, dragged the correct audio clip into the track and rendered a reference mp3. Everything seemed fine until today when I had the error described above. It appears that the canceled nesting operation left some loose ends that almost caused me to lose the project.

[Graham Bernard]

Originally Posted by Patrick Tracy

It appears that the canceled nesting operation left some loose ends that almost caused me to lose the project.

Nasty! I wish I could help, but I will say that this last week I’ve run into an issue that produces a FLATLINED Audio from within a Nest Project where the Nest had within it a Proxy File, automatically built by VP19. To get around this issue I’ve had to render that Audio File, a WMA, to a plain vanilla, simple MP3. Doing this cured my problem. I’ve had the reproed by four independent VP19 VegHeads too. So, it was your mention of Nesting that made me respond.

Question: Has VP had to build Audio Proxy files?

[Patrick Tracy]

Originally Posted by Graham Bernard

Question: Has VP had to build Audio Proxy files?

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question, but it does seem that VP builds an audio proxy file for a nested audio project. If you change anything in the source project, it has to rebuild the file in the project in which its nested.

[Graham Bernard]

Yes, Nesting produces Proxy files. I’m talking about what was INSIDE that Nest. Any Audio Proxy files inside?

[Patrick Tracy]

Originally Posted by Graham Bernard

Yes, Nesting produces Proxy files. I’m talking about what was INSIDE that Nest. Any Audio Proxy files inside?

It was audio only, no video. Technically, the project file on disc wouldn't have any nested audio in it until I saved the active copy I was working on, which would overwrite the one on disc. But I didn't let it get that far. I immediately realized I had dragged the wrong file into the project and hit the Cancel button, but it probably left a partially created proxy, and it left the .veg file in the Project Media list.

Not sure if I was explicit enough about this: I dragged the .veg file of the project I was working on into its own timeline. The project was nested within itself. That can't be good.*

*Actually, it's not horrible. If you change something then close and reopen the file, it has to render a proxy. But each time it renders a proxy, it has changed the file, which causes it to render a new proxy, and so on. Fortunately, it seems to limit it to six cycles in order to prevent an endless loop.