Help. Sony Vegas DOES NOT render?

[Paul Wilson]

You said…..

“What I find odd is that Vegas will render to a format that you cannot then again place on the time line. EX…AC3 audio.”

Sorry. I didn’t understand that sentence fully.

————————————–

The render of the really long one took just over an hour but I have always maintained I dont care about render time just as long as it works. I was expecting render times to be long anyway. I was pleasantly surpised (when render works) at actually how quick it is.

Your info about file sizes helps my case in the fact I had worried my files were perhaps too big and uncompressed. Obviously not.

Really it does seem like multiple different files that are hi def WMV format really throws vegas.

Whether its some “talking” between the software and windows 7 which is the cause then who knows.

The File Transfer thing is no good for me. Unfortunately I have moved back with my parents who have broadband but its somewhere around a 1mb connection and the upload / download speed is “RIDICULOUSLY SLOW”.

When Movie Studio played up I tried that with Sony. Managed to upload the jpg and 1 WMV. Queued em. Also tried individually. Individually it would say IE was still working for like over an hour on 1 clip. After queuing and leaving PC on over night they came back to me stating only the 1 WMV and jpg got thru.

No worries in the sense I know its my awful broadband BUT a shame in the sense it would be ideal so that Sony can work out whats going on.

I’m sorry. I’ve been taking my frustrations out on Sony. It may not be all their fault. To me it does seem a lot is but as you stated, the complexity of these apps and different media involved really doesn’t make their life easier.

It would be nice if somehow you could (even if you had to pay) get a technician to come out and look at your PC directly.

I dont want to assume things but they say now that its compatible with Windows 7 and that was under a week after Windows 7 launch. I highly doubt that gave enough time for testing.

On that link I provided to the guy with a similar problem he was using Vista anyway.

Surely they go through multiple instances when testing. Surely they test each render option on each output file type on a project comprised of certain types of video.

Maybe thats asking too much as that opens up a HUGE amount of combinations.

I can imagine a tester trying WMV’s. Putting in 5. Render as all different formats and qualities. It works.

Vegas 32 bit had its cap and maybe they test to that size. Remove the cap from pro but dont bother testing multiple files that way.

Sorry I’m reaching and waffling again. Lol. Thanx for your response.

I will be back on Sonys case 1st thing Monday. Shut at weekends.

EDIT. Brainwave although unlikely. If I get no further luck with Sony tech support I might see if they’ll let me mail a CD. I cam just burn all the data to disk. Gonna take longer due to post especially due to Xmas but I NEED to get this sorted.

[Kristofar Rieleef]

What is the bit rate of your source files? Do they play fine in windows media player? Can you play them in the Vegas timeline ok, without having problems? I know what you are going through. I’ve had similar problems, but have learned to “work around” like it’s called. I don’t think you have gone wrong with your choice of machine and program. I’ve worked with many editing systems and they all have issues. This is one of those and it basically comes down to the numbers. Do you have the option to change your bit rate setting output, on your game console? If so, try augmenting that and see if it helps.
The reason why you got a letter boxed output render isn’t because of the bit rate you used, but the project settings didn’t match your video render settings. You can output 2mb per second files in HD and still preserve the aspect ratio. I think you said you matched the project settings to the source, so probably not an issue there. I know your frustration. A workaround you could try would be place your files on the timeline without doing any editing and render it as an .M2T, which is a HD mpeg format. If you can do that you’ll end up with a clip that’s probably around 2 gigs. If you get that far, you should have no problem editing and rendering the video. I’d just keep experimenting though, find whatever works and stick to it. I wouldn’t settle on a lower quality though. Good luck to you and I hope some one else with more knowledge to shed on this can help shed some light. Take care, and BREATH! 🙂

[Paul Wilson]

Lol @ Breath. I know. I’m awful. Lol

Anyway. Bit Rate.

On the Xbox itself when playing through composite hi def cables (only things that attach to the capture device), the console itself allows about 2 options. Haven’t checked but they are basic.

1 of about 2 different resolutions and either widescreen or square.
Basically not a lot can be done with console.

Its outputting widescreen 1280 x 720p I believe.

In the capture software it as more choices. It has set itself as default 1280 x 720 @ 60 frames per sec.

Bit rate has a scroll bar you can move. I have not changed it. Can go as low as 0.2 and as high as 13.5 but I have it left at default (8). It states Constant Bit Rat.

Audio is saying 2 channled AC3.

That saves the capture as MP4 H264 or whatever.

In the capture suite theres a converter which auto converts to WMV.

I must admit. I have never got as far in a project where it starts to fail by using other options at the capture end e.g. it can capture straight to MT2S and AVCHD. I have tested these in Vegas to see it accepts them but made the decision to use WMV as the files were only slightly larger and, although its hard to tell, the quality looks better.

When I render in Vegas I was doing it at HD 6 mbps 720 – 30p.

I think the most testing I have done is in the rendering side when things go wrong by changing multiple variables.

The only constant is Vegas as the editor and the WMV files always captured and converted the same way.

Maybe thats the problem?

I dont think so tho. I think I mentioned that I did a project with no issues, recorded the same way and converted and using the simple movie maker on a really old machine?

Perhaps something is my fault. I hope not and most of the vids I cannot “recapture”.

Just watching some utube vids now. Got people on there with Vegas and the same Capture card.

PS. Yeah. Never had a problem with the editing side. Had it freeze coupla times when project has got big but usually due to me clicking things too fast. Also it does take a time to load up on big projects.

[Paul Wilson]

Right so I followed this guideline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSNUwUIE4D0

Guys saving to MP4 rather than WMV.
Gave it a go exactly as this guy describes. It worked.

ISSUES. Final MP4 vid has poor frame rate. Stutters a bit.
Loss in FX they dont appear as they should
Its extremely dark.
Vid in middle with black edges left and right. Basically square overall but it letter boxes top and bottom to account for the widescreen format.
and
The sound quality is poor.

Does not look HD at all.

If you watch that vid he points out theres a way to match the project properties to the input media which I never knew about.

ANYWAY. Tried all the options he did but rendering as WMV. This time I got a different error. States Audio bit rate on output and input not matching.

Have tried fiddling with the options in the audio render. Notibly changed it from something like windows audio 9.2 to professional 10.0.

Started render. NO ERROR message. 5 mins in. 5% rendered. Approximates an hour to go. To be expected

BUT

No instant error message.

Crossing my fingers that it works and output is good.

I must admit I have largely left the audio rendering options alone and tried multiple changes in video settings.

Maybe thats the incompatibility I’m coming across. I will let you know shortly.

Maybe with my outputs not matching inputs and Vegas trying to recode its working out theres too much work but this last test (if its the answer) seems to indicate Vegas having problems in WMV formats with the audio side of things.

I remember reading a while back whilst doing this research where someone stated Vegas I think (Could have been adobe) was advertised as multi sound track BUT was not supported by Dolby as this would cost too much and that he thought it was not geared on the sound side of things.

Maybe I haven’t given enough info to Sony and to them its “ok it could be multiple things causing his issue”. The question then is WHY DONT THEY GO THROUGH SOME OF THE MORE OBVIOUS THIGNS FIRST rather than blaming restrictions etc etc and searching their own forums.

You’ve been more help in the last 48 hours after only a couple of responses than Sony Support have in the last 2 months.

I’m counting chickens too early again anyway as this may not be the fix BUT thank you.

Right. Less waffle. I will be back to give you my findings

[Paul Wilson]

I was hoping too early.

Fail. This is all on the long vid again by the way.

Crashed at around 50%. Low memory error.

Tried again with sound entirely disabled on render.

Fail

[Kristofar Rieleef]

You should try the MP4 again. Capture the video to MP4 and take it into Vegas. Match project settings by going into project properties. When you render the video out to MP4, use the AVC Sony MP4 codec, the one that is internet ready at 720, 30p, 6mbs. Click on stretch video output also. There should be no downgrading in the HD quality if your project settings are matched to your source. I hope you get it figured out. I’m pretty much useless at this point, since I can’t be there to see what you’re doing. Good luck!

[Chris Shah]

Paul,
I am having the same problem. I have video from sony HDRXR520V
camera in m2t files. I loaded up the project about 1 hr 20 min long. just change some sound tracs about 5 titels from sony and some pip with stills. I tried on my new machine with win 7 ultimate , core i7 720 processor, 12 gb ram,nvidia fx3500 video card, this project plays fine on time line. when I render to ntsc dvd mpeg-2 it will render for 1 minute and shut down, I tried to render avi file samething. finally I copied every thing to external hd, copied back to my other machine with win xp,2gb ram,intel quadcore,ati5800 video card. started rendering project worked fine the whole project rendered flawlessly in 2 hrs 30 minutes and dvd is delivered.

this sure proves that movie studio 9.0b is not compatible with windows 7 64 bit version. How am I suppose to break it up in 10 minutes segment when I am doin a 1 hr 20 minute wedding video ?

[Grant Melville]

I think you’re right about it being a Windows 7 problem. I can’t render on my (much higher spec.) Windows 7 PC because of the same error message, but I can on my older Windows XP PC. Ridiculous! I hope something gets done about this soon, my livelihood depends partially on video editing.

[Paul Wilson]

Apologies to anyone reading this past and present. It’s been a while and I’ve never been back.

Due to Grants response I thought I’d better come back and say something.

That “something” is that Vegas is rubbish. It really shouldn’t have “pro” in the title.

After much back and forth, which I’ve probably talked about above, (I really cant be bothered to read over my old posts) I finally got a copy of a CD to Sony in the US with my latest project (at the time).

Sent it by snail mail as uploading was not working. I thought it was my terrible connection. Turns out it was actually a dying modem but that’s another story.

Although they repeated for weeks they hadn’t received it I finally got a msg from them telling me my problem was “too many instances”.

Basically. A keyframe FX, an indivdual input media, a transition etc all count as one instance each. I’m forgetting but from memory they said that Vegas only allows a maximum of 100 instances (I think) per render.

As my productions are mainly gaming footage compiled into montages it consists of many small recorded snippets with lots of editing work in the key frames both as SFX and pan / crop etc.

Therefore, according to them, Vegas can only handle 100 or whatever instances. This means I can only render about 2 mins (final output length) at a time dependant on complexity.

Now the error has always been “system running low on memory”. The msg was wrong as I wasn’t even using 3 gig out of my available 8. This same msg I assume is the one that appears when “instances” have been exceeded which is something they need to resolve if what they were telling me was true.

Affectively they say that Vegas can use up to a Terabyte of RAM. Fine if you have a long project. Lets say 3 different 2 hour wedding footages put together with 10 special effects each. That’s a big input (file sizes), a big total output (file size) and well under the instance allowance. I’m assuming that would work by what they told me, would take a long time to render but not fail and would start to use more of the actual RAM available but without any errors.

Now this is what Sony told me RE too many instances being the problem. As to whether they are telling the truth is another matter. They supposedly couldn’t find the CD for more than a week even though I sent it registered post and the post service confirmed “signed receipt” for my delivery.

It could still be a Windows 7 issue. I’m no uber techy. I’m still making my montages and cant afford a better editor. I’m starting to wish I had gone with Final Cut as it seems in the “pro” video editing employment world that is the editor of choice.

My projects are getting more complex as I become more proficient with Vegas. It just means my videos (max of 10 mins) are only allowing me to render 1 – 3 mins at a time dependant on complexity.

My next production is going to be very complex, will probably be around 9 mins and I’m sure I will have to render it as 9 seperate parts and then strap it all together.

For an example of the montages I do then feel free to visit my Youtube channel here….https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlbinoRat

Along that line. What follows is a link to my most recent and possibly most complex production to date. Warning strong language hip-hop music (It’s what the kids like these days)… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6PArLPL7Mw

Thankfully now I can recognise signs of when Vegas is struggling and will likely be unable to render. I also render constantly to make sure I haven’t gone too far which sadly eats up a lot of my time.

I’ve still got an open ticker with Sony support RE other questions and issues with Vegas but I think they had enough of me as I’ve still not had a response in over 8 months and I really can’t be bothered chasing their absolutely useless customer service.

EDIT. Link to my Youtube channel not visible. Nade Nation 2 link / embedding working so go to that video and you can access my channel from there.

Ratty
; )

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