Long Render – Now NO RENDER!

[Steve Rhoden]

Corey,
Since you have basically tried everything else,
have you tried breaking them up in increments (small pieces),
and render a piece at a time in the final format….then when all pieces are done you assemble back on the timeline to do the
final complete render?

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Portfolio at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Corey Whitley]

Hey Steve,

No I haven’t. I hope that solution is not necessary, but if need be I will attempt. I would be seriously disappointed if all projects in Vegas going forward have to be rendered as such.

Thanks for the advice.

Corey Whitley

[Corey Whitley]

I also wanted to thank Don Gordoni (Sp). This forum is so helpful and it is really refreshing to know that people are taking the time. I hope I can return the favor someday.

Corey Whitley

[Steve Rhoden]

Im sure you are not going to always do your renderings
like this…lol. Just to climb over this hurdle to meet your
deadline, im sure it will work.

Therefore i can somewhat assume that something (event) on the
timeline is causing you grief…not sure which is it.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Portfolio at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Corey Whitley]

I have since taken every track except video tracks off of the time line. The last render attempt produced a crash after a 96 MB file was created. The computer is crashing now! This is with the computer restored to last Friday before the Matrox Codecs. I am getting worried about my machine now. What an unfortunate mess.

I will attempt to render just the video tracks (3 total) in 2 minute increments next. Here’s to Friday night next to the warm glow of the computer screen. lol.

Thanks again peeps. Any ideas are welcome.

Corey Whitley

[Steve Rhoden]

Let me also know if the solution offered by Don Gordoni,
resolves your rendering issues.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Portfolio at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Corey Whitley]

It didn’t, Steve. I will keep trying things though.

Corey Whitley

[Steve Rhoden]

Sorry, Keep us posted…..

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Portfolio at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Joe Mantaratz]

I wanted to wait before I added my two cents, you never know what will work or what can be the cause. I’ve worked on computers for years since DOS was the name of the game. Lets go back to system basics and the details you have stated this far.

The big point I see is that you were able to render it fully at home but it took 19 hours.

I have had similar problems using different machines over the course of the years. The number one culprit was an over temp or an over temp limit value set in the bios for the CPU. To protect the CPU it will crash the computer but prior to reaching that point it will hang or produce errant results. Before anything further please boot up and get into your BIOS and check what your TEMP readings are for your CPU. The temps you are reading here are idle and should be well below the threshold. Also make sure you are not overclocking your CPU as this adds great instability and a huge amount of heat. These CPU’S will burn out in less than 30 seconds without proper cooling. Your CPU temp on a quad core should be well below the max limits. There is free CPU monitoring software out there that will give you live temps of everything from Mother board temps, graphic cards, to Hard drive temps. Few people ever think about the drives being a problem but they can be and often are. Do the basics and check those temps at both idle and processing. Render times can indeed take a very long time depending on the system config. For example..

1.Are you using separate drives for rendering? Is there sufficient space? Do not forget that Vegas uses a default for the Temp folder. So that you might have sufficient room on the destination drive but not enough on the primary. Also please allow at least 10 gigs of space on any drive you are using to render as windows does not accurately report the remaining disk space. For example it does not redeem anything in the trash until you empty the recycle bin.

2.Make sure you are allowing windows to handle your PF memory allocation size. Vegas only recognizes 2 gigs as I recall so if you don’t allow windows to handle this it will cause a crash every time under heavy processing.

3.Make a clean boot setup so that there is nothing running in the background. No virus, spyware, internet, etc. Anything that auto does anything is not good. NO SCREEN saver.

4.Power management settings should all be turned off. The last thing you want in a long render is for the screen to turn off or the hard drives to power down. Basically you do not want any CPU cycles to be interrupted by any other programs. My HP printer periodically checks the for ink levels and prompts me. Not good. Turn off windows update and anything else that automatically looks for the internet. It will still do it regardless of whether or not you disconnect the internet source so you have two choice, turn it off in the preferences for each software or create a clean boot with no services running. If you don’t know how to do that just ask. I’ve had renders and other operations ruined because of these annoyances. Again simple solutions first.

5.Try using a lower bit rate for rendering. I have one machine that bogs down if I use 32 floating point. Not all systems can fully use the feature…yes even a quad running Vista.

6.Turn off Preview render option of course if you using that feature and also minimize the window. Anything you do to free up resources will speed things up and cool things down.

ok I’m sorry if all this seemed rudimentary and for being long winded. I’m fairly well versed and still make basic errors like these. I hope this helps in some way. You need to diagnose the health of your system. Defrag your drives and perform a virus and spyware check. You never know. The systems I use to work with never see the internet….

[Joe Mantaratz]

The more I have read your problem the more I am convinced you do indeed have an overheat condition. You mentioned it crashed after only creating a 96mb file. Please define crash. Do you get the BLUE SCREEN? Does it just reboot or crash out of the program? I need some more details to define the possible source. The Blue SCREEN OF DEATH (BSOD) will usually show the module or driver that caused the fault. It is not that accurate but a good starting point. Windows records EVENT logs where you can see more detailed what might have caused the crash. These are more advanced trouble shooting techniques so please perform the prior post checks and pass on the details.

You mentioned that you only have 30 minutes of footage but it took a huge amount of time. Let me address that point for a moment.
I have rendered footage mixed with all kinds of effects stills etc and the total length of it was less than 10 minutes. Rendered to an AVI it was almost 2 GIGS…to Quicktime at 3MBPS….3 GIGS. Hi Res stills will really add to render time. The reason I mentioned that here is if you are rendering to an external or internal drive and the rendered file approaches 4 gigs it will not fit on a FAT32 system formatted drive only an NTFS. FAT32 has a file size limitation to around 4 gigs as I recall. It wont crash the computer but it might crash the program.
This just happened to me recently when a client gave me their hard drive and I could not copy their 7.5gig file to my external. It kept telling me I did not have sufficient disc space. Made me crazy as this was a brand new drive. Who would have thought that they were still formatting drives this way. Took a while for the light to go on for this one.

Here is it more plainly stated
Single-user systems with limited hard disk space will probably use NTFS compression successfully. The slowest link in a computer is not the CPU but the speed of the hard drive, so NTFS compression allows the limited, slow storage space to be better used, in terms of both space and (often) speed.

I really hope you find the answer and get back to us. We all have the brick wall to climb at some point and it sure helps to get lent a hand. Best of everything. Any questions or clarity please ask.
Joe