Sony Vegas Pro 8.0c keeps crashing – project due in 1 week

[Mike Kujbida]

Sony are the only folks who can truly understand those error messages so you’d have to send it to them for analysis.

Have you installed ANY other software recently besides the ones you mentioned?

If it crashes at the same place each time, I’d suspect a bad piece of media.
Try replacing it with something else (like Color Bars so it stands out) and see what happens.

Is this for a DVD?
Try rendering out to an AVI file first and then bring that back into Vegas for rendering to DVD.

[Erik Martin]

Thanks for your quick reply. Vegas had been working fine for several days until yesterday; yes, it could be the last MPEG 2 clip I added that is causing my project to crash; but every time I try to re-open the project file (or even the .bak file, for that matter), I immediately get the exception error once it fully loads, with no option to remove that last clip, render video or edit further. I suspect that the entire project file is damaged/corrupted/non-repairable. Luckily, I outputted my project to AVI 2 days ago and can edit from that, but that means I lost the last 6 hours of work.

Do I need to change any settings under “preferences”, by the way, to decrease chances of crashing?

Lastly, I do remember seeing a separate Windows error message after rebooting 2 days ago (before the Vegas crashing problem started) indicating some kind of fault/exception with MS .NET Framework (I think it was 3.5). I’ve since upgraded to .NET 4.0.

[Mike Kujbida]

“it could be the last MPEG 2 clip I added that is causing my project to crash”

What I would try first is to load the problem clip only into a new instance of Vegas.
If it still crashes, then it’s definitely the cause.
If it doesn’t, render it out to another format (DV-AVI if it’s SD format).
Move the problem clip from it’s current location to a new one, start Vegas and load the project.
When it can’t find the missing MPEG-2 clip, it’ll give you a few options.
Point it to the newly rendered DV-AVI file and it should continue to load properly.
Re-save the project under a new name and continue editing.

“Do I need to change any settings under “preferences”, by the way, to decrease chances of crashing?”

I stand to be corrected but there’s nothing specific that I’m aware of.

[Erik Martin]

Good suggestions–I’ll try them. Thanks so much!

But if anyone else can suggest a reason/solution for why my Vegas keeps crashing, based on the symptoms I posted above, please post. I would greatly appreciate it.

[Dave Haynie]

If it’s related to that newly added clip, there’s a good chance the clip is mal-formed in some way. Again, as Mike said, only Sony software engineers are going to make much out of the stack dump you provided.

Vegas is not very good at dealing with file corruption. I suspect that’s intentional — when you assume a file might be bad, you need all sorts of checks that slow down the processing of normal files.

If this was a DV or HDV capture, you can try to re-acquire it from the camera… capture glitches are as common as they used to be, but they sill occur. There are tools for filtering out glitches, too, if there’s a problem with the tape. Some places to look:

https://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/video-repair-fix
https://home.roadrunner.com/~mwilczyn/mpeg2repair/

-Dave

[Sebastien Gravel]

You could also delete/move the “supposed” offending file from it’s current location. Then start Vegas. It will give an error message of missing media, but at least you’ll be able to open the project.

You can then try to convert the malformed media using another instance of Vegas or some other conversion tool.