Starting to Panic: Vegas Not Rendering!

[Mike Kujbida]

See if Vegas will let you render to MXF or YUV (choose AVI and then one of the YUV templates).

[Dale Spetz]

If you haven’t yet, try separating the render task through 4 drives to prevent a bottleneck: OS, scratch(temp), source, destination.

Also, set dynamic ram to 512 or 1024 and threads to 8 (or even the max of 16).

[Edan Cohen]

How can I separate the render? This sounds interesting.

[Dale Spetz]

I assume that you have 2 internal drives. Let one run the OS (win7), exclusively. Let the other be the scratch drive (set temp drive in your Vegas options).

If you have two external drives, let one contain all of your projet’s source footage. Let the other be the destination of the rendered project.

This may prevent the system from choking on the demanding work load.

[Edan Cohen]

I see – yes, I have a C&D drive. The D contains all of the media for the project. Do you think it would help to set up an external drive to write the project to instead of writing it to D as well?

[Edan Cohen]

I was able to get to 25% rendered using AVI (YUV). I will try MXF now.

[Edan Cohen]

Same thing with MXF – it gets to 25% and stops rendering. In all instances Vegas never freezes, the estimated time keeps decreasing.

SO FRUSTRATING as I need to export this thing today!!

[Chris Young]

Oh yes the drives. Multiple drives is a must for serious editing IMHO. I run a four disc hardware raid for all the video material and as previously mentioned make sure your ‘Vegas Temp’, ‘Vegas Recorded’ and Vegas ‘Prerendered’ folders are nowhere near you ‘C’ or OS drive. That is a deal breaker for some systems with heavy rendering requirements. A lot of your working and rendering goes on in the Temp folder until such time as your project render is finished and appears in the drive/folder you nominated. Not that I think that this is your primary problem.

The following are only my observations but they have me intrigued. I may be way off but I don’t think so.

What I have discovered with the Canon AVCHD HD files is that frequently they DO NOT end on a frame boundary. If you throw a bunch of clips on the timeline straight from the Project Media bin you often find that there is a minute gap between some of the files. A half frame gap! Vegas correctly drops the next clip on the next frame boundary, as it should.

Zoom in on the timeline and you can see clips ending half way across a frame. It appears to me that the long GOP structure of the AVCHD H264 MOV files are not being closed correctly when the Canon cameras stops recording.

With H264 it’s a new concept GOP structure where a ‘B’ frame can also become a reference frame as well as the ‘I’ frame, this makes it an inherently more complex GOP to decode and re-encode dynamically. What is concerning me with these Canon files is that I believe the GOP structure has been compromised in the GOP sequence not being closed correctly. If this is the case then it’s hardly surprising that Vegas or any other software has issues decoding and re-encoding HD files working with GOPs that contain these half frames. This is why trying to render with them is a major headache hence the Vegas hangs. I know with the Cineform converted files from Canon AVCHD it’s a breeze to edit with them and render from them.

If Cineform conversions run out of sync it doesn’t surprise me as every Canon H264 clip I convert to Cineform ends correctly on a frame boundary. I am surmising here that any of these Canon half frame ended clips will be shortened to the closest closed GOP boundary where Cineform can create a complete inter-frame. I am curious, are you are trying to marry up Cineform files back to the audio from the AVCHD files? If so then I would expect to have problems, as they are now no longer the same duration. What the answer is I don’t know but if anyone has any in dealing with these Canon files when editing I for one would like to know.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[David Keslick]

You may want to check out DVFilm’s new EPIC I plugin for vegas. It allows you to edit h.264 files in real time without transcoding. It also makes Vegas more stable when using h.264 quicktime files.

EPIC I

Dave Keslick
DVFilm.com

[Chris Young]

Yes, very interesting! Thanks for the heads up. Am downloading it as I write. If this is half as good as their Raylight Ultra plugin for P2 files then it should be good. Will find out very shortly.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney