V11.0 64 bit Build 425 breaks 1920×1080/60p Main Concept MPEG-2 rendering

[Dave Haynie]

There’s been something broken in Main Concept MPEG-2 all along. Like, going way, way back. It got worse in Vegas 11.

The usual symptom is that it just stops rendering — you get an “unknown” error (eg, Sony isn’t passing the error codes from the rendering engine up to the user interface). This was guaranteed to happen if you set the bitrate too high.

So in Vegas 10, I had a number of presets for MPEG-2 rendering to higher quality, high bitrate MPEG-2… usually for intermediate files, rendering a finished product in another program, etc. These all ran at 50Mb/s… and every one of them fails with this error in Vegas 11.371. I was able to drop down to VBR averging at 35Mb/s and peaks of 50Mb/s with some early success, but that one failed on me, same way, last week.

Sony + Main Concept need to [a] fix this, and [b] actually report the error that’s seen by the Main Concept rendering engine. Some of this is understandable; it’s obvious that Sony licensed a new version of the Main Concept engines — they’re OpenCL accelerated. But for whatever reason, we’re seeing a bug or other issue in these that didn’t show up with the same parameters under Vegas 10 and earlier. Given that this is really a long-standing bug, they really could so us all a favor and fix both the bug itself (Main Concept) and the reporting mechanism (Sony).

-Dave

[Tom Roper]

Very well put Dave. I agree with your observations about the 50+ mbps bit rates, not a new problem I have seen it. And usually what happens is someone replies to just use one of the other working plug-ins…what a frustration!

But in the specific instance of Main Concept MPEG-2 1920×1080/60p, if you just selected the Blu-ray 1920×1080/60i 25 mbps template and changed the field order to “None” (progressive scan) and the frame rate to 59.940 and accepted all the other defaults, it would render out the file in the most recent V11.0 iteration before the just-now released Build 425 which now adds all 1080/60p outputs to the other 50+ mbps formats that give the “unexpected error encountered.”

In my case, I just rolled back to V11.0 64bit Build 371 and I can get the output file. But Build 425 has broken 1920×1080/60p output with ANY render setting that tries to use the Main Concept MPEG-2 plug-in. It’s something they just did. Build 371 was itself only a few days old.

Tom

[Dave Haynie]

Oh, I don’t doubt it’s more broken now.. that seems to be the trend. Thing is, that might ultimately be a good thing. Fringy errors are easy to ignore.. and yeah, I told myself “just use MXF” when I couldn’t render in Main Concept beyond 50Mb/s (which, honestly, is the right answer more of the time, unless you had 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 in M.C.). But of it’s getting worse, perhaps Sony can’t ignore the problem. It would be sweet if they fixed Main Concept MPEG-2 (and I believe the AVC CODEC has the same issues), better yet if they fixed Vegas to correctly interface to these CODECs and report the errors they encounter.

-Dave