[Brett Underberg-davis]

[Xavier Dolz] “why? because I want to upload the files to youtube…
“

I don’t mean to confuse the already excellent advice others have given. Their guidance has been spot on.

But if the compression artifacts you are seeing are only happening after you upload to YouTube then you might be running into a glitch of theirs that’s been ongoing since around Sept/Oct 2011. You can possibly address that by using the SSL uploader they cobbled together as a stopgap.

If your problem only shows up in the YouTube encodings, that is, if your Vegas render doesnn’t show those artifacts, then this is probably just YouTube trying to be too efficient, and conflicting with some sorts of connections on their error correction. Namely, they started trying to process video before it was uploaded, and my guess is that the checksum they’re using is not 100% accurate, since it can’t possibly be based on the file as a whole, if the processing starts before they have the entire file, can it?

The HTTPS/SSL Uploader that YouTube created to address this issue is accessible from the following link: https://upload.youtube.com/my_videos_upload

I’m posting the link as plaintext as well, since the preview was kind of flakey — https://upload.youtube.com/my_videos_upload

While it appears identical to the standard uploader, use of the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) supposedly improves the error checking and should prevent data corruption that leads to such defects. It may run slower than the uploader you were using before, especially if there are significant problems with noise in your current connection.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

[Stephen Crye] “In the past I’ve found this link to be helpful and a bit amusing:

https://www.foolishpassion.org/vidding-tips/vegas-won%27t-open-avi.html
“

Great tutorial. I wish I’d found this about two or three years ago. Pretty much summarizes about 90% of the complaints I’ve seen on YouTube forums in the last few years.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Which text-oriented media generator(s) is this happening in? I’ve tried to repro this in the three I’ve used most (well two and the new one I’ve barely used at all (Titles & Text) but haven’t managed to spot it in any of them so far.

The more frequently used ones being ProType Titler and (Legacy)Text. I didn’t try the Credit Roll generator, however, until just now but it too seems to work. (I don’t tend to use Credit Roll as it’s really clunky… it’s usually easier to generate title cards in another app and render an alpha transparency image that I can pan over.

I’m using one of the more recent (but haven’t installed the MOST recent) patch build. Build 511 (64-bit) is what I’m using right now.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Norman,

Usually I expect a new release to be full of nasty bugs, so that was my first assumption in this case as well. Wishing you well with completing your project! (If anything I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how relatively minor most of the bugs have been, and glad to see a maintenance release coming out so soon with such a list of fixes).

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I may have misread something, but it sounded like the problem was mainly cropping up when images were saved to JPG (with no alpha layer possible)… If there were problems with PNG, it is possible in PNG to suppress or save without an alpha layer… at least I know that can be done fairly easily in PSP or Painter… I don’t use Photoshop as often as many do, though I’m sure it’s possible to do many strange things to an alpha layer there as well.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Looks like I posted my question just a few days too early. At least in my case, it seems that the first patch (9.0a) took care of the issues I was having with the MCMP4plug.dll… namely what was listed on the bugfix report as a crash related to dualpass rendering. For me, at least in the 32bit version just installed, the problem seems to have gone away and I just finished a 720-30p render (2-pass) a few hours ago with no obvious problems.

Thanks for all the helpful hints though. Some of them proved useful anyway and probably helped to further stabilize things for me. Mad props as always to the knowledgeable crew here!

I’m mainly adding this bit for reference for anyone who may come along who is not aware of the patch and is having similar issues. Would love to hear from Norman whether this patch addressed some of the problem’s he’s experiencing with the Sony AVC/AAC package.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Update: Boosting the value back up to 256MB (less than what the setting had been before) seems to have enabled the render to progress, or at least to get started, at least using one of the sub-HD presets installed with Pro 9.0 thanks for pointing me in what seems to have been a helpful direction!

Here are the specs for my one successful render so far:

General
Complete name : M:\Vid\albe09\littlelight01mcX1.mp4
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media / Version 2
Codec ID : mp42
File size : 19.3 MiB
Duration : 4mn 28s
Overall bit rate : 604 Kbps
Encoded date : UTC 2009-07-19 21:41:43
Tagged date : UTC 2009-07-19 21:41:43

Video
ID : 2
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Baseline@L1.3
Format settings, CABAC : No
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 4mn 28s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 473 Kbps
Width : 368 pixels
Height : 208 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16/9
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Standard : NTSC
Resolution : 24 bits
Colorimetry : 4:2:0
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.206
Stream size : 15.1 MiB (78%)
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2009-07-19 21:41:43
Tagged date : UTC 2009-07-19 21:41:43

Audio
ID : 1
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format version : Version 4
Format profile : LC
Format settings, SBR : No
Codec ID : 40
Duration : 4mn 28s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Resolution : 16 bits
Stream size : 4.10 MiB (21%)
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2009-07-19 21:41:43
Tagged date : UTC 2009-07-19 21:41:43

However, when I tried to do a new render at something closer to 720p 30fps I still got the same crash. (I have rendered at least 50 videos for YouTube/vimeo using similar profiles under Vegas 8.0c, using the MCMP4 plugin or its equivalent in 8.0c, fwiw).

Perhaps I just don’t have the RAM and processing power needed for doing it in 9.0? I only have 4GB RAM, not counting video RAM (512MB) on my NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT card. CPU is an Intel Core2 Quad Q6600.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I realize this advice was meant for Norman, but on the off chance that it might also help with my issue I did try it. Unlike past attempts it did seems that a very tiny bit of progress was made before crashing. Still, the crash reporter is suggesting that the issue is with the mcmp???.dll plugin that I think was listed in the crash report I posted before.

Actually, after resetting the reserved memory for prerendering to 0, then closing Vegas, restarting it and confirming the setting change had registered I did get the program to “pretend” to render using the MCMP4 fileIO plug-in, but considering I was using a “roll my own” preset that should have used very little memory (360×180 resolution, 30fps) and there the estimated rendering time just kept on multiplying the longer I let it run, I cancelled that process after a few minutes had passed and estimated rendering time was well in excess of what it took Sony AVC to render the same project at 720-30p. But it was interesting that the MainConcept IO plugin did NOT simply cause the crash I’d had in all cases before this.

Thanks for the input!

[Brett Underberg-davis]

While I agree in principle with most of this, I seem to recall reading the following here on the Cow, from John Galt https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/the-truth-about-2k-4k-the-future-of-pixels

What I recall making the biggest impression on me in that interview was his comment about framerate having a much bigger impact on perceived image quality than any amount of trying to boost resolution or play the megapixel game.

But in practical terms you’re dead right… I never try to edit at anything approaching full resolution or frame rate and even if I had a much faster computer I probably wouldn’t. If you need to preview what you’re doing at something closer to what you’ll be rendering to, your best options are selective pre-rendering when it’s really necessary. The rest of the time, on my machine, preview settings are generally set at the Preview(Auto) level, and yes that IS fuzzy. But it allows me to edit at speed without risking lock-ups or crashing the machine.

I do, however, almost always shoot at the Canon XL H1’s fastest framerate, 60i HDV. I can always choose later (and in most cases am compelled to) cut down the frame rate for final production, at least at this point in time when no one I know is willing to pay for BluRay discs, or at least not enough of them to make any investments I’d need to make in hardware justifiable.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Thanks for the suggestion, but to get one (non-essential) codec set to (possibly) work, I really can’t justify the amount of lost time of a fresh OS install. If I were going to reinstall the OS I’d probably go for Windows 7 in any case, and frankly, I don’t like wasting my time living on the bleeding edge any more. 😉

Also, please confirm to me that you have rendered with the Main Concept AVC presets (at least the built-in preset templates?) Just about everything in the rest of Vegas 9.0 is working, and working much better than Pro 8.0c ever worked. Since the MainConcept codecs DID work (and probably still work) in the Pro 8.0c installation I’ve left available, an OS reinstall seems a bit drastic and unnecessary at this point. If something really big was not working I’d certainly have to consider it, though. But since there’s almost no way to make money with streaming video, (and the ways that do exist have nothing to do with rendering quality) the difference between the Sony AVC/AAC set and MainConcept is pretty non-essential for my needs, at least.

The machine is a little over one year old, and I intentionally have installed very little other software on it that is not directly usable for rendering. If I continue to research and find that there are many people using the MainConcept codecs without a hitch, I may resort to a reinstall of Vegas but reinstalling the OS is a last resort for me. Especially reinstalling Vista. I’m frankly looking forward to a day when it would be realistic to do my work in linux, but I suspect Win7 is probably in my future before that fantasy comes true.

Also, I wouldn’t even try to run Vegas Pro 8.0 or 9.0 on a laptop myself. Their video drivers are never that stable and they run way too hot for my taste usually with very inadequate ventilation and cooling though I suppose you might put one on one of those cooling devices and see if you could keep it stable, for me, the adventure would be too much… I don’t like losing any more work than I have to, given other options.