[Carl Alessi]

Thank you, Dave. I wasn’t thinking about rendering back to the C: drive from the hypothetical D: drive, but your numbers make sense to me. I’ll pass this along. Thanks again.

[Carl Alessi]

The dedicated drive would be for both the source footage, and the destination for the rendered version.

[Carl Alessi]

Thanks for responding, Danny…

I’m actually getting errors on different segments of this project, and the segments are of different lengths. Sometimes Vegas says it cannot determine the reason for the error. One time it gave the error I mentioned in the subject line of this thread. Last night, it generated a new one:
“The playback device Microsoft Sound Mapper does not support the current output format.
The playback device Microsoft Sound Mapper does not exist.”

All this is really puzzling: I’m not generating any of this to tape. I’m just generating uncompressed AVIs to my hard drive. I had problems with this project earlier with failed renders, and I solved them when I properly nested child tracks under parent tracks that contained Boris RED chromakey filters. After that, the renders succeeded. I’ve since added some new files (of the same types that I’ve used before–Camtasia generated AVIs using the Techsmith codec at 15 fps, none of them more than 2 minutes or so in length), and now I’m having this new set of errors on the same project again.

Quite a confusing mess. This project is absolutely causing me fits. If anyone has any ideas, please pass them along.

Carl

[Carl Alessi]

Alright, problem solved. Making the backplate track an explicit child, with the foreground track containing the RED chromakey filters the parent, has allowed the rendering to complete. And it completes much more quickly than before.

[Carl Alessi]

OK, I finally seemed to have resolved this. When I nested the backplate track and made the foreground track with the Boris RED chromakey filters its “parent,” the render finishes. In fact, instead of a projected 2 hours and 15 minutes, it finishes in 1 hour and 15 minutes.

In retrospect (and to the more knowledgeable than yours truly), this all makes sense, given that I’ve limited the application of the filters to the parent and child exclusively, rather than to every “lower” track in the timeline.

A lesson painfully learned.

[Carl Alessi]

I’ve taken the first part of the sequence that rendered correctly, and placed it adjacent to the second part that rendered correctly on their own, dedicated tracks. My objective is to produce a temporary workaround that allows me to have the single uncompressed avi that I was trying to get in the first place.

What I’m now wondering is whether my application of Boris RED chromakey effects using compositing mode at the track level without nesting the background track as a child is causing me all this trouble. In my present configuration, is it likely that the chromakey filters are performing calculations through every video track beneath it, rather than being confined to the green screened track and the background track beneath it? Most importantly, can this be causing the renders to ultimately stop?

[Carl Alessi]

John,

I have a question for you regarding the integration of Boris RED and the problem I mentioned in this thread (i.e., the imperfect fade outs produced in Vegas when using Boris chromakey filters).

What I’ve done on this project, which I’ve done differently than any previous project, is to apply the chromakey effect via compositing mode, rather than as a simple track effect.

My question: how important is it to make the background video track a compositing child of the track containing the chromakey filter?

I have not created such a child relationship. This is becoming an increasingly critical question for me, because I’m now having problems getting my renders in this project to complete (I started a new thread about this particular issue on Sept. 7). I now have to wonder if my possibly incorrect application of the filter via compositing mode is causing me a range of project crippling problems.

Thanks in advance,

Carl

[Carl Alessi]

OK, so far all my efforts have failed in pretty much the same fashion. I’ve tried reinstalling the dll, and I’ve tried reinstalling Vegas twice. Vegas still typically fails at just over 90% into the render, usually with an “unknown error.”

I did increase the RAM in the box from 6 to 8GB, although my working set in memory has left more free memory, it hasn’t helped with this problem.

I did find that I made one boneheaded mistake in adding several clips from my backup copy on the NAS, rather than my local RAID 0 drive, into the segment I was rendering. Again, fixing this problem and restarting Vegas has not made any difference.

Is it possible that adding Boris RED chroma filters in “compositing mode” in one of my video tracks might be an issue? I don’t know what else to think at this point…it’s the only thing I’ve done differently on this project than on my previous projects.

Any suggestions? Anyone? I’m getting quite desperate. And frustrated…and embarrassed with my co-workers.

Carl

[Carl Alessi]

Thanks, Stephen…I believe this copy of the dll is Microsoft’s generic one. I just reinstalled it, and rebooted. I’m trying the render again.

One update–it turns out that while Vegas would render the last few minutes of the segment by itself (the 29.97 fps portion), it will NOT render the previous segment by itself. This is strange, because when I try to render the segments together, the failure did not occur until Vegas got into those last few minutes where the 29.97 fps section is (I hope all that makes sense).

I did try your option of unchecking the unused media checkbox before my last rendering attempt (which ultimately failed), although I did not tell Vegas to drop its listing of unused media from the bin.

Anyway, I’m rendering the whole segment now after reinstalling the C++ libraries and a reboot. We’ll see if that solves it. Fingers crossed.

Carl

[Carl Alessi]

Thanks John…I tried upgrading to RED 5.0.6, but I’m still having the same issue. Next week I’ll try recreating the problem with a fresh project in Vegas/RED…if the problem continues, I’ll report it.

As severe as this is, I’m surprised that the Boris team has not been approached about this earlier.

Carl