[Jerry Smith]

Uh oh. Has nobody else on this forum hit this problem? Or does it lack a good solution?

[Jerry Smith]

Sony folks have gotten to the bottom of this. The comments only are lost when you need to re-locate media. I hit this because I added a hard drive to my system and the drive letters were re-assigned, effectively moving my video clips. It can be worked around by using “disk management” to force the drive letters back to the ones used in the Vegas file references.

[Jerry Smith]

I did some more checking on this:

– With Vegas Pro 8 on Vista SP1 32 bits, the project media comments in my existing Vegas project file ARE visible.
– With Vegas Pro 8.1 on Vista SP1 64 bits, they aren’t visible.
– With Vegas Pro 8.1 and Vegas Pro 9 64 bits on Win7 RC 64 bits, they aren’t visible.

This is with the same project file and on the same PC.

It seems the variable is whether the operating system is 32 or 64 bits. I assume comments are embedded in the Vegas project file, so it’s odd that they aren’t consistently displayed.

[Jerry Smith]

Thanks John. I changed all my After Effects renderings to AVI, substituted them in Vegas and the full project rendered without error in about an hour. Great!

Presumably, something about the stress of a large project (e.g. on memory) combined with decoding the highly compressed WMVs and rendering out to MPEG-2 caused my crashes. In smaller pieces, Vegas could handle WMV After Effects content, but in the full project it couldn’t. Perhaps more memory could fix this without incurring the disk space cost of rendering effects as AVIs. I could tinker with the AVI effects some (they are rendering as 720p HD), but they will still be much larger than my WMV versions. Do you have any experience with Vega 8.1 running with 8MB or more of RAM on 64 bit Windows?

If not, thanks anyway. Your advice was great!

[Jerry Smith]

I wondered about corrupt content, but doubt it’s my problem. My crash was always early in the render, but not at a specific spot. Also, when I broke up the project into three pieces, I left all the content in place. It rendered fine then.

I’m not sure what you mean by pre-rendered files. I’d say my After Effects content is effectly pre-rendered, but it should just look like another wmv or mov.

I’m rendering to MPEG 2 Widescreen and Dolby Digital audio using default templates that work with DVD Architect without re-compression.

[Jerry Smith]

I agree that PMB is no great tool, but it does a few things I like:

– Organizes acquired clips in folders by date acquired (although I’d prefer date taken).
– It automates making a backup AVCHD DVD. Just highlight the clips, click the DVD button and do a few more clicks. The resulting DVD is a lossless copy of the original footage, with one .m2ts file containing all clips.
– It also automates making a standard DVD (MPEG) for sharing with others.

I use Adobe Photoshop Elemenets Organizer for managing still pictures and wish it could take on these videos, but it’s not AVCHD compatible (yet).

[Jerry Smith]

I used the Sony Picture Motion Browser to acquire the .mts files off my CX12. Once on the PC, they were changed to .m2ts. It also created .modd files in the same folder. I don’t know what these do. The PMB app will make an AVCHD DVD from selected clips, and it made the combined .m2ts file I mentioned.

The 1440×1080 resolution I mentioned came from the file properties displayed in the PMB app. I used one off top video quality because I was shooting basketball games, and wanted to fit a full game on a single AVCHD DVD.

I’m glad to hear you are using the CX12 with no issues!

[Jerry Smith]

There are some shortcomings in my workaround:

– If I re-render my large AVCHD DVD file, it can take up to two hours (if I’m able to snip out the offending portion).
– If I mark clips around the problem section, I have to cancel building audio peaks, and so don’t have audio information displayed. I hope it comes back when the clip is used, but am not sure.

This seems to be a problem with Vegas itself, although something in this clip is a contributing factor. I hope Sony is working hard to make sure their camcorder files are 100% compatible with their editing software.

[Jerry Smith]

Thanks for your advice, Joe!

[Jerry Smith]

I think I could select a portion of the large file just after the clip and render it any way that I like. That would involve loading the file, hitting a hang, noting the playback position, killing the process, starting over and rendering file information from just after the hang point.

Also, I could:

– Load the file in Vegas
– Define clips (my preferred way of identifying best content)
– Note when the trimmer window hangs (it does with this file)
– Kill Vegas and resume defining clips just past the hang point

I can understand Vegas having some problems with cross brand AVCHD, but don’t think there should be in-brand (Sony camcorder) problems. Maybe (I hope), this particular clip is unusual and the problem I’m having won’t be common.