[Joe Mantaratz]

Could you better define what you mean by black background? If you are using PAN/CROP and want to maintain the aspect ratio (it fills the screen) then make sure you have that button selected. If you are unsure as to which one that is just pass you mouse over the button selection and it will tell you which one is which. If this is not what you are having problems with please ask again.
John

[Joe Mantaratz]

Like I had said before you just never know what will fix the problem and freeing up resources is the biggest. That being said let me address the BSOD issue. It is commonly thought that the restart on failure option will avoid that window, actually it does not. Why would you want a reboot to never be able to see the fault anyway? This was microsoft’s way of dealing with a buggy program. Out of sigt out of mind thing. Otherwise it makes little sense.

OK here is it directly from Microsoft concerning Page File and BSOD
Most crashes are due to memory allocation errors and then drivers conflicts. In that order most of the time.
Here’s a good link to better explain it, not from Micorsoft.

https://www.datarecovery.com.sg/data_recovery/hard_disk_symptons_blue_screen.htm

Another workaround may be necessary if the minimum size of the paging file is set to a value less than the amount of physical memory. Windows requires a paging file on the system drive large enough to hold all of physical memory, plus 1 megabyte (MB), to write debugging information. You can modify the PagingFiles value of the original installation so that the dump file can be created by the STOP error message. Enough free disk space must be available on the system drive for the paging file.

All this being said without being there with you it is tough to diagnose. But a good understanding of the basic can perhaps help you find a solution that works.

[Joe Mantaratz]

Thank much for passing this along. You just never know when things like this will crop up. There are just too many variables in hardware and software to ever be bug free. But we can try. Thanks again for this one. I’ll file it away for sure.
Joe

[Joe Mantaratz]

The more I have read your problem the more I am convinced you do indeed have an overheat condition. You mentioned it crashed after only creating a 96mb file. Please define crash. Do you get the BLUE SCREEN? Does it just reboot or crash out of the program? I need some more details to define the possible source. The Blue SCREEN OF DEATH (BSOD) will usually show the module or driver that caused the fault. It is not that accurate but a good starting point. Windows records EVENT logs where you can see more detailed what might have caused the crash. These are more advanced trouble shooting techniques so please perform the prior post checks and pass on the details.

You mentioned that you only have 30 minutes of footage but it took a huge amount of time. Let me address that point for a moment.
I have rendered footage mixed with all kinds of effects stills etc and the total length of it was less than 10 minutes. Rendered to an AVI it was almost 2 GIGS…to Quicktime at 3MBPS….3 GIGS. Hi Res stills will really add to render time. The reason I mentioned that here is if you are rendering to an external or internal drive and the rendered file approaches 4 gigs it will not fit on a FAT32 system formatted drive only an NTFS. FAT32 has a file size limitation to around 4 gigs as I recall. It wont crash the computer but it might crash the program.
This just happened to me recently when a client gave me their hard drive and I could not copy their 7.5gig file to my external. It kept telling me I did not have sufficient disc space. Made me crazy as this was a brand new drive. Who would have thought that they were still formatting drives this way. Took a while for the light to go on for this one.

Here is it more plainly stated
Single-user systems with limited hard disk space will probably use NTFS compression successfully. The slowest link in a computer is not the CPU but the speed of the hard drive, so NTFS compression allows the limited, slow storage space to be better used, in terms of both space and (often) speed.

I really hope you find the answer and get back to us. We all have the brick wall to climb at some point and it sure helps to get lent a hand. Best of everything. Any questions or clarity please ask.
Joe

[Joe Mantaratz]

I wanted to wait before I added my two cents, you never know what will work or what can be the cause. I’ve worked on computers for years since DOS was the name of the game. Lets go back to system basics and the details you have stated this far.

The big point I see is that you were able to render it fully at home but it took 19 hours.

I have had similar problems using different machines over the course of the years. The number one culprit was an over temp or an over temp limit value set in the bios for the CPU. To protect the CPU it will crash the computer but prior to reaching that point it will hang or produce errant results. Before anything further please boot up and get into your BIOS and check what your TEMP readings are for your CPU. The temps you are reading here are idle and should be well below the threshold. Also make sure you are not overclocking your CPU as this adds great instability and a huge amount of heat. These CPU’S will burn out in less than 30 seconds without proper cooling. Your CPU temp on a quad core should be well below the max limits. There is free CPU monitoring software out there that will give you live temps of everything from Mother board temps, graphic cards, to Hard drive temps. Few people ever think about the drives being a problem but they can be and often are. Do the basics and check those temps at both idle and processing. Render times can indeed take a very long time depending on the system config. For example..

1.Are you using separate drives for rendering? Is there sufficient space? Do not forget that Vegas uses a default for the Temp folder. So that you might have sufficient room on the destination drive but not enough on the primary. Also please allow at least 10 gigs of space on any drive you are using to render as windows does not accurately report the remaining disk space. For example it does not redeem anything in the trash until you empty the recycle bin.

2.Make sure you are allowing windows to handle your PF memory allocation size. Vegas only recognizes 2 gigs as I recall so if you don’t allow windows to handle this it will cause a crash every time under heavy processing.

3.Make a clean boot setup so that there is nothing running in the background. No virus, spyware, internet, etc. Anything that auto does anything is not good. NO SCREEN saver.

4.Power management settings should all be turned off. The last thing you want in a long render is for the screen to turn off or the hard drives to power down. Basically you do not want any CPU cycles to be interrupted by any other programs. My HP printer periodically checks the for ink levels and prompts me. Not good. Turn off windows update and anything else that automatically looks for the internet. It will still do it regardless of whether or not you disconnect the internet source so you have two choice, turn it off in the preferences for each software or create a clean boot with no services running. If you don’t know how to do that just ask. I’ve had renders and other operations ruined because of these annoyances. Again simple solutions first.

5.Try using a lower bit rate for rendering. I have one machine that bogs down if I use 32 floating point. Not all systems can fully use the feature…yes even a quad running Vista.

6.Turn off Preview render option of course if you using that feature and also minimize the window. Anything you do to free up resources will speed things up and cool things down.

ok I’m sorry if all this seemed rudimentary and for being long winded. I’m fairly well versed and still make basic errors like these. I hope this helps in some way. You need to diagnose the health of your system. Defrag your drives and perform a virus and spyware check. You never know. The systems I use to work with never see the internet….

[Joe Mantaratz]

I personally do pretty much what you are asking. I have found that installing the software on one drive, rendering to another and using the source material from yet another drive to be advantageous. Firewire external drives are much faster than are USB 2 drives. The thing to remember is all drives have moving parts with discs that rotate and heads that have to locate files. So it is not hard to see how relieving some of that movement by using more drives will speed things up a bit. Hope this helps..
Joe

[Joe Mantaratz]

I didn’t see you had posted an addition to the first question. The basic answer is no you can’t. Architect does not afford that option. All of your video clips should be tailored outside and imported back in with the exact length you desire. In this way you keep it looking as you would like it to appear. Architect just assembles all the pieces and encodes it to the disc. It is not a NLE and is not capable of doing much of anything in that area. Hope this helps…

[Joe Mantaratz]

Hi,
I do exactly the same thing you are talking about. I create four backups on my separate hard drives so that I do not have to go back and find all the files again. Vegas will not search all your folders for files unless it sees those files in the same folder. This is why the COPY MEDIA function creates all the files in the same area. It would be great to be able to multiple save your project to preselected destinations and have all the folders and media follow.
My work around for this is not the best but it works for me and has saved me on many occasions.

First I put all my media in the same folder then subdivide it further. For example.

…Flight Survey…
…Aerial Pics
…Aerial Clips
…Audio
…Aircraft Clips

Then I copy the folder to all the drives. When I save the project I make sure that I choose SAVE AS and do that for all my drive backups. Then when I open them elsewhere I do not have to find the locations of the files. There might be better ways to do this but it is the only solution I have found that works all the time. It is a safer way work. The only caveat it when you take your work elsewhere and save it you might want to add the date to the end of your saved name so you know what is the latest. I’ve not done this and after connecting my hard drive forgotten which file I was working with. It is easy to do with all the same name. Hope this helps, there might be software available for this but I am not aware of it or how to do it in Vegas.

[Joe Mantaratz]

OK so now I understand that it does not work after you have burned it to DVD while it does operate correctly in preview window.

The only experience I have had close to this recently was during the burning process the data corrupted only for certain portions on the DVD. I had burned 25 DVD’S and out of those 8 did not play or got to a point where it just hung. Going back and choosing a slower burning rate helped. Sometimes faster is not better. If you look at the the properties of the DVD drive it will tell you that at faster speeds you may have errors. Other than that I can’t point to any reason for your situation. Try burning one disk at the slower speed and try again.

Question…Does the burned DVD play properly on the computer?

[Joe Mantaratz]

Thanks for the replies. Let me clarify a little bit more what I have found in my research in direct contact with Vegas in the last year regarding memory allocation. They are aware that a major problem with the software is the HIGH PF usage and memory allocation faults. Where as the program attempts to write to a protected area and windows will crash the program. From what I have read Vegas has a limit on ram usage to only recognize 2 gigs and it also does not utilize more than a dual core. I can’t point to where I read this info but it was not from Sony. My inquiries over the last year put me in contact with a developer and it was this person who recognized the memory limitations.

That being said the masking issue happens without any effects added the moment the masking is completed. I’m talking about just one track and one media clip. I will have to frame by frame advance for it to show properly. This is a huge obstacle as you can imagine. I really don’t recall this being a problem in the prior versions. Vegas 5 never crashed but 8.0a did with regularity. The latest update hasn’t so perhaps some of the issues have been resolved. The preview window will show the … as it is trying to pre render the clip and with the task manager open the CPU usage spikes to almost 100. There are no other programs running, no virus, or spyware or internet connection open at the time. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance