[Kent Clark]

Thanks for taking the time to give such detailed explanations. My remark about Pro 8 was me thinking that HD wasn’t available in that version, but up to now I’ve never used HD so my impression appears to be wrong. I’m not at my editing desk right now, I’ll have to look more carefully once I have a chance. Again, thank you for helping me out.

[Kent Clark]

Thanks for the help Mike, I never knew about that import procedure. Your comment about image size was one thing I was wondering about. The camera is a Canon 30D which produces an image 3504 x 2336 pixels. With Pro 8 I’m not going to be doing HD rendering although this may be a reason to upgrade to Ver 10. Besides the extra load on the PC are there any other reasons why downsizing the image is preferred? I’m thinking that with the larger images I could pan/crop and introduce movement. But my PC is a quad core Intel Q6600 cpu with 4 gb ram running XP Pro 32 bit, that may not be enough to process that many images. Any reason why I couldn’t process smaller chunks of raw material and then stitch those chunks together into the final product?

[Kent Clark]

Well, the problem is solved, or I should say there never was a problem. In the DVD Architect preview mode it showed black bars at the top and bottom but when I burned the disc and played it there were no horizontal bars. I checked a standard width project in DVDA and it showed just the actual screen in preview mode. I don’t know if this is a quirk of the widescreen mode but I spent a long time trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

Thanks John for taking the time to try and help.

[Kent Clark]

Hi John, I forgot to add that I also set the project properties to NTSC DV widescreen. I thought I would get what you describe but instead I have a much smaller square of standard DV video surrounded by black and then horizontal black bars on the widescreen DV.

[Kent Clark]

It looks like there is some problem with my pc or the software on that pc. I rendered the whole project on a second computer. Right now I think I’ll reinstall Vegas and then do a test render. The only major change on this pc since the last time I used it for rendering was installing adobe photoshop CS4 and Lightroom. No hardware changes at all.

Thanks again for all of the responses and help.

[Kent Clark]

I ran it again last night after removing the sharpening FX. The color correction is on the whole video track, it was blueish and I warmed it up. That is the only FX.

All of the pictures are 2x DV resolution.

Yesterday I rendered the last five minutes of the project, no problem.

One week ago I rendered a preliminary version on another computer, dual core, it took 10 hours and it had all of the pictures and the same length. The whole thing rendered.

The strange thing is that the quad core system has been used to render about 20 projects in the last year, all of them more than an hour.

Thanks so much for the help. I’ll let you know what happens today.

[Kent Clark]

Well I just sat and watched Vegas crash again at the same place in the render, on one picture 40 seconds from the end of the project.

It got to the picture and then stopped running frames for a few seconds, then I got a Microsoft error message saying that Vegas.exe had encountered a problem and had to close.

I ran a test of this project a few days ago, with this picture included, and it rendered fine. I made a few corrections in places and now it crashes every time it gets to the picture. It is a png, nothing special about it.

[Kent Clark]

I have about 3 dozen large stills and I did a color correction and a sharpen on the whole video track. I’m rendering in VBR with your settings right now. It finishes in about 50 minutes, I hope.

Thanks as always for quick responses and help.

[Kent Clark]

Mike, once again you come through for me. I’ve had software policy so ingrained into me that I hadn’t even thought about your solution, thanks for the help.

[Kent Clark]

Bob, you’re right about not needing Vegas on site. I was a little too brief. I’m going to be at my inlaws house and right now I need to have the project finished that weekend for my father-in-law to mail out. Ideally I’d have a laptop with Vegas, record, assemble and finish it that weekend.

Since I won’t have Vegas available that weekend I’m wondering about other options that would allow me to finish this. I just realized my inlaws have windows vista pcs, I could use windows movie maker except I don’t think they have firewire and my camcorder needs that for downloading.