Vegas giving me a Red Screen of Death and locking up

Matt Grunau

Matt Grunau

Adobe Demigod
I have been using vegas for years. I've never had a problem, until the project I am working now.

As I scrub through the timeline eventually the preview window will go red and the program freezes and then shuts down. Sometimes it doesn't even go that far, it simple shuts off like I this F4 or something.


It is a simple project, consisting primarily of still photos and a little video. There is one track for a VO, and two for music. At this point since we are still in the editing stage, there are spaces in between many of the pics. Iv'e tried setting the program file's compatability to windows 2000 and windows NT4.

Nothing works, I've done larger projects than this many times. I would really rather not reinstall, but I will if I have to.

I am running version 6.0d
2 gigs of ram
2250 gig WD hard drives in raid to give me 500 megs
Amd Dual core 2.2's
Asus motherboard, with on board sound (just for reference)

Anyone with any ideas, please lend me a hand.
 
You see red sometimes when the media's offline or if Vegas can't read a frame, for whatever reason.

Which version of Vegas?

What kind of video?

What kind of effects are you adding?
 
How big are your pictures? It floats around that Vegas seems to have problems with larger jpegs, and if you have a lot on the timeline that might be your problem...
 
David Jimerson said:
You see red sometimes when the media's offline or if Vegas can't read a frame, for whatever reason.

Which version of Vegas?

What kind of video?

What kind of effects are you adding?
Click to expand...


6.0d

Quicktime and still frames

No effects on audio or video




William, some of the pictures are indeed larger than NTSC, so Vegas scales them accordingly. And there are quite a few. a couple of dozen at least. The project calls for hundreds of pics, of all varieties; .jpg, CMYK .tifs, .gifs, even a .psd file.

The thought of making an Action in Photoshop had come to mind, since i believed it would be faster to use pics of either the width or height to be the right frame size. But there are so many, some undersized, some oversized, some in grayscale, that even a couple of actions wont work. I'de have to make at least three or four and then go into the pics folder and seperate them by eye into where they should go before I could run the Action. And like I said, there are hundreds of pics.

Why the client simply couldn't provide me with what I asked for at the very beginning of the job is beyond me.
 
I get this problem sometimes with really large photos (ie: 30 meg satellite scans). I scale large photos in photoshop, re-import them, and the problem goes away.
 
Do you have Cineform anything on your computer? I only had this happen when Vegas was trying to playback Cineform files that it didn't have the codec to. This was in Vegas 8 though.

Never seen this in earlier versions of Vegas though.

cheno
 
I've never throw this many incorrectly sized pictures at it before. I wouldn't have thought that would make a difference. Going through and correcting by hand is going to be a rough ordeal, there are 197 photos.

I guess after a point, Vegas gets sick of resizing and just stops.
 
I've used a thumbnail creator in the past that just goes to work on a directory of photos, and resizes them all to a standardized maximum size. Maybe you could try that. Since it's a batch process, you don't have to babysit it.
 
General rule of thumb for me is to keep them just under 2K. Vegas will handle with no problem then. Sometimes larger will run but yes, when you get a ton on the timeline, Vegas chokes pretty badly. Can't say many other NLE's don't have the same issue though.

cheno
 
You guys were spot on.

I changed the size of them as close to NTSC as I could, and it now is working great.




THanks all.
 
Hi, the red screen as David says is when vegas cant id a frame or even when there are bad frames in the video (even encrypted frames) they will appear red not only in your preview screen but on the timeline itself. The resizing of your pics under 2048 across is the best option. I know you cant do this manually to all the pics. Just go to the photoshop forum and ask the guys there how to program a macro in photoshop. Ive seen it done where it will open each pic in a folder one by one and resize or color correct etc and then save to a new folder. Basically you can get PS to do the job repetitively over a set of pics.
 
I run 8 b and usually use cineform to capture m2t to avi 1080i then edit as progressive which gives extremely good results, rendering to mpeg4. I just tried capturing as cineform mov. and it worked very well for some small clips, actually slightly better when rendered to mpeg4, however when I tried a large file the same way, it worked only until I saved it and then opened it again, thats when V8 locked up, gave me red frames, had to keep shutting down, tried to re-install, didn't work, as soon as I converted the m2t back to avi everything is fine. any ideas?
 
In fact if you dont mind the disk space beng hogged i would suggest taking all your rush footage and extracting the bits you will use in your final cut and converting them first off into 1080p Uncompressed AVI.
Because for some strange reason uncompressed avi seems to run smoother and reliably than m2t. Secondly if your going to do any serious masking / beziers ala rotoscoping / greenscreen compositing / color correction then its better to work with uncompressed avi's. Then finally render out to whatever format you want. Hope this helps.
 
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