Rendering in Sony Vegas

M

MichaelRizzo

Member
Just made the transition to an HMC150 based on several factors, fantastic information from this forum being one of them.

If anyone has any idea how to help me with my issue, I'd greatly appreciate it:

Just picked up the 150 to shoot a series of 30 second spots for broadcast.

We shot the material in PH mode at 1080 and proceeded to take it into Vegas 8.0c, the AVC footage was hellish for the processor but we were able to work with it with reasonable success, the edit is rock solid and ready to be rendered out.

The cable network wants it as a 1920x1080 quicktime .mov file.

This is the first finished project we've rendered from the HMC150 and Vegas crashes EVERY single time I try to do an HD render, which I presume is the result of trying to transcode the huge AVC files to another complex codec, my CPU is pegged at 100% until it eventually crashes, 60-80% through the rendering job.

My only constraints are that I WANT (realizing this may be unrealistic) to get a 1920x1080 .mov on the backend, that looks good. Otherwise I don't care how I get to it, although the most efficient path would be appreciated.

Right now I'm rendering from native AVCHD files to Quicktime with Mpeg-4 compression, @ 1920x1080 with the quality set at 50% and the bitrate at the Vegas standard 4 megs/s. This crashes every time at 1080p.

Am I doing something wrong, per se, or is this just the nature of the beast? My plan is to get a working mpeg render and just keep bumping up the quality until I get it as high as I can, but right now I can't get ANYTHING to complete at 1080.

-I have 2 quad core desktops, would network rendering help me complete this job?

-Is there another codec that might work? Again, I'm not picky, I just need a 1920x1080 mov on the backend. Worst case scenario I'm going to render a 720p version and take that back into Vegas and re-render at 1080.

-Should I give up and transcode the source files then tell Vegas to use those instead?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Michael:

I have been shooting and editing projects from the HMC-150 using Vegas 8.0c since October 2008. Although, I have not rendered to Quicktime, I have not had any problems at all.

On a Q6600 or better machine, you should be getting pretty good playback from the timeline and renders at 1/2 to 1/3 realtime, unless there are lots of effects. If things are extremely slow and glitchy, I think there are computer issues.

The native HMC-150 files can/will work for your render when you get it sorted out.

Go to:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowTopics.asp?ForumID=4

The Vegas Pro forum can answer your question for sure.
 
What is your frame rate? 24p in Vegas 8.0c can be problematic. I have clips that just lock up Vegas. Most work well, but not all.

I have gone to transcoding if I will do more than just simple cuts. I used the panasonic DVCProHD transcoder (free) then used raylight ($$$) to edit in Vegas. Now I use cineform neo.

You could also use Avanti to transcode to avid DNxHD (Free). This is a reasonable option too.
 
Maybe this isn't a help (I'm not a Vegas guy), but my instinct would be to try transcoding to other formats (avi, maybe a PNG sequence + audio file if you're desperate) and re-encoding it to Quicktime using Quicktime Pro or any other software you might have.
 
I've done any number of these. The only time I had Vegas 8.0c crash repeatedly was with a job that had a ton of filters and other things going on. Render the file out to either uncompressed AVI or some other clean AVI format. Once you have that, pull that back into Vegas and cut your .mov file. Vegas does quicktime pretty well, but coming from highly compressed sources it can choke.

Did the network say what kind of quicktime file they wanted? There's a lot that can be put in a .mov file.

-P

MichaelRizzo said:
Just made the transition to an HMC150 based on several factors, fantastic information from this forum being one of them.

If anyone has any idea how to help me with my issue, I'd greatly appreciate it:

Just picked up the 150 to shoot a series of 30 second spots for broadcast.

We shot the material in PH mode at 1080 and proceeded to take it into Vegas 8.0c, the AVC footage was hellish for the processor but we were able to work with it with reasonable success, the edit is rock solid and ready to be rendered out.

The cable network wants it as a 1920x1080 quicktime .mov file.

This is the first finished project we've rendered from the HMC150 and Vegas crashes EVERY single time I try to do an HD render, which I presume is the result of trying to transcode the huge AVC files to another complex codec, my CPU is pegged at 100% until it eventually crashes, 60-80% through the rendering job.

My only constraints are that I WANT (realizing this may be unrealistic) to get a 1920x1080 .mov on the backend, that looks good. Otherwise I don't care how I get to it, although the most efficient path would be appreciated.

Right now I'm rendering from native AVCHD files to Quicktime with Mpeg-4 compression, @ 1920x1080 with the quality set at 50% and the bitrate at the Vegas standard 4 megs/s. This crashes every time at 1080p.

Am I doing something wrong, per se, or is this just the nature of the beast? My plan is to get a working mpeg render and just keep bumping up the quality until I get it as high as I can, but right now I can't get ANYTHING to complete at 1080.

-I have 2 quad core desktops, would network rendering help me complete this job?

-Is there another codec that might work? Again, I'm not picky, I just need a 1920x1080 mov on the backend. Worst case scenario I'm going to render a 720p version and take that back into Vegas and re-render at 1080.

-Should I give up and transcode the source files then tell Vegas to use those instead?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
 
An update:

I have no idea what the deal is, but rendering from Vegas 9.0 seemed to solve the problem.

I wouldn't call it elaborate, but there are a lot of effects layers, I've got 25 tracks on the timeline, lots of video on top of video and a lot of transitions. That may be what caused 8.0c to freak out.

The source files are 1080/60i PH mode from the HMC-150, editting gives me a decent framerate but it drops as low as 6 fps when there's a lot on screen.

I wouldn't compress under other circumstances, but if I can get this 30 second spot down to 300 megs I can just upload it to an ftp and let them download it, it's that or overnighting them a physical copy of an uncompressed version, and I'm happy with compression if it looks good.

The thing being that up until this point I couldn't even render uncompressed! That was my first instinct once things weren't working properly, render to unconstrained .AVI and then re-render, which was one of my backup plans that I've seemed to bypass.

But I digress:

I have a Vista installation that's JUST for Vegas 8.0c and assorted pro software. After five hours of changing settings around trying to get SOMETHING to render properly (I DID manage to get a 720p render, but it wasn't fantastic looking) I gave up on 1080p, and loaded Vegas 9.0 on my Windows 7 installation.

This was a game changer.

64-Bit Vegas 9.0 did it's thing no problem. spat out an awesome looking Mpeg after 14 minutes. I've got to make some changes, but the important part is that I CAN render.

Thanks for the input, everyone.
 
This post in the Sony support forum gives a work around for rendering native AVCHD in 8.0c. It is not for everyone, and not for the meek at heart, as it involves a "patch" to the vegas80.exe file. You are changing the flag which makes the app aware of and use >2GB of memory. Be sure you make a backup copy of any files you work just in case.

Now, for personal experience. On my i7 machine, I couldn't get any but the absolute simplest AVCHD raw files to render from Vegas without crashing. Anything with more than two minutes and one cut would crash. No way to do even a crossfade on two short clips.
After I completed this change, I rendered a 1 hour 20 minute video last evening with NO problems.

My guess is that this would also be of no help if you have 2Gb of RAM or less.

So far no ill effects have been reported from this "unauthorized" fix, and in my own case has greatly improved my AVCHD and Vegas experiences.
 
HighDriver said:
This post in the Sony support forum gives a work around for rendering native AVCHD in 8.0c. It is not for everyone, and not for the meek at heart, as it involves a "patch" to the vegas80.exe file. You are changing the flag which makes the app aware of and use >2GB of memory. Be sure you make a backup copy of any files you work just in case.

Now, for personal experience. On my i7 machine, I couldn't get any but the absolute simplest AVCHD raw files to render from Vegas without crashing. Anything with more than two minutes and one cut would crash. No way to do even a crossfade on two short clips.
After I completed this change, I rendered a 1 hour 20 minute video last evening with NO problems.

My guess is that this would also be of no help if you have 2Gb of RAM or less.

So far no ill effects have been reported from this "unauthorized" fix, and in my own case has greatly improved my AVCHD and Vegas experiences.
Click to expand...

[My machine - XPPro32, Q9650, 2 GB RAM, Asus P5k MB, Vegas Pro 8.0c]

There are obviously lots of variations in computers hardware and software configurations. Some people certainly have problems.

But there are lots of folks running 8.0c editing native AVCHD off the HMC-150 natively with no problems at all. I can even edit long projects with both XH-A1 & HMC-150 footage on the same timeline without a hickup.

I will be glad when later Vegas versions come out that will improve AVCHD handling. The current consensus on the Sonycreativesoftware forum is that Vegas 9 is at best the same or maybe even worse than 8.0c at handling AVCHD. Vegas 9 also eliminated some AVCHD support like removing support for the Cineform intermediate codec. Playback from the Vegas 9 timeline is also reported to currently have a bug that causes major pause/stutters. Oh well, 9.0a will be out in a few months.
 
This all just makes me wonder what the disparity is between guys like myself and HighDriver having tons of slowdown and guys like Jeff who are running smooth with nothing but Vegas alone!

There has to be something, some software disparity, between those of us running smooth and those of us having trouble.

I mean, could it be the number of tracks I'm working with? I've got tons of transitions and such, maybe that's my problem.

I'll have to try rendering a dry cut with just shots with transitions, and see how that goes.
 
I have purchased 9 and downloaded it, but haven't taken time yet to install it. It seems from posts in the Sony forums, 8.0c is better at editing and 9.0 is better at rendering. I agree with MichealRizzo, that it is quite puzzling that some machines work fine and others do not. I'm just very glad that the "fix" is allowing me to work and render the natvie 150 files.
 
I have been testing 8 32bit and 9 in 32 and 64bit versions. I have no problem editing at all. Vs 9 32bit is smoother and the 64bit version is almost seemless. However the bad news is non of your plugins will work in the 64bit version...NO magic bullet works! However being the computer biz.. I have a VERY powerful computer.
 
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