Vegas 8 crashes when rendering image sequences

Ducatimark

Well-known member
I have a project that is a combination of TGA and Tiff image sequences, and a few 720p clips of Raylight AVI. Audio is a stereo track of WAV files and a Cinescore track. My computer is a Quad core, 4 gig ram, Quadro 1500FX machine on XP Professional, Vegas 8 Pro vers. 8b., QT vers. 7.4.1

Some parts of the project include TGA / Tiff sequences composited over Tiff stills with a maximum of three tracks composited. The TGA sequeces are from Boris Red 4.2 and the Tiff's from Maya 2008.

My problem is that on render (WMV 720P, DVD widescreen 24p, QT, AVI, etc) it crashes at random points in the under three minute project. However, when I play the project in the video preview it plays with no problem. Also, I tried rendering the individual tracks and each will render on its own. I also tried deleting the sound and it still crashes when the three video tracks are rendered together.

I have read through the Vegas manual regarding still images, but can find no reference to issues related to rendering problems.

I get no error message, so I can't post that. I just simply stops rendering and I have to use ctrl-alt-del and stop Vegas.

Any ideas of potential issues? I've tried freeing all the memory possible (per other threads) and making sure Boris Red is not used for any titling within Vegas. This is the second time it has happened on this project and I've had to go back and reconstruct my timeline and try a multitude of fixes. After five lost days of work, I'm about done dealing with it.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Mark Gervasoni
Richmond, VA
 
what are the tga / tiff file sizes? Vegas begins to choke on anything over 2k. I seem more issues with large tga than png but nonetheless, it's never been "officially" recommended that you use image files larger than 2k

cheno
 
I just took your suggestion and went through it carefully. Am rendering now without sound to see what I get. Didn't see any obvious flaws, but I appreciate the suggestion.

I'm watching as it renders and it is just crawing at the moment. Let's see what I get!

Thanks again,

Mark
 
I talked to Sony Tech support and was told to try upping the dynamic RAM preview from 128 to 511 MB. I thought this was only for preview, but Nate at Tech Support said it also affects rendering as well. He also had me reduce rendering threads to three to leave some processing power for other Windows needs.

I tried a render and it worked. However, Nate also told me that Vegas has its limitations in rendering large still images (as I had already run into that also) because it constantly has to re-size a pic to the rendering resolution. He thought there may be a problem trying to composite three Still HD images on top of each other as well. I thought it would be the same as having three tracks of video, but apparently not. Anyway, for anyone trying to composite 3d images using Vegas, best to do the bulk of it in an outside compositor like AE or Boris FX and then bring in a single still image track to Vegas.

Thanks Nate at Sony Support! BtW, if you own a professional product (Vegas 8 Pro, Cinescore, SoundForge 9, or DVD Architect you get 60 days of support for each program and support is based on when you call to register for the support, not when you bought the product. So I have all those products and have support for 60 days x 4 based on the dates of support registration for each one. That should have me covered for any problems in the next year or so. See the Sony Creative site for more info.

Mark
 
Well, it worked once (kind of like feeling better before you go to the doctor) and wouldn't render again, even with the same settings.

I composited all the scenes individually in Boris Red this morning and now it works flawlessly. Don't know why I was trying so hard to use Vegas to composite in. Anyway, I rendered out the composites to QT files and it looks great.
 
I had a problem with large tiffs as well. I converted them to 24-bit pngs to get around it.

I regularly use a large 20-meg jpeg "blue marble" map from NASA in my productions (animated crop-and-pan to zoom into map), and had to convert that down from the 40-meg original to get it to stop choking. Works fine now though!
 
Tried many times to use Vegas to work with still sequences with alpha exported from carrara, but it always crashes when the project gets slightly complex. Ended up converting the still sequences to video using lagarith codec and it works fine with that. Pity Vegas doesn't seem to support stills very well though.
 
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