Corrupt renders from Vegas Pro 8
 

I've been fooling around with Vegas Pro 8 for a few days now (demo version). I finally tried a render of a short video clip with some effects (black and white, some contrast adjustment and the odd transition) and found that there is something very wrong. There are purple lines through the video and very blocky white artifacts happening on highlights in the video making the render useless. My source video is HDV from an XHA1 at 60i captured in Vegas 7.0d and brought into 8 as it's native m2t format. Within Vegas 8 the video looks right in the preview window but the resulting AVI 720-30p render is garbage.

Is this because it is the demo version instead of the full version?

I have attached a screen grab of the rendered video, has anyone else seen this happen in their renders with the full version of Pro 8? I wanted to test it out for a bit to see if I wanted to upgrade but I will not if this is a common problem/bug.

I am having all sorts of problems with 8

Try the Dynamic RAM preview at 0MB and reduce the rendering threads to 1. And/Or, render in HDV MPEG-2 instead of the Cineform VFW .avi

Jack, Setting my dynamic ram preview to 0 did not solve the problem, however rendering out as a MPEG2 file did generate a proper render, no purple lines or artifacts to be seen so I thank you for that suggestion.

Vegas 7 would have no issues with my original render options and would create an avi just fine, so I have to consider that Vegas Pro 8 has a pretty major bug rendering out AVI's right now. I'm sure they will get it fixed up in an update but would appreciate any other advice as to why an AVI will not render properly from 8 currently.

When you say it Vegas 9 won't render out an avi, do you understand that "avi" is just a generic name for many different codecs that fall under the "avi" umbrella. It IS significant to know which avi codec you're trying to render to. Your post implies that the specific codec is the Cineform codec. Be advised that there IS a bug in the way Vegas 8 accesses the appropriate cineform codec. IF this is your problem, the workaround is to go into your Vegas 8 folder and disable the CFHD.dll file. Disable it by renaming, moving or deleting it. I would recommend against deleting it, in case you want to restore the configuration in the future. This fix works only if you have a valid license for Cineform somewhere else on your machine.

Bill, sounds like this may be the fix, and sorry...your right I did not specify that it was a cineform AVI I was rendering to.

So if I follow your advice I can work the logic out on this as follows.....

I have Vegas 7.0d that has it's own CFHD.dll file as the license for Cineform renders from that version...and now with Vegas 8 I assume that it also creates it's own CFHD.dll file as it's license and the two 7/8 don't play nice together? Just wondering if my logic is straight on this. Either way I will try it out and see what occurs.

Thanks for everyones help on this.

EDIT----
Hmmm...just checking through the Vegas 7 and 8 folders. There is a CFHD.dll in 8's folder but I do not see one in Vegas 7's so mabey this is not the fix I am looking for AND my logic is flawed....still going to try it however.

Bill,

The CFHD.dll tweek did the trick. Renamed the extension in the Vegas 8 folder and rendered out as a cineform AVI with perfect results.

I appreciate your advice, it was bang on!

Now I just wonder if my logic was sound.

Thanks again!!

EDIT - This is now just for information for the curious since the problem has been resolved. But I'll give myself the booby prize for being on the right track, plus it took a while to type!.

I know this wont help per se but it may give someone else a lead.

Looking at the image very closely, you have pink and green lines. The green are hard to see and make those parts look grey.

Pink and green are the extremes in the chroma part of the image. When both Cr and Cb are at their maximum, you get pink, when they are at their minimum, you get green. The most common reason to get both at max or min is because the encoder hasn't actually created any chroma information. So what you have is a luma image (the barn, that looks horribly similar to mine!) with unencode chroma.

The blocks on the diagonals of the tin roof look like incorrectly encoded DCT blocks for the luma. Based on my experience troubleshooing our own encoder, I'd say that the encoder you are using is making mistakes when there is a certain level of contrast in a given block (16 x 8 pixels).

Your image sample is 1920 x 1080 and your target format is 720p. I assume that the screen grab has been scaled up from 1280 x 720. This makes the width of the chroma bands (4 pixels) and the size of the luma blocks (16 x 8) more meaningful.

For the luma to be wrong in many parts and for the chroma to be hopelessly wrong suggests to me that either the decoder (required to do the editing) or the encoder are assuming the video is in a format different to what it really is. This might be a very slight difference in the header that tells the decoder/encoder to treat the data incorrectly. I don't think it can be completely off target, though, otherwise you'd probably get just complete random junk or an error.

I want to add something here RE: V8 crashing, My problem has been when I use Cineform clips (avi) filmscan1 and put them on my timeline, I can save them to a veg. file if I don't render out. I renamed the cfhd.dll. thought it helped until last night. everything was OK until I rendered to a wmv HD file. I did multiple renders on this one veg. file. mpeg2 ntsc was ok, but after the wmv render same problem again, I could get the veg. file to open to 22% then crash, it hangs then all the files open, I click the pop up saying there is problem, crash. Using m2t clips are no problem at all. I tried to get V8 to crash, wouldn't. I can render them into anything and there is no problem. I can go back and put the cineform avi clips back on my timeline, re-do everything and that works, for a while. then crashes again. the computer I am on is a new clean install xp sp2 just for V8, so all programs are newly installed including NEO HDV. are my issues close to anyone else's issues? V7 no issues what so ever. To me, its between V8 and cineform.

Hugh,

So far for what I have been doing things seem relatively fine after renaming the CFHD.dll I've been working with .m2t files and renders are good and no crashes....however....last night I rendered out a 5 min project from .m2t files and a couple of .mov files (photojpeg). The render worked and the render looks fine. While it was rendering I left the computer to do it's thing and when I came back vegas 8 had crashed. I can't say when or why but the resulting render was complete and proper so I have to assume it was at the 100% mark.

I will keep my eyes open for issues with cineform avi's and mixed content files rendering out. There's some issues here definately. Either way I bought the upgrade and expect further updates will sort everything out.

I am going back to the basics, I had V7 with cineform NEO HDV, never a problem, rendering, saving, etc, no problem, now I have V8 upgrade, with cineform NEO HDV, crashes, can't save cineform avi clips as a veg. file, now, I may not be too smart, but, I'm not dumb, definitely a conflict. I just captured some clips from my V1 as m2t, they save fine, so I am going to say its a V8, cineform thing.

upgrade you're cineform to the latest version 3.1

I have latest cineform, 3.3.0, I have been opening and closing files, rendering 6 test files in V7 tonight, never had any hint of trouble, I think V8 was changed quite a bit from V7 and there are issues depending on computer, ram may be a factor