Things that break Sony Vegas 8
 

Hi all,

I've been having a hair pulling time trying to render since switching from 8.0 to 8.0a then 8.0b. Vegas would inexplicably close itself in the middle of editing or render would start but hang in the middle. I'm looking to compile a list of things that make it break and what workarounds/fixes we've all used. Hints on what to watch out for help too.

My config: Windows XP SR2, Sony Vegas 8.0b, 2GB RAM, Intel Core Duo 2.0Ghz, editing HDV files extracted via HDVsplit/Sony Video Capture

1) Big JPEGs
Big JPEGs from DSLRs (3-5MB each) eats up RAM. Nested projects with full size pictures or having more than 10 big pictures mixed with HDV footage can cause crashes when editing pictures in the timeline. Or at times the render can be started but halts.

Workaround A: Resize photos or convert to PNG
Workaround B: At first I could solve it by changing the preview ram from 128 to 0 and render threads from 4 to 2.
Workaround C: Break out the JPEGs into their own clips and render to them separately.

2) Vegas crashes after opening a project or adding HDV footage; using lots of RAM
Vegas crashes when it gets nearer the end of a 4 minute HDV project. Effects used were 2 velocity envelopes, three clips with color correction. 3 transitions. It appears to happen near the end while Vegas creates thumbnail images for the video timeline.

It appears that physical RAM spikes to 1-1.2GB used out of 2GB on the system. Windows Page file goes to about 2GB, around here Vegas appears to get unstable.

Workaround A: Split into smaller vegas files and render clips separately; then get the rendered clips together in a new project.
Workaround B: Kill all other applications; hope its enough free RAM you don't crash.

3) Project previews but won't render
I've got all the clips put together with no effects, few or no JPEGs. I have a soundtrack and run preview. It all looks good and I choose a render option (Quality: Good).

When I choose WMV it runs for a while then stops 'Specified and invalid argument'. No other WMV render will work until I reboot.

When I choose MainConcept AVC it starts to 'rendering'. Time increments but progress meter doesn't move out of 0.

Workaround A: Find a format that works, go for highest bit rate/quality. Convert the video to target format using SUPER(C) or VirtualDub.

Mike, I sure hope Sony Vegas programming guys and gals read your post since I do all of those things really easily in Vegas 7e (on a not particularly high spec PC running XP - details in my profile if anyone needs to see.)...which no doubt makes your pain even worse (Sorry Mike!!!!) This could and should become a great "To Do" list for those Sony Vegas people.

Come on Sony! One of the reasons I held back (and I'm still holding) on getting Vegas 8 Pro was that I heard there were a LOT of bugs. I'm sure many will post good workarounds and/or other Pro 8 issues in this thread so great news that you've started it.

Not to lessen the impact of what Mike is experiencing, but I'm doing projects that use HDV, cc, etc. that are hours-long on V8 with no problem. Never a crash, never a render problem.

Are you doing your HDV caps with Vegas or possibly some other program? Many people have reported issues of this type with caps from other programs.
***edit*** I see you're using HDVSplit. Try a project with only Vegas capture and see if it works better for you. ***closedit***

I too would be pulling my hair out if I were experiencing issues #2 and 3.

JPGs - yes. Vegas has never liked megapixel jpgs going back to V4 or 5. I always work the pix in Photoshop down to no more than twice frame size (unless zooming in) and convert to png.

XP SP2, Core2 Duo 2.4GHz, 2GB ram, Vegas 8.0b

Hi Seth, funny thing, I did make a video that was almost 1 hour long with 8.0 (HDV downconverted to DV). But it was about 5 or so long clips of HDV (captured with HDVSplit to start with). Most of my newer ones are 4 minutes long but have clips from maybe 20+ different files. Next time I should watch if memory spikes with many smaller files vs large files. I'm thinking this because one of the workarounds I've tried lately is to render the subclips into longer single clips then add them back to the project. Maybe its an accident of writing to a new file (removing any bad data in the source HDV) or the number of open files (I wonder how much of each file Vegas caches).

I've got to go back and try Sony Vegas Vidcap on the same tapes/clips that caused me trouble.

Mike,

I've experienced your problems. All of them. Exactly them. I was running a quad-core (6800) machine with 4 GB of RAM and Vegas was crashing during various spots in my renders (usually while working on a nested project). My project was loaded with about a dozen nested .veg files and somewhere around 160 still images (all of which were in nestsed files).

On the other hand, I'd been using Vista 64-bit and, of course, everyone blamed it for the problems.

I partitioned my hard drive a built a dual-boot and loaded Windows XP, hoping that it would eliminate at least some of the areas. It didn't. Actually, it was worse! Vista, even though it is memory-voracious, seems to handle the allocation of memory better and would keep it running longer.

I'm back on Vista and have concluded, through much testing and trial and error, that the only way to export this is doing what you've done. I export each nested .veg file as an AVI and add the AVI to my master file.

It sure would be nice to see a response on this board from a Sony representative or at least an affiliate. I'd like to know that they are aware of these bugs, that they're working on them, and when they anticipate a solution.

wow this will be a big thread but hopefully
 

put in the hands of good, will then do good!

And I don't think we can tackle it without the other Sony plugins like SoundForge and DVDA, which one presumably would intrinsically work together with Vegas.

1) Ok, system bogs down using SoundForge 8.0d and it can take up to 30seconds for Vegas to come back up before you can use it after saving the sound file when using PAL DV material, and often crashes completely.

2)Random resets of projects settings, I have been editing PAL SD projects, and occassionally when I reload them they come back as a 720 25p project. Even though I haven't set this as a default setting in preferences.

3)When you move a file, and it says it can't find it, and you do the search, and it finds the file, it should permanently remap it's location. Because after you use the relocatted file and save your project, and then reload the project at a latter date you have to refind the file again.

4)And the same goes for files you no longer want to use, if you tell it permanently leave them offline, then don't ask me the same question every time the project is accessed

5) DVDA should be able to seemlessly do dual layer burning

6)Maybe its just me, but post editing ripples can do things you never told them to do occassionally, moving events untouched by the edit. I use Ctrl F here.

7) ProTitler is buggy as anything, occassionally it will change text colour at random, and lock the text so you can't change it again

8) I don't know if it's a problem, but more of a annoyance that you modify audio plugins at a event level, only a track level?

thats just off the top of my head..

It does appear some of my HDVsplit captured footage is responsible at least for render errors. One clip had a phantom frame at the end. Zooming in on the clip I saw a gap between that clip and the next one that wouldn't go away. After trimming 1 frame on each end of that offending frame it started to work. It's not true of all frames, could be the way it cuts m2ts.


Found another trick, when your project terminates while opening and you know which clip is taking it to the edge, minimize Vegas the next time you call it. When it reaches 100% you can maximize again, the clips will start to update thumbnails. Chances are the project is big, so go to the offending clip before the preview reaches it and delete. Then save!

Mark, User experience suggests to me that you should be using Vegas Cap app, rather than HDV Split to be ingesting your footage. A lot of problems have been caused by the way HDV Split makes the HDV Clips (especially XHA1 footage) and it seems to be problematic in Vegas. I strongly suggest using the Vegas capture tool to ingest footage from your camera as many have said this cleared things up. I don't have any idea why as I'm not using HDV Split and not actually capturing a lot of HDV right now, but I hope you get it solved ( may find more help on the sony forums as a few others have seemed to have your problems ).

Dave