Working backwards with Bluray...
 

Ok, here's a curly one,
I have a Bluray disc i have purchased ( Dire Straits alchemy, so good, but anyway...),
I've decrypted it and have the MT2S files on my hard drive, (23GB ) opens and plays ok in Vegas,
I'm trying to just make a 720p version of the concert as a back up in case anything happens to the disk.
Tried rendering to 720p .h264, no go, Vegas spat it after about 30 sec.
Tried making regions of the individual songs and rendering one at a time, Vegas still packed up and went home after about 30 sec again.
Tried rendering individual regions to Neoscene ( it'll be huge but if it gets it done, who cares), crashola.
Tried rendering individual regions to Neoscene with ram preview set to 200mb and render threads to 1..... crash :(
Short of using a 2 TB drive and rendering it uncompressed, can anyone suggest something?
With the time I've already invested in this maybe I should have just bought 2 Blurays instead of one,
Now its more about the battle.

If you're wanting a standard SD disc, just render to the proper MPEG2 DVD Architect preset. SD discs are MPEG2.

Thanks for the suggestion Edward, Ive shut down the workstation now for the night, I'll try a DVD template in the morning.
Is there a reason why the MPEG2 would be less crash happy than .h264 or Cineform?
just wondering about the science and such.....

I can see h.264 having issues. Cineform shouldn't. But if you're going to SD DVD, you must have MPEG2 so that's what you should be rendering to.

If it crashes even going to uncompressed, then it is likely that the particular Blu-ray disc you tried to copy is copy-protected. Vegas cannot defeat the copy protection, which has already been embedded into the extracted video file. Nor can most Blu-ray decryption programs defeat the copy protection. And in the case of your particular disc, the copy protection allows you to rip to your hard drive to save wear and tear on the BD drive, but does not allow you to tinker with that ripped file any further.

The OP is not trying to create an SD DVD at all, in this case. He is, instead, trying to make a 720p HD backup. In either case, if the original disc is copy-protected, the OP would have experienced crashes when transcoding to even uncompressed or MPEG-2.

Randall, you said exactly what I was thinking.
Unlike regular DVDs, Blu-ray has a different level of encryption and, like you said, I'm certain that this is what's messing Gerald up.

thanks for the input guys,
tried mpeg2 , no go again, just crashes.
its not encrypted guys, i've decrypted it already, it plays fine in VLC, if its encrypted you cant even look at the m2ts files on the pc, the HDCP wont let anything open them unless it gets the electronic "handshake" back.
It even crashes on the timeline jumping from one point to another.
But, I had a thought last night, I downloaded the Edius trial, set it up this morning, imported the 23 gb clip and started converting in the bin to Canopus HD (their intermediate codec),
70% done so far and going strong.
hopefully i can drag that back into vegas and all will be good.

I just hate it when companies such as Sony run two divisions which are at odds with one another. One unit of Sony is pushing technology while another unit of Sony is constantly DRMing their media. It's like someone has his foot in his mouth.

Ok, rendered to Canopus HQ, all is good, all 103gb of it.
Drag it into Vegas, No video, 64 bit Vegas 9 doesnt recognize it, but 32bit Vegas 9 does recognize the video just no audio (explain that one please).
Ok, no biggy, render a Wav file of the original audio, drop it in 32 bit 9 and we are good to go.
Cut up the regions and render out the individual songs to the Canopus codec so its "no re-compression reguired".
Now I have individual tracks in a near lossless format that I can render out to DVD or .h264 from 32 bit Vegas only.
After all that I am finally backed up...........
its not over yet.
Try to render Mainconcept MP4 at 1080p and it begins to render at 14.985 fps even though the render settings say 29.97, did it 3 times, it always does it at half the frame rate?????????
LOL, I luv Vegas but jeez she's a quirky old nag.
I might just get one of those cheapy video converters.
I'd just luv to know why these strange things happen.

Vegas 9-64, seems like there isn't a 64-bit version of Canopus HQ on the system? Hardly a Vegas issue?

Vegas 9-32, harder to say. I know some have success with the Canopus codec, but, I've certainly read about people having issues using it on anything outside of Canopus/Grass Valley software/hardware, to include on software with proven good codec utilization, like VirtualDub.

I'm not sure if we should fault Sony for less-than-perfect (OK, way less-than-perfect!) use of a codec that isn't distributed outside of a competitor's NLE.

Well, anyways, that would seem to me to be what's going on with this last chapter of the saga.

Perhaps data does want to be free, but content creators have other ideas...

Trying rendering your original Vegas timeline to AVI first. Then, import the AVI and convert it to H264 or MPEG2. This will take up a lot of disk space, but you can erase it when you're done. I do this on most of my big projects and it's amazing how much rendering time it saves. Never had a freeze using this technique either.

Render to AVI. Then drag it to a new timeline, or a new track. Now, set properties for desired output and render.