Corrupt clip on the timeline

[Chris Harding]

Hi Guys

I was rendering a simple wedding prep and the render freezes abut half way along the assembled video which has 24 clips in it. I'm assuming one clip is corrupt and that's causing the issue but is there any easy way to isolate it without putting in clip one and rendering and then clip 2 etc etc until it crashes.

Knowing my luck it will be the last clip!! I did play the timeline and when it reach clip 20 it had a little glitch but played OK ..the second time I played the timeline it actually froze on clip 20 BUT I thinking that the player must be buffering a bit so it may be working ahead of the cursor so it COULD find clip 23 is corrupt and freeze the play before it actually shows it??

I've had this once before and did it the hard way (adding clips one by one) ...Is there any other way to isolate a bum clip??

Chris

[Juris Lielpeteris]

While rendering under the preview window runs the frame counter which may indicate the approximate location of the defective clip (or effect) when Vegas crashing.

[Dave Baker]

Hi Chris,

How about moving any suspect clip to another video track, I'm thinking of the next one up from where it is and playing or rendering from there? If it's OK, slip it back down and move the next one up and so on until you find it.

Good luck

Dave

[Chris Harding]

Thanks Guys

OK, if I think I have found the suspect clip and render again it freezes at a different counter position Maybe I need to leave the offending clip space blank so the timeline length is constant ..It's driving me crazy and it's only a 4 minute clip too .... the rest of the wedding is fine !!

Dave? I haven't tried it but if you move each clip in turn to an upper track and then mute the video and audio tracks on the upper track will Vegas ignore them in the render or not??? That would be quite easy to do ... the original timeline froze at 3820 and I could see which clip it was so I removed it and filled in the gap with the clips ahead and it simply froze at a different count. There might be more than one bad clip maybe?

It's 10pm here so time to chill out and tackle it tomorrow with a fresh mind ... I haven't had this for maybe 3 or 4 years ! I wonder what causes the problem ..there are no VFX and only crossfades on the timeline.

Chris

[Brian Berg]

I think I would try rendering the suspected clip by itself first in a new project. You should be able to narrow the corrupt bit(s) and splice around it. Then after that, just drop that into the spot in your timeline of your original project.

[Dave Baker]

Chris, I forgot to say turn ripple editing off first (long time since i last used Vegas!), but I'm sure you know to do that!

My idea is to move a suspected clip up to another track to test it, select it as a region and render just that region. If it's OK, then slip it back into place and repeat with another clip until the corrupt one is found.

You're thinking the opposite way, move it out and render the rest, which should work too. As far as I remember, Vegas has settings on the track headers to disable any track you choose. I would suggest leaving all the other clips where they are and fill the gap with a title clip, so the timing stays the same.

So in the morning it's deerstalker on, pipe lit and magnifying glass in hand for you!:-)

Dave
p.s. I had a similar thing about a year ago, a longish render kept crashing in the same spot. I found it was my own fault, I had applied a denoiser to a clip of fast moving water by mistake, it couldn't cope so it crashed. Once I disabled the denoiser on that clip, all was OK.

[Roger Gunkel]

I had a similar thing in Magix a couple of years back, which turned out to be a corrupt first frame of a clip. I found it by going to the start of each clip on the timeline, and enlarging the TL to individual frame view. The corrupted frame was easy to spot and after deleting it, all was fine.

Roger

[Chris Harding]

Thanks Roger

I will definitely try that ... the rest of the wedding edit was totally uneventful so it must be a corrupt clip..Just got to find ut!

Chris

[Chris Harding]

Hi Roger

Well I looked at each file in expanded timeline view and not one hint of corruption! The last with my Panasonics it was a bunch od green squares so easy to spot.

I did it the hard way! Start with clips 1 to 5 and render ..then 6 -9 and Vegas shut down on clip 5 ?? I deleted that one and used the next and it was fine again until it froze again at clip 15 ..then on clip16 ...In the end I managed to get enough footage to compile a bridal prep of 3:48 instead of my original 4:28

The weird thing is that with the same camera and card at the reception the rest of the clips right up to clip 113 rendered perfectly with not a single issue!!! There might be a bad sector on that card so better safe than sorry so I'll bin it !!

These things are sent to try us!!

Chris

[Roger Gunkel]

Well at least you were able to get enough footage to work with. Probably best to bin the card as you will never be sure if it will happen again until it does :-(

Roger

[Steven Davis]

Ok, I'll try to keep my comments PG, but if you do a search you'll find that people have had problems similar to yours. Once I had a single jpeg that would crash a render, who knows why. If you look through this forum in Vegas, you'll see a lot of weird random issues. Sony has always ignored glitch reporting so a work around is best such as copying the project onto a different drive (which I've done and worked), copying the footage to a different drive and replacing the problem event (which I've done and worked) or (rendering the jpeg into a png and worked). All of these I've done to work around similar issues like the one you have.

Like your experience, these are huge time wasters, something Sony doesn't care about at all. But I'm glad you worked it out.

[Chris Harding]

Hi Steven

I didn't really work it out! I just had to settle on a compromise of using maybe 18 clips out of the 24 I shot to make a preparation wedding sequence. Before blaming Vegas it COULD be a bad write from the camera too! I was shooting 1080 50P which is tough on the card as you are recording at double frame rate so a write error is more likely to happen. I haven't ever had a crash with interlaced footage only progressive ...you get slightly better resolution so nowdays I shoot most weddings at 1080 25P and just be careful with fast pans.

I wonder now if it's the camera write issues at higher bitrates or does Vegas have an issue with more intense files.

Chris

[Steven Davis]

Sorry for my rant Chris, I know this is elementary, but would it be possible to convert the footage using something like Wondershare Convertor and try using that footage? I've done that when my machine/vegas/fcpx was struggling with a clip or particular footage.

[Renton Maclachlan]

I have been using Vegas forever, and have had a project on the go forever as well.

In the last few days I've been going through early episodes I did in v11, checking editing consistency etc with later ones, and bringing them into v13 (latest build).

So I made some changes, then went to render an early episode using v13 and behold it stopped at a clip...repeatedly. It seized the program so I re started and tried it a number of times. No joy. Then I just tried playing it rather than rendering it and it stopped then as well, even though last night it had played ok.

Then I tried rendering out just the clip, and it stopped, so that didn't work either.

As I still have v12 and v11 on the computer, I thought I would try rendering just the clip in v12...it stopped. Then I tried rendering just the clip in v11, and it worked. I then brought the rendered clip back into the episode, deleted the clip as it was before, and rendered the whole thing out in v13...no trouble.

So that was a relief...