WMV renders crash about 90% of the time for me. Help?
 

I just don't understrand what's wrong with my rendering in Vegas 7.

I'm having difficulties rendering HDV clips from my Canon HV10...

About 90% of the time my wmv renders crash vegas to desktop. I don't get it, I have applied all patches, reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled vegas. It still CTD's when rendering wmv files more often than not.

Frustrating to say the least. I can render avi and mov files with no problems, but wmv (my render of choice) just doesn't want to cooperate.

Has anyone else experienced this level of frustration with wmv file rendering in Vegas 7? (It happened in Vegas 6 too)

When it does render, the files looks fantastic. It's just frustrating to see it crash 9 times out of 10 and not finish the render. I pray someone here can help me pinpoint the problem. BTW, yes, I have contacted Sony support, but they are completely clueless. They keep asking me about pre capture when I'm telling them the video crashes post capture during render. Anyway...


My specs:

P4 3.4 @ 3.75
Asus P4P800-E Deluxe MB
7800GS
2 gig Mushkin PC 3200
XP Home SP2

What other encoding softwaer have you installed? The beta of the new Sorenson encoder crashed my .mov encoding, and the new Quicktime killed virtually everything video in my system. you say you reinstalled, but what else was installed?
Next, what about heat? Heat is a huge crash-monster. Can you render a full size MPEG 2?

Hmm, I don't think there is any other encoder other than default Vegas installation. I do have quicktime pro installed.

It's just weird it's only tied to wmv renders. Really makes me want to build a dedicated PC/Laptop just for video work.

Something nasty is just stopping it cold. Nothing worse than seeing your file at about 80% rendered then bam, Vegas CTD's and the file is dead. It's actually keeping me from creating lengthy videos. all my videos right now are all under 2 min long due to the fear of it crashing and me wasting all that time rendering.

Truly heartbreaking to have all this great HDV footage only to have it sit on my HD unedited and unshared. :(

Douglas could be right. When rendering, the processor builds up heat very quickly. It is not a problem with just browsing or simple editing. Maybe the processorfan is full of dust, so it doesn't cool the processor enough. Get the cover of the pc and have a look at that.

I had it once and it takes me weeks to discover what the problem was. Solving the problem was just 10 seconds. It can be that simple.

Good luck.
Hubert

It could be the heat guys. I have a P4 (Prescott) that runs hotter than most processors.

I clean my case, cpu, grills, fans, and video card out every 7 weeks or so. Maybe my new PC build will correct this.

Next time I render a video I will watch the temp thru Asus probe. If this indeed is the problem, how about lunch on me?

Thanks guys, I'll keep you posted.

Crashing on render of WMV
 

I sort'a doubt it is overheating of CPU. Likely you would see BSOD (Blue screen of death). Also would happen elsewhere. Ditto for RAM, though some apps only BSOD when upper addresses of memory are used. Memtest86 can isolate ram BTW.

You don't provide any specifics on the errors you get with the crash - is it just Vegas crashing? Are there any "details" boxes when it occurs? Does it want to "phone home" (microsoft?) That could tend to implicate underlying MS app, such as dot-net.

Also look at event viewer, see if there are clues there. Usually red circle w/ X and the yellow ! are the ones to look for. You can copy/paste them here, BTW. More specifics are needed, otherwise we're shooting in the dark.

Have you run the original file(s) thru windows media player (vegas and similar apps shutdown) and crashed?

Can you render another completely different project ok? (could be issue in underlying avi, m2t, etc).

Generalized advice is to ensure your video card driver is up-to-date, while vegas may not use the gpu that much, it is something that is a good practice. Make sure you have at least direct-x 9.

Also make sure your chipset is current. Ditto with mobo firmware (BIOS). These coud affect the HDD ability to deliver data to the cpu and screw up underlying system timing. Run a scandisk "thorough" too. Generally these will do no harm.

There is no message box after crash. It simply just vanishes and goes back to desktop.

I can create some wmv renders, but most often they crash Vegas before completion.

And yes, I can play all the raw files with Media Player and VLC with no problems ever. Only in Vegas do I encounter this. I can render avi's and mov's just fine, it's only wmv files that crash.

I haven't tried any other videos since I posted this so I don't know if it is heat overload. I'm willing to look in all the nooks and crannies to sort this out. I have actually lost interest in editing my clips due to this problem...at least until I build a new PC with dual core, 4 gig mem, dx10 pci-e v-card.

My system is a fresh install of XP Home all patched up and my v-card drivers are all up to date too.

I appreciate the offers/ideas of help.

One workaround worth considering is rendering to avi, then using the freeware wm encoder from microsoft to encode your wmv. It's a good encoder, Vegas' wmv encoder is built on it.

more...
 

in control panel, administrative tools, event viewer, you may see evidence of why it took a dive..
copy/paste it here, take a look.

Usually heat related issues cause blue screens - killing everything.

There is a post about Windows Media 8 needing a patch...
http://www.custcenter.com/cgi-bin/so...i=&p_topview=1

Just an update...

It appears I found the culprit! One day as my system was booting up it said that the CPU overclocking had failed. I thought, that's weird it's been overclocked from 3.4 to 3.7 for over a year now and I haven't had any problems. Anyway, I set it back to the default 3.4 setting.

After doing so, I thought, hmmm, could that be it? Well it appears so as I haven't had any crashing of Vegas rendering wmv files since then!

So I thought I would post this in case anyone else runs into this. Perhaps it was a heat issue afterall or just the CPU not being able to handle Vegas and the overclocked cycles...dunno, but I do know that it works now that I'm not overclocking my CPU.

No worries about not overclocking since I will be building my new Quad Core system here in a few weeks!!

Thanks for all the help guys. It got me thinking and with a little help from my PC acting up I got it solved!

wmv rendering errors
 

I'm having the same problem of Vegas crashing during wmv file renders, only my system is not overclocked. Short projects are fine, but whenever I'm working on longer projects that involve more than a few video captures, I keep getting the errors "an exception has occurred" and "System is low on memory" even though I have 3Gigs of Ram, plenty of free space on my hard drives, and all the latest updates. This is so frustrating and time consuming.
It'll seem to be running fine for hours and then abruptly crash and freeze after about 32 to 50% of the render.


Configured Vegas Platinum on 58 Gig master boot drive C, rendering to 175Gig partitioned drive E, video capture on external 1000Gig drive G.
XP Pro-2
3.47 Pentium Dual Core
3Gigs Ram
9213Mb page file size

Surely we're not the only ones with this problem? Any knowledgeable advice would be greatly appreciated.

Do u have photos in your veg file? I had this prob last mth when I had oversized photos in there. It also freeze at about 80% for my case. When I view the file, I found that it would always stop at the photos. I could render to smaller wmv but when I tried 720P WMV HD, that was it. I reduced the sizes of the photos a fair bit and it works sometimes. I will have to downsize the photos further to make it work properly.

I'm not using any photos, only m2t Hi-def video.

The damage is permanent after you overclock so you might actually need a new processor. But you're getting the Quad-core, so it's no big deal.