Questions on Vegas Nested Veg Work Flow
 

Posted this question on the SONY Vegas Forums, but thought I might find additional input to my question here on the DVInfo forums.

Scenario: I just completed a short video project for the City's Planning Division on Infill Compatibility. Finished project is 9min 30sec.

The project was edited in Vegas 8.0c, mix of video and stills (stills as 24bit PNG files, 72dpi, 1920x1080). Original video footage is 1440x1080i from my HC7's ingested from tape with HDVSplit.

I broke the project down into separate sections to make editing easier. These separate veg files also helped with transitioning between the topics discussed. Once I had all these sections done, I created a new master time line, embedded the 8 VEG files (they only had minor CC and basic text titles with either straight cuts or dissolves - each veg was no longer than 2 minutes)

Seems straightforward enough - until it came time to render the master time line with the embedded veg files. I set it to render on my quad core desktop to SONY YUV avi to a separate drive and went to bed - of course I awoke at 5am with a sneaking suspicion something wasn't right - sure enough - Vegas was locked up. Had to end task.

Having the presence of mind, I then chose to render out each section as base Cineform AVI's that comes installed with Vegas and then reassemble those AVI's onto the master timeline. Added a watermark, rendered out a master 720p AVI and then encoded two WMV files.

Now my question - are nested Veg's a hit or miss work flow option? Once I rendered out the 1440x1080i footage as 720p Vegas based Cineform avi's and placed those on the master time line to render out - Vegas rendered the final master without issue.

Any thoughts on what might have happened? Is this where using Cineform NEO Scene is applicable for future editing? This was my first time nesting VEG files and now I'm gun shy to do so in the future (I had a tight deadline to meet), but wanted to get some insights from others on what I ran into problem wise. Other than this, the editing itself in Vegas Pro 8 was perfection as far as I was concerned.

Nested VEG File
 

Hi,
After researching this (here and on other forums) the best advice I found was from Douglas Spotted Eagle. He says to set (in Options / Preferences / Video ): Dynamic RAM to "0" and Threads to "1". It worked for me with nested VEG projects.

I would leave Dynamic Ram at around 8 or 16 instead of 0. Setting it to 0 can slow down renders a LOT in some cases.

Well after more research, I pulled the trigger and purchased Cineform Neo Scene - it just seems that ever since I moved to HDV, I, and others, have had issues no matter what NLE being used for Long GOP files. I was always editing in frame based AVI whenever I shot and edited Standard Def footage and never had a single issue when editing in Vegas.

So I figure this must be the weakest link so to speak with editing HDV footage.