The only things I can think of:

As you said, Neat Video must look at every pixels of every frame which, as you said, is very resource intensive.

How hard is it hitting the cpu's?

How HOT is the system getting?

All Excalibur is doing is starting a series of rendering process. If that rendering process causes Vegas to crash for some reason, naturally the process will stop.

Temps were my very first suspect, Edward. As you can see in the screen shots below, before render (idle) CPU is essentially 0%, temps are in the 40's. During render, CPU is around 80% and temps are never more than 65*C. I can also run the Intel Burn Test until the cows come home and have no problems. To me, therefore, these parameters are fine, so I don't think I have a hardware problem.

It looks like I have Vegas and/or NeatVideo gremlins wholly separate from Excalibur. I'm open to any other suggestions, but I'm afraid that my woes have gone too astray from the OP's question to keep this alive here.

Thanks,
Steve

Steven, what container format and codec are you rendering to?

Going from avi (1440 x 1080 PAR=1.33) to avi (1920 x 1080 PAR = 1.000), both in Cineform progressive.

I think I'll start a new thread on this. I got a successful render when applying NeatVideo as a Media FX instead of Event FX. Have no idea why, but so far a test render of 11 or so clips went to completion, in contrast to the 5 or 6 that I managed before.

Stay tuned...

Steve