Vegas stops, and says it can't write the file
 

So, I am working on a project for the office. A program I recorded some months ago that I was trying to complete before the holidays. We just submitted the audio to the captioning service this week. Multi-cam shoot.

My last piece before final, was to take my 1080p XDCamEX files, and render them into one complete clip. Program was 1hr2min long. Render scheduled to take 2hr40 minutes. I stayed late to watch it finish.

At 2hrs28m, as I was watching the .tmp file copy into my final file, Vegas stops, and says it can't write the file. 250GB free on this working drive. No explanation, no error code. Just a waste of an afternoon. Why an afternoon? Because after the render failed twice in Vegas 9 64bit after only10 minutes, I decided to try it in Vegas 9 32bit. No filters, 8-bit encode, just as fundamental as could be.

Those of you who wonder why I am jumping ship... There is your answer. Absolutely, 100% unacceptable. And if I was on deadline, I would have picked up the phone to order my new NLE today.

Dammit, I'm mad...

[edit]

I am now going to try to render into the XDCamEX format and see if it can manage to write back into the same da** format the video came from without crapping out. If not, I am uninstalling the program.

That's Gotta Hurt.
render the workspace of the first minute, and the last minute, then somewhere in between, it'll work perfect right :-)

That's just it... the RENDER was complete!! No more frames left to process. All it was doing was copying the temporary file it creates to the final video file. A basic damn file copy! With NO recovery ability. Instead of preserving the .tmp file so it can try again later, or the user can rename the file, it deletes BOTH files before it pops up the window to tell you it's failed!

The name "Pro" should be removed from this program. There is no "Pro" in it.

are the temps on a different hard drive than the final?
are the temps on a different partion than the final?

No, Vegas gives you no control of where the temps write. So by default it creates the .tmp in the same folder as the final. Temp file was 66GB on a drive with over 250GB free.

So it might have failed when it was just renaming or moving a temp to its proper name.

well what are the possibilities,, brainstorm.
an asleep drive, it wastnt that
not enough space and them using Copy, you know it wasnt that
I changed the name of a folder when it wasnt looking , probably didnt do that
Program doesnt have the right Permissions, which could allow writing but not renaming/deleting, which would be a crasy setting for a user in a NT system.
File header writeout couldnt occur
CRC failed cant see it doing that
piece missing of an archive, its not an archive
Program crash, you know it wasnt that because it cleared the file
Another Program had a Lock on the file , there is a possibilty, you were LOOKING in the folder, that means Xp Vista and 7 Would all try and get Info and properties on the file as soon as it was made. remember the MS system routing through your files in a folder doing thumbs and such? most video geeks turn off the one that routes through whole anims, did you turn that crap off?

Yea Marty, I know the failure modes...

Drive can't be asleep, Vegas just spent 2+ hours rendering to it.

Tmp file was 66GB. Drive has 250+GB free.

Drive is on a private system and the keyboard wasn't touched. Nothing got renamed. I was watching the numbers count up. It was at over 40GB into the copy when it stopped.

If writeout couldn't occur or it was a permissions issue, it wouldn't have copied 40+ GB.

CRC error is possible, and I accept that. BUT DON'T ERASE THE SOURCE FILE! At least leave it there for possible recovery later, or a copy onto another drive. That is what I would expect of a professional app.

i wasnt done editing. i added a few more.

Program didn't crash. I didn't have to restart it to try a new render.

And file wasn't locked.. it was counting up when it stopped, just like it had been doing for 20 minutes...

Does it work if you rendered just the workspace of 2 gigs of it?
while monitoring the file the same way?

I am looking on the web, your the first one to come up in search when i seek for the problem. isnt that cool :-)

here is a speculation one person had about a write error
Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec parameters ?) <--- if it was finalising by writing a header that might apply somehow?

is it a shared folder?

did the file name have Odd charachters , like any of them @&$^@ -- += things in it , not including the Period which should never be a problem with anything.
did it have spaces? was there any forign language or accented vowels and stuff in the file name?

was the complete file path and file name long? like more than 255 charachters?
is it down an excessive number of folders from the root of the disk?

http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=10297&page=2
same problem by others.

are there any sound files in the project that are not already converted to uncompressed Wave format stereo at the rate of your project?

what is the virtual memory ammount of the machine vrses the ram you have, and where is the Vm Paging file?

and why didnt you make that call for the other software :-)

I rendered the file to an MXF format (XDCamEX same as source) and it finished.

Not really.

Not after 40GB

No.

7 characters, all lower case letters. No numbers, no special characters.

path was less than 30 characters, file name was 7.3


Nope

Separate drive.


Because my second render worked.

so you got it out?

Then you still must run, and not look back :-)
i was thinking about all the times i struggled miserably over something, when there was finnaly success, it was like the happy ending in the movie.
All the problems i had lowered my expectations to -482 , so when it finnaly worked i was so gratefull that i was at +10 , i forgot about the -482, and did it again.

next week your going to have a project in there again, trapped , unable to get out, all your hard work with No-Exit, and you will again be forced to do everything possible to get the project out of it. once they have you down and depressed and lowered your expectations as low as they go, finnaly the project will escape from its hell, and it will seem like a glorious day with everything perfect. if you cant get to heaven raise hell up a bit.

No worries. My request for purchase went in yesterday afternoon. Now I just need to wait on Budget. January or April.

Perrone, what are you moving to?

Perrone, sorry to hear you had problems, I very much feel your pain :)

Just out of curiosity what did you end up requesting to purchase?

Avid Media Composer 4. Software only.

Not the right choice for a lot of folks, but if your livelihood depends on getting things done, it's worth a look.

It's got the fastest XDCam(EX) workflow I've ever seen. Absolutely stunning. Have you guys seen the workflow?

I feel your pain Perrone - I don't do near the amount of video editing you do, but I do have clients that expect their work to be finished on time and on budget. The Vegas/Cineform workflow has all but stopped me or at the most, kept me at a slow crawl between Cineform upgrades no longer working with Vegas, or Red/Black clips where I have to restart Vegas a dozen times in a day - that's just ridiculous IMO.

I'm looking at Edius right now since it's minimalist philosophy fits in with how I shoot/edit.

Another Vegas Forum member contacted me on the Edius forums - go figure he had had enough of how Vegas mangles his work when trying to earn a living with a tool that has "Pro" in it.

I've not been this disgruntled in a very long time.

Currently converting my content into Canopus HQ AVI's to see what kind of performance I get. I have a sneaking suspicion Vegas is going to be left for only opening old projects.

That's the thing. A couple years ago, I did a few videos a year. It's been a steady increase every few months. I would have never dreamed a couple years ago that I'd be cutting several HD programs a month.

I'm staring at a bi-monthly episodic show for 2010, about half a dozen conferences, maybe 10 live shows, and whatever creative work I pull in. Part of it is three years ago, we had a contract with a local station to do a lot of our work. PSAs, historic shows, etc. With the tight economy, that was cancelled, and I was asked to pick up the slack. They gave me budget thankfully, but no salary. So they pay me in gear! :)

I could live with a lack of advanced tools. But I can't live with slowness and worse, crashing. There is nothing worse than watching 2-4-10 hours of your day just WASTED because of a silly crash.

Same here. And dang, I just want it to work. I don't need fancy editing tricks. Cuts, dissolves, a few titles, render. Give me that workflow 100% and I'd LIKE more, but could live with it. Well, maybe not at $600, but you know what I'm saying.

There are still no other reasonably priced apps that can work with 2k/4k files. So for me, Vegas will be a part of that workflow. But I hear ya. No more day to day, breadwinning projects.

I looked at Canopus a year or two ago, it was intriquing, but awkward after coming from Vegas. I gave up on it after only a short time.

Yup. Vegas had a good run. And I never pushed Vegas all that hard is what has me frustrated.

None of my projects have been more than 15 minutes in length save for one which was a nightmare to keep going given it was straight footage with dissolves or straight cut edits only and Vegas kept doing red frame/black frame bug.

Tryiing to make myself reassemble my current winery doc project I shot. Since Edius Neo 2 doesn't accept EDL's, I'm having to rebuild it from scratch - looking at the VP9 timeline and reassembling the project accordingly placing the clips where they are into Edius from Vegas.

What a PITA!

BTW - for your insomnia - try 3 to 5mg Melatonin 30 minutes before lights out - works wonders for me ;)

Jeff - I can understand your response but when one is losing time, which is money I'm willing to learn a new NLE if it will save me in the long run. I've been using thr trial of Neo 2 and it has been rock solid so far. It also uses my NewBlue FX plugins so I"m not losing out on that investment.

Perrone, Let us know when you find the problem with your computer - and you will. Meanwhile a good "dose" of another NLE will do you good; let's say it will "refine" your perspective.

Yikes, Canopus HD costs $7400.00. I'm sure there are less expensive solutions among their offerings. Wow, that is some high end stuff.

What are you looking at??

With hardware assist: Videoguys.com - Grass Valley HDSTORM with EDIUS v5 - HDMI Based Editing

Without: Videoguys.com - Grass Valley EDIUS v5 Editing for the Digital Generation

just completed the transcoding of the clips into Canopus HQ AVI's - a little disconcerting given that the same number of clips as Cineform AVI's comes in at a little over 36GB while the canopus AVI's weigh in at over 72GB for the same number of clips (basically a doubling in file size).

I've tried the Cineform clips in Edius and they don't playback as well as the Canopus AVI's do so it's now becoming plainly clear that for the time being, I may HAVE to stick with Vegas Pro.

Truly a PITA right now...

I used to be a Vegas user and made the switch to Mac FCP what must be 12 months now and I have to say FCP rocks in every way.
Give it a go.

I've been drinking the FCP KoolAid since version 1.0.2 on OS8.6

It's been good to me but it is FAR from perfect... Every update prompts the question "what pro feature did they mess up to appease noobies?" and the answer is normally "AH NO, not THAT one..."

CanopusHQ is using a very different kind of compression than Cineform. Cineform is a Wavelet based compression. Best thing going right now. Do some research on Wavelet codec (REDCode, Cineform, Dirac, JPeg2000) and you'll begin to understand why it works so well, and is SO FAST and small. This is why I use it as an archival medium as Jpeg2000.

CanopusHQ is using DCT compression, same as ProRes and DNxHD. It makes beautiful encodes, but it needs more space to do so. And more horsepower to play back, though it can be optimized inside the application, which is why Avid screams with DNxHD, and FCP flies with ProRes.

Vegas comes with a free Jpeg2000 encoder, but it only encodes into the .MOV container. I bought Morgan multimedia's encoder which stores in .AVI. It was $30. It uses the same technology as Cineform, but is 8-bit instead of 10-bit. However, Edius is 8-bit anyway, so you're not losing anything.

since he's running Vegas right now, I am going to assume he doesn't have a Mac handy for editing. It would actually be cheaper for him to go Avid, once you toss in the factor of having to buy a new machine. Not to mention time lost to become conversant in a new OS...

That's not the easiest switch in the world when you've got clients waiting for work. I am running Avid and Vegas together right now. My hope is that by the time I need to switch over fully, I'll be good enough to do anything on Avid, that I can do on Vegas. That is looking like a distinct possibility.

I don't know Avid, but it's known to play better with Mac than PC. I dunno, you might be exchanging one set of headaches for another. I've heard horror stories coming from every brand.

Well FCP may not be perfect and yes it's missing BR support ( this will come) but in general I find FCP easy and does exactly what I give it from a 30 sec cut to a 2 hour cut.

For me also is the stability of Mac's that I work on from a MBP to a tower and sure FCP locks up but so has every other NLE I have used including Avid MC.

I used to think, why FCP and Mac but I get now.

Cheers

sucks to hear the trouble people are having with vegas. I too have been dissapointed with the recent versions and lack of quality control. the app's recent instability has also made me question moving to a different NLE. seems like anything sony gets its hands on turns to sh!t after a while.

Perrone - would you recommend sticking with Cineform given what you've layed out for it's technology or make the transition over to the native Canopus HQ codec while working in Edius?

Do you mean sticking with Cineform inside Vegas or CanopusHQ inside Edius? I'd go for Edius to be honest.

I actually meant using Cineform inside Edius Neo 2

Ah ok. Well give it a shot. There's a lot I like about Cineform. A few things I don't, but hey...

However, I would think that CanopusHQ would be optimized well for their products. I'd do some A/B testing and see...

Perrone, I was looking at the following...on the Grass Valley website it said this was their flasgship product...so naturally that is what I checked out....like I said, yikes.

Grass Valley | EDIUS HD Boardset & Software | 600292 | B&H

Jeff - take away about $600 of that total price on B&H and that's the cost of the hardware. I'm doing a 30 trial of Edius Neo 2 right now and other than not having scopes, it does everything I've been doing in Vegas - since my primary delivery is the net right now, I figure if I can get into a work flow methodology that can be used with the full blown package at a later date - why not.

Consider the full Edius package much in the same way as Avid MC software only - no hardware to work with, but you can at a later date add on if needed.

Not a bad way to go actually.

Jeff you can run Edius 5 in pure software mode. If you are using HDV there is no need to convert to HQ just use straight on the timeline realtime. I am just editing multicam 2 tracks of HDV from FX1's and a track of XDCAM EX3 1920x1080P native realtime on my Q9450 running VISTA64. IF you need to monitor realtime on a full HD monitor you can get the SPARK card which is just a HDMI output card for the preview screen only. The SPARK will work with Edius and Neo. IF you want input other than iLink from your motherboard (ie HDMI) then get the STORMHD and for analogue input get the STORMHD with the analogue BAY. Personally my system is just software. For AVCHD you will still need to convert to HQ ( which I do for my XR500 video until they port the Booster pack to Edius!!!).
Still use Vegas just for audio and to output encode for Architect with named markers etc. I export a HQ file from Edius and bring into Vegas for final audio and export.( only use for Vegas at the moment so I just use 8.0c!!!!)

Ron Evans

There is something else going on in this thread and I'm not sure what it is. Maybe it's nothing more than a "lack of sleep and a purple brain." The most likely source of many of the "problems" mentioned in this thread is probably between the keyboard and the chair.

The ONE thing I do know is that I use Vegas every day and I don't see problems like those eluded to in this thread. If these problems were Vegas itself, they wouldn't selectively appear in only some systems. A particularly vulnerability that Vegas has is that it can be run on a wide variety of systems - - including those that are "whacked" by the user none of which would ever admit that they don't know everything there is to know about computers.

i would encourage those who are reading this thread to realize that it's a good idea when reading a forum to look for the main body of understanding from a wide range of people. This is the best way to avoid being mislead by either fan boys or people with an "alternate" intent.