Major problems rendering HD in Vegas 8
 

I'm fairly new the the world of HDV editng. I've done SD for years with no problem and am using Vegas 8b Pro. I'm using a Canon HV40 for the summer so I've been playing with the HDV footage.

I have a church event Ifilmed this week in 24F setting on the HV40. I captured with HDV Split and imported into Vegas. I then chopped the video as desired and added some photos, transition, and effects as desired. The whole thing comes to 3 minutes when finished.

I tried rendering out as WMV 1080p and about 5% in I get an error from Vegas that a problem has occured and no solution can be found. I tried rendering to AVI 24p intermediate and get errors also. I even tried going to DV widescreen 24p and it won't finish. Vegas is even closing at random on my laptop I'm doing the editing on.

So I installed the same version and all plugins on my wife's new laptop with Windows 7 64 bit. I get the same error when trying to export to WMV or AVI intermediate. I was able to get it render to DV widescreen 24p on hers after a couple tries using Tools > Render to new track instead of just render as.

So what could be the issue here? It's obviously not just that my laptop is messed up because a fresh install and the same project got the same errors on a different machine. Is Vegas 8 finnicky about HDV? Should I go ahead and upgrade to 9?

I won't have time to try it out for a few days but I suspect capturing with HDV Split may be the culprit. I rendered a couple smaller videos of my kids in WMV with no problems, using some of the same plugins I tried on the big project I am having issues with.

HDV Split would be the obvious thing to eliminate first. You might also consider capturing with Microsoft Movie Maker, if there is a reason you don't want to capture with Vegas. I personally hate that audio preview cannot be disabled when capturing HD with Vegas. It has to be the absolutely stupidest thing I've ever seen.

I do want to capture in Vegas but for some reason on my machine Vegas 8 is splitting the clip into 1 second segments. I disabled scene detection and it still happens. I would like to capture with HDV split. I always capture SD with WinDV so I'm used to a separate cature program but if Vegas won't let me render a project captured with HDV Split it does me no good at all.

I did some more reading and saw using Vegas 7 to capture mentioned. So I installed my copy and am caturing right now. It seems to work fine. Is there any difference between the capturing utilities of 7 and 8 that would cause and trouble?

The probelm with all this is that I won't know if there are any problems until I try to render the final project so I don't want to invest too much time without at least a decent guess of what will happen.

I don't know Stan, I'm thinking there is something going on with cam...too many issues to blame on Vegas alone...not sure what to say...good luck.

I captured some of the same material with Vegas 7 and no issues. 1 single file as desired. Just seems to be something with Vegas 8. I will try another camera to make sure but I don't seem to be the only person who has had glitches with version 8.

Stan, I just noticed that you're using Pro 8.0b.
There was an 8.0c update so my suggestion is to upgrade to the newest version (it is very stable) and see if that fixes your problem.

Would it be worth it to go ahead and upgrade to 9?

I still recommend installing the Pro 8.0c update.
You can download the trial version of Pro 9 and see what you think of it.
It installs to a separate folder so the two will co-exist peacefully.
I have Pro 7, 8 and 9 on my computer with no problems whatsoever.

I messed around some more last night. I installed the 9d trial and rendered some footage from the 24F setting that I captured with version 7. It did not give me any problems. I tried my original project from this week that I was having fits with. It was captured with HDV Split. I got a memory low error when I tried to render it.

The project that rendered successfully was much longer than the failed project so I am positive HDV Split just doesn't want to cooperate with Vegas on my machine. I'm going to experiment some more in the coming days to make absolutely sure but all signs point that way.

I now capture with Vegas 9, but I've completed many projects that were captured with HDVsplit - I'm surprised to learn that it causes rendering problems. However, many people, including me have had problems rendering with Vegas8x. I now always edit in 8c, but render in 9c-32 whenever I need to deinterlace, or otherwise in 9e-64 (I haven't found a good deinterlace method for 64-bit OS).

If you're stuck with V8 or with a 32-bit OS, here's a thread that many have found helpful:

Sony Creative Software - Forums - Vegas Pro - Video Messages

Also try this when getting ready to render:

1. Uncheck everything in the view menu (you can monitor rendering activity by watching the Performance tab of Task Manager).

2. Set Preview RAM to zero, or close to it, in the video tab of Preferences.

3. Disable multicore rendering, set rendering threads to 1 in Preferences.

4. Cut the project into smaller chunks. In extreme cases, I've had to delete all of the timeline except for, say, 30 seconds of it, then save it to a new VEG, and finally render after opening the new .VEG. using Cineform (visually lossless). Then I put all the rendered segments on a new track above the original TL and render that series of segments.

5. Convert all clips to Cineform files. You can get NeoScene from Videoguys for around $100; or get PicVideo for about $40 - search the Sony Vegas forum for the website that sells PicVideo for that price. The Cineform and PicVideo codecs uses INTRAframe compression instead of INTERframe compression, and therefore require that a lot less data be stored in RAM during rendering.

6. Render to a different hard disk than the one that holds source data. I take this to an extreme and use one disk for Cam1 data, another for Cam2 data, a third for stills, a fourth for the .VEG project file, and then render out to a fifth. I doubt that all this is necessary, but I was fed up with Vegas rendering problems and was willing to leave no stone unturned.

As I suggested above, I NEVER have any type of editing or rendering quirks whatsoever now that I usually render to 9x-64 bit, and 9c-32 rendering is almost as stable. 8c also is rock-solid for editing.

I'm going to try out Vegas 9 for a few days and render some smaller projects testing footage captured with Vegas and HDV Split. I may go ahead and upgrade to 9 soon if HDV Split truly does seem to be the issue here. I also tested capturing with 9 and the same tapes that 8 tries to split into 1 second files 9 captures in one file like it should.

I like using HDVSplit but found that it is "very" tolerant of discontinuities in my video. Also, I set the preview off since that sometimes messes things up. Sometimes I review my footage on my HV20 and perhaps the mechanism doesn't find the end of the previous video properly. So, once in a while Vegas chokes when I try to import an HDV file. I found a utility that seems to fix bad mpeg named appropriately "mpeg2repair" which even prints out a report of the problems it finds.

Free-Codecs.com :: Download MPEG2Repair 1.0.1.5 : MPEG2Repair is an application for testing HDTV transport streams
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=442446

Well, I thought I had made major headway. I downloaded the trial of Vegas 9 and it captures fine and renders successfully. The problem now is that anything I render in version 9 has audio that is skipping constantly. I am rendering a project that has 2 audio tracks, 1 from the camera and one from the mixing board synced up. I tried muting each track and leaving them both on and rendered a 1 minute segment in multiple formats. It's the same with any format playing with WMP or VLC.

Edit:
I loaded up a large SD project in Vegas 9 that I had just finished a couple weeks ago using 8. It works perfectly with 9. It seems my machine just does not like HDV footage I guess.

I'm surprised - I've never seen such audio problems. . .

An old trick used by many when faced with a recalcitrant render (that I failed to include in my previous post) is to render audio separately, then render video-only using an intermediate codec, then putting all into a new project for rendering to final delivery format. Does your audio sound OK when rendered alone using an audio-only format (such as .WAV)?

Incidentally, some have found that they could render video from 8x by setting up the render engine as if they were going to use network rendering, but then rendering to a local hard disk as usual. . . you might try this to see if this helps - in case you don't want to buy Vegas 9.

Here's an update. I shot a church service last Sunday on the HV40 at 24F setting. I upgraded to Vegas 8c and captured with it. No dropped frames and 1 file but a long segment of audio was blank on the timeline. So I recaptured and it was fine. I tested rendering a short segment in a couple formats and no issues. I brought in a separate audio source recorded off the mixing board and synced it up. Then I did some test renders again with both audio sources combined. It worked fine. Now I am further into the project having added volume envelopes to each track to fade back and forth in specific spots and put a few images in also. I decided to test rendering a small segment again. Now the audio is screwed up again. If I use network rendering the same thing happens. I also tried taking the volume envelopes out to test and got the same results.

However, if I render audio and video separately into intermediate codecs, AVI and WAV, and combine them in a new project and render it works. So there is a work around but it wastes an amazing amount of time. I just don't get why the audio is not screwed up on the timeline and rendered fine at the beginning and now it's all jacked up when I try to render. Do I need to change the project settings or some Vegas settings? HDV audio is 384kbps MP2 right? I've got the project settings set for 16/44 audio which is the standard setting for 24p HDV 1440X1080.

For one thing, ALWAYS render audio and video separately...not sure why you would render into avi then reinsert to a new project, unless I'm missing something.

Normally for DVD I render separately. This particular project is for web delivery so I want to render straight to WMV but when trying to render to any format the audio is all messed up. A couple posts up Larry suggested trying to render audio and video separately into intermediate formats and combining them in a new project then rendering the final file from there. That seems to work but it's a lengthy workaround. There is no legitimate reason why I shouldn't be able to render directly from the original project but it is screwing up for some unknown reason. It has to be the HDV format that is causing trouble for some reason because I've done tons of projects in SD on this same machine with Vegas with audio and video separate and combined in numerous formats and never had audio issues.

I understand now. BTW, since your shooting for the web, wouldn't 30p be better?

I just wanted wanted to shoot 24p for the simple fact that I could. No other reason really. I have the HV40 to play with for the summer and am trying to take advantage of it.

I suppose 30p would be less problematic to deal with.

I thought maybe I had it figured out and changed the audio ruler setting to match the video setting. That did no good.

What project settings should I be using with the HV40 24p footage? It is wrapped in a 60i container right? So should I set the project to 60i HDV? If so can I then render at 24p? Will that even work?

I think I truly have the problem solved and you're going to laugh at what it was. I had a VST limiter plug in on the master audio output and that seems to be screwing with the audio. It had absolutely nothing to do with my workflow or project settings. Now I just need to see if I can find another limiter plugin that might work since that allows me to mix two sources to taste and not have to worry about peaking by a couple dB here and there. So any recommendations in that area? I am using the Antress Modern Limiter now.

Glad you found your problem. 24p is what you want not because it is less problematic, but because your medium is the web and it would look optimal.

I quite like the Volume Maximizer in Izotope Ozone. Ozone is a very nice mastering suite for not much money, and I use all the tools on music projects, but the volume max is used on almost every video project I do.