Apparent crash while rendering? All might not be lost!

[Ian Stark]

Interesting phenomenon to report.

I just rendered a project where the rendering froze at 68%. I tried to cancel. No joy. I had to go to Task Manager to close Vegas. I noticed that the rendered file was still available, albeit with a .tmp extension. Out of curiosity I renamed it with an mp4 extension, double clicked it, and lo and behold, it played perfectly, right to the end.

I re-rendered, and the rendering seemingly froze at 88%. Same result. A third time it only got to 44%, but still played perfectly. On each occasion I started the render and left it running, returning an hour or so later (it is SUnday after all and my wife is not happy that I'm working!)

On the third occasion, again through curiosity, I clicked the Open Folder button in the render progress dialogue. Even though the 'busy' icon was showing, it opened the folder! I tried it once more and this time pressed the 'open' button after it had hung. Same story.

So, the moral here is that even if it looks like your render has crashed - it might just be that the UI has got messed up and the render may actually be finished. In fact, in once case I noticed that the % complete value displayed was different in the render dialogue to that shown in the task bar, which does suggest something has lost its way.

In my case, this is a very complex animation using numerous graphic, generated and text elements, and hundreds of keyframes. Some of the graphics are huge, so I can pan around them. I am suspecting a memory shortage is causing the UI to give up the ghost.

Whatever it is, do check your render folder first, before re-rendering. As soon as you start a re-render, it will delete the original file, which might be perfectly usable.

[Stuart Campbell]

I've found the exact same thing about a year ago Ian. This happens predominantly when attempting to render complex projects. The moral of the tale was that I now build any complex graphics sequences in a separate .veg, (even splitting them up if the sequences themselves are complex and large) and then render them out to a Cineform AVI. I can then play them at 25fps on the timeline when brought back into the final .veg which is never possible if everything is built on the same timeline.

[Chris Harding]

Hi Ian

Now and again I find also that the project renders to 100% but the render box will not close and the clock keeps running. In Task Manager it reports that Vegas is not responding and you have to close everything down. However the rendered file seems to be perfect with no errors and has the correct extension too.

The only time the program crashed halfway thru a render was due to just solitary overlay clip..I re-rendered the project eliminating clips as I went and it crashed every time until I deleted the faulty clip!!

Anyone had that one?? On restart the subsequent projects render and close without any issues

Chris

[Leslie Wand]

same as chris - a few times, however, more often than not it was with either a bad avch clip or client supplied jpg.