I always do a reboot before a long render to avoid crashes. I don't know why I need to do this. Vegas is the only program I have that crashes if I haven't rebooted in a while.

We've had lots of these posts lately. One thing mentioned in those others, but not yet mentioned here, is: how many still photos do you have on the timeline? If you have any, what is their resolution? Even a modest number of large pixel-count photos can sometimes cause Vegas problems. The solution is to use a photo editing program to reduce the pixel count to something closer to the project resolution.

I agree, it doesn't take more than a few hi-res images to break Vegas. I now convert my hi-res images to whatever the pixel count is for the particular project I'm working on before adding them to the timeline. If I need a high res to pan and zoom, I usually create separate project and drop the rendered output into a master project .veg. Saves a lot of hair pulling and breast beating:)

Ted

I render meetings that are sometimes over 6hr. long. Vegas is solid as a rock with my avi files to mpeg-2 render. But I believe I did run into a problem when I had a project with a lot of large tiff files from an artist I did a documentry on. I had to lower the res. of the files he gave me for his paintings so I could render the project. They were really large tiff files that he used for copies of the artwork. I wonder with the new 64 bit software and able to use large amounts of ram will fix this issue in the future? Or could your hard drive limit the size of your files? Fat vs NTFS

I mentioned this in another thread, but it is relevant here too so I'll post it again.

I use http://www.coffeecup.com/pixconverter/CoffeeCup Pix Converter[/link] to batch resize pictures before using them in Vegas slideshows. It really works well for this application. What it does is to allow you to specify maximum vertical and horizontal dimensions, then convert all your files at once so that none of the converted pictures will go beyond these sizes.

It also has a tab that lets you not convert any file that isn't already smaller than the specified size, which makes sense. It also lets specify the output format and quality. I usually use .png so as not to double data compress the images yet have them a manageable size.

It's not just a matter of Vegas crashing. Vegas previews smaller images way more quickly and the timeline and transitions stay responsive. Renders are quicker as well. I usually resize to twice the dimensions of the video format I am working with. For HDV this is 2880 x 2160 and will let you zoom into a quarter of an image without Vegas needing to interpolate pixels. SD works well at 1440 x 960 for the resize (or1440 x 1152 for PAL). Pix convertor will resize whole directories of pictures at once and it is pretty quick.

I really like Pix Convertor and it's not that expensive. I already had the CoffeeCup suite for web page authoring so for me it was a no-brainer to use this instead of looking for something else.

I also like CoffeeCup's licensing scheme. When you log onto their website, you can see all the software you have and download all the latest versions. This is much like Sony Software, Vasst and Propellerheads which all also let you log in and keep up to date with all your purchased software. It is how all software licenses should be managed IMHO.

The only still pics in my wedding videos timeline is just two of them which I extracted from the video itself as a JPEG file. The other source is not still pics but an edited photo montage video that is captured from a mini-dv tape so it's not considered the actual still pics right because it's a video file before I captured.

I'll try lowering the threads from 4 to 1 but a Vasst trainning DVD said to keep it at 4 so who is right?.

It could be the heat but Vegas pro 8 always shuts down even a second more of 1hr and 30 min. I put in more fans and I keep my regular fan cooling it down too.

My Western Digital 1TB external harddrive is not NTFS. What is the difference?.

I don't think it's a still pic issue because even my corporate edits stop at 1hr and 30mins of rendering. Can I ask what is your settings when you are rendering a 3-hr event.

Thanks.

debuman, I would typically leave it at 4 as well. However, you're having problems and this is one change that *may* help your particular problem. Notice I say MAY. It's worth a shot to see if it works. I'd probably change it back when done.

>My Western Digital 1TB external harddrive is not NTFS. What is the difference?.

The big difference is that FAT32 (what your drive is formatted to) has a file size limit of 4 GB. NTFS can write any size file. In other words, as soon as Vegas tries to write any file, be it a temp file or a finished render, as soon as it gets to the 4gig mark. it will stop. This is a FAT32 issue, not a Vegas one.

This is almost certainly your problem.

Laurence wrote:
"
I use CoffeeCup Pix Converter to batch resize pictures before using them in Vegas slideshows. ... "


Another great tool for this is Xnview

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.html

... and it's free...

My Western Digital 1TB external harddrive is not NTFS.Are you sure??? I didn't know that drives that big were not formatted with NTFS.

But, as Laurence already said, if that is really true, then this is definitely your problem. You can't create a file larger than 4 GBytes, and the render will hang when the output file gets to this size.

I have two different computers that I was having the same issue with and the cause turned out to be the same. I was doing photo montages and had all of my photos and programs on an external Western Digital MyBook, and it would only render up to 3.99 GB which turned out to be about an hour and would crash. When I transfered all of my data and programs to the system drive and tried again, it worked just fine on both computers. I wonder if you are having a similar issue.

The reason it worked on your system disk is obviously because it is formatted NTFS. Reformat your WD MyBook as an NTFS drive and it will work just fine.