Too many mpeg-2 clips?

marks27 wrote on 3/10/2010, 5:29 AM

Are there know problems (known to everyone but me) relating to the processing of mpeg-2 projects that contain large(-ish) numbers of clips.

Trying to simply product a DVD compilation of JVC camera clips, converted by someone else to MPEG-2 (albeit 1920x108050i). I have had the same trouble with straight 720/576 SD mpeg-2 -- to many clips and it's belly up.

When I get to 40 or so clips I get crashes out of Vegas 8. Version 7 is better but i still have to tread very lightly.

I stumbled upon a thread where "blink" mentioned a tool to allow for a settings change such that you could access > 2Gb of RAM. Is this the only solution (running 32bit XP)?

I love Vegas, but what should have been a trivial job has been killing me.

Would transcoding to something like MXF be better?

All advice welcome.

Thanks,

marks

Comments

NickHope wrote on 3/10/2010, 6:23 AM

Yes, I remember this issue. From what I recall that memory tweak does not help; You're just limited to a number of MPEG files.

My issue was with MPEG2 1080i50 program stream files that had been smart rendered in Womble MPEG Video Wizard. My solution was to smart render them all in Vegas Pro 8 to transport stream files as a batch using the Veggie Toolkit from Peach Rock. Then they get handled by Sony's codec in Vegas and all is fine. I did it all overnight in the fully functioning demo. But with standard definition files I'm not sure if you can do transport stream and fix the problem. As you suggest, you might need to chose another format.

vegemite wrote on 3/10/2010, 4:31 PM

I know this is of little direct help to you, but your problem is not universal. I have just completed a short screenplay that contained several hundred MPEG-2 files using Vegas 8 (1920x1080 50i) and it did not miss a beat over a couple of months.

Could it be something in your particular setup?

NickHope wrote on 3/13/2010, 9:44 AM

Vegemite were those program stream files? I think those are the ones that cause the problems.

It's a known problem. If you go back through the release notes for 7 and 8, at some point they "increased the number of mpeg files that could be opened on the timeline", or words to that effect. But it's still limited as far as I know. No problem with transport stream files though.