hi john, hope you're staying cool....

so, you reckon it was in the 'render as' name rather than the veg/timeline name?

you're probably right - i wasn't given the opportunity to name the 'render as' file, which obviously contained a number of illegal characters.

will have to watch out for that in future.

Because I'm lazy, I try to avoid the special characters that DOS 2.1 complained about just so I don't have to deal with odd things that sometimes happen.

I've had the "." cause issues with the name stopping at the "." in certain programs in the past. Back in the nineties, AutoCAD would allow one to save project files with long filenames but layers still had to be DOS names. I just don't even want to know why some things happen anymore.

My overall comfort level has been good, but I'm beginning to worry about having enough water for showers if we don't get some precipitation in the region.

Update

In Vegas Pro 11, I was able to render using special characters in the title by changing the render template to [I]CPU Only[/I].

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40618156/2014-01-11%20Names/3.5m's%20(ep4).png

John, now why would you even THINK of doing that? Selecting CPU only to get over the Spec Characters? I'm in awe...... However, we are still left with the "issue".

Cheers

Grazie

"[I]why would you even THINK of doing that? Selecting CPU only to get over the Spec Characters?[/I]"

Every time I see something unusual, the first thing I do is check the state of the GPU. Just gun shy, I guess. Though special characters have been problematic in the past, I think we may be past most of the problems in most situations.

Maybe the special characters were a red herring? I still twitch when I see them in file names.

In any event, John, real nice catch.

Moving this forward, is it at ALL possible that this is at the root of other GPU issues?

Grazie

I don't think having special characters in file names is necessarily related to GPU related issues. I just happened to have a render failure when I tried to render with the file name suggested and tried my first trick (looking at GPU settings in the render template) and the render went to completion.

goodness john, never even thought about that!!!

anyway, job rendered and out the door. no matter, in future i'll be as dumb as possible when naming veggies and renders. i simply don't haveany hair left to pull out.

as an aside, where are you exactly? i'm in the upper hunter, 33 today and looks like a week of it coming in from the west. we're on tank water, but since we have two 10k liter tanks and just the two of us, along with the river (well, stream at the moment;-() outside the front door, i think we'll be ok. even during an earlier drought we were only down to a third of one tank..... (but still had water in the river, if not much)

Near Folsom Lake in Northern California. The satellite map doesn't show the current water level.

No water left at all in Carmel Valley. The state ordered 80% reduction in pumping in order to save the steelhead trout. The environmental lobby then managed to get one of the two dams declared unsafe (earthquake hazard). We already live with all sorts of water restrictions and have done a wonderful job conserving. The problem is, because we've done such a great job there isn't much else that can be done to conserve more.

There was supposed to be a desal plant constructed, but the same people who are taking out the dam are now opposing that. I'm all for saving the environment, but we've all got to live, and you have to be [I]for[/I] something rather than constantly being against every attempt at providing basics, like sufficient clean water

I've said it many times: droughts are acts of nature, but water shortages are acts of man. We could still have adequate water if our representatives had done the right things during all of these changes.

The big story that I'm sure will national news -- assuming we don't finally get some rain -- is that the thirty Monterey Peninsula golf courses will have to go brown. No one is even whispering that yet, but I don't see how it can be avoided.


As for special characters, sometimes you can get a character that looks legal, but isn't. I've occasionally had this happen and couldn't delete a file that somehow had been created, but which Windows couldn't handle. I was finally able to get rid of it by using wildcard deletion at the command level.

I am in Southern California, and what irks me is that the local weather people complain if we have a cloudy day and hope the sunshine returns soon.....??

They don't seem to be bothered by the fact we only have received some 3 inches of rain for the entire year.

The winter down here seems to be an extension of summer 82 F this week????

We need some rain FAST !!!


Ted

ushere,

I can't think of any constraints on file names in Vegas, other than the usual ones for Windows (like "\" and ":"). We had a problem with "%" characters in stills, but that should be fixed now. I tried naming a project "3.5m's (ep4).veg" and it's working fine on my machine.

Chris

My guess is that one of the non-alpha characters was not what it appeared to be. For instance, if you copy/paste the file name from Word, the apostrophe may be replaced by the right single quote. While Windows should have rejected any non-compliant file name at the time of the original file save, I have had file names like this copied across the network from other computers (Macs) that didn't play nice on Windows.

thanks chris / john.

curiosity took over so i created a new project named as before and again it threw up errors. changed the name to something completely harmless, no problem....

i am more than happy to put the error down to MY pc rather than vegas ;-)

A filename is not just a name, it is part of a file/path description which is taken in by the OS. So the complication becomes a combination of name within the characteristics of its path.

Just a thought: is this a 3D project?

Vegas is supposed to support file paths of the full 260 characters that Windows supports. But we recently found some bugs in the media code where we crash if you get close to that limit. If your project is 3D with a separate media file for each eye, then the limit is less that half of that by mistake (something like 120 characters).

Maybe it's the length of the project name rather than any odd characters that's causing the errors?

I'm really intrigued by this problem, so I hope we can find the answer... Can I email you outside of the forum to get a copy of the problem .veg?

According to Microsoft, the following characters can NOT be used in file names:

< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon)
" (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)

May I add that also scandinavian characters in file names or paths - like å, ä ,ö - used to give Vegas problems (severe crashes). Sorry that I cannot remember in what version. I cannot tell if the problem is still there since I have not dared to use any other symbols than "0..9 A..Z _ and . " after those crashes... Probably this is fixed a long time ago...dunno.

Christian

Christian,
I just tested å.veg and ä.mp4 and both are OK for me in a quick test. I rendered å.veg to several formats, and saw no issues. These are far from thorough tests, of course, but my belief is that Vegas 12 should be safe for any unicode character that the filesystem can support.

Filenames in Windows use characters from a larger dataset than DOS, but a lot of file I/O in Windows programs use the older DOS filename limitations. so it's still a good idea to avoid the non-standard names.