This is a new one.. error during rendering, any ideas?

I completed a project, my deadline is Wednesday which is when I'm supposed to hand the finished video over to my client. I am trying to render the footage tonight in mpeg2 to import into DVDA.. when I render I continually get this error message. "An error occurred while creating the media file.. The reason for the error could not be determined" (see image below) This is a new one, I've been with pro since 6 and I've NEVER encountered any issues with Vegas while it's rendering a project. So I've come to the experts.. any ideas of whats going on???

pro 11 and yes 64bit.. and I installed the newest update

"Film is a dramatized reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique." - David Lean

Yeah I've tried that and didn't help any. Only thing that helps is shutting it down and rebooting Vegas. But I shouldn't have to do that everytime I edit a project.
I may try to uninstall and reinstall Vegas see if that helps

"Film is a dramatized reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique." - David Lean

Have you made any changes to the template you are using to render with? I know that some changes I've made, like increasing the bit-rate too much in Sony AVC using 1280x544, it will give this error. Try rendering with a standard template that was installed by Vegas, such as "Program Stream NTSC Widescreen".

-Jim.

Paul,

Make sure you are using a DVD Architect template. Make sure you are not rendering out the audio too (make sure audio is disable in the rendering options).

For DVD Architect, you need to render out the video and audio separately into two different files. I'm not sure, but Vegas might complain if you are trying to render your video with audio when you are using a DVD Architect template. So check this first. If your audio is stereo, you can choose either PCM or AC3-stereo. Go with PCM (uncompressed) and if you don't have enough DVD space, then decide later in DVD Architect to convert it to AC3-stereo.


If it is still no go for you, you can try to let DVD Architect render it to MPEG-2 for you if Vegas is being a pain in the arse.

From Vegas, render out your file as an AVI using either a LOSSLESS or VISUALLY LOSSLESS codec. Hopefully, Vegas won't complain here as well.


For LOSSLESS, I use Lagarith. There's also Huffyuv as well. To reduce colorspace conversions errors, set your LOSSLESS codec to RGB and whatever bit-depth your project is currently in. I usually work in 32-bit, so I set it Lagarith to RGB-32bit.

A VISUALLY LOSSLESS codec will take up less space than a LOSSLESS codec if hdd space is a concern. A VISUALLY LOSSLESS codec will be just as good as a LOSSLESS codec, since humans won't be able to tell the difference anyways.


Lagarith and Huffyuv are free open source codecs. Google it if you don't already have the codecs.

Cineform and Avid's DNxHD codecs are excellent VISUALLY LOSSLESS codecs. Your version of Vegas might already have Cineform. If I am not mistaken, both these codecs are *free* as well. You'll have to Google them to find where to download them if you don't already have them installed.

Then DVD Architect can encode your AVI to MPEG-2 with the highest quality that it can.


Cheers!

sorry i've been sick...
Yes I do everything that Sony provides with Vegas

"Film is a dramatized reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique." - David Lean

If this is the class of "error can't be determined" that you get immediately, could definitely be your settings.

I had a number of higher bitrate presets, things I've been using for years, like 50Mb/s CBR MPEG-2 output, things like that. When I first got Vegas 11, I found a number of these templates errored out with the same sort of message.

I know basically what's happening here. For rendering, Vegas is spawning a subprocess that's using independent modules, such as the Main Concept CODECs, etc. I think the design here is such that Sony's pretty much expecting the Vegas UI to do all the bounds checking for each of these. So they expect the subprocess to pretty much just work... and they fail completely when the subprocess rejects the render, for whatever reason. Clearly, in the case I found, I had parameters that were just dandy in the old version of the Main Concept MPEG-2 engine, but considered out-of-bounds by the new one (I ultimately fixed this by going to a slightly lower bitrate).

I guess I'd find it a little suprising, but maybe less so after my initial experience with Vegas 11, that this might change in-between Vegas 11 releases. Or maybe this was a template you hadn't used before with Vegas 11. Either way, that's the one source of this kind of error I've run into before, and with at least a credible explanation.

-Dave