Frequent issue when rendering from DVD source

[armyofquad]

I frequently run into an issue with Vegas 13 freezing during rendering when following this sequence of events:

Rip source from a DVD.
Run into audio confusion when importing the source into the Vegas session - it pulls in multiple audio streams into separate tracks and I'm unsure which is the stereo and which is the 5.1, since it pulls both in as stereo.
Use tsmuxer to separate out video and audio streams, to keep things straight.
Pull in separate video source and separate audio source that I now have as a result of using tsmuxer.
Finish my project.
Go to render - at some point, the render freezes on a frame, requiring me to force the app closed.
Try different drivers, and a multitude of things - consistently the render freezes on the exact same frame of the mpg.

I have found that if I pull in the original DVD rip and just delete the audio tracks, and use that as my video source, instead of the stand alone video source I got from tsmuxer, I am able to render, so I do have a workaround.

But it keeps pissing me off that I'm regularly running into problems like this.

Is this a problem with tsmuxer doing something screwy when demuxing the video? Or is this a problem with Vegas?

What gives?

It is rather frustrating to spend hours laying out a project just right, and to then have to troubleshoot stupid crap like this because the render won't complete - sick and tired of the whims of buggy programming holding my hours of work hostage.

[armyofquad]

Ok, this gets a little more bizarre.
I ran into a 2nd occurrence of this same problem on my current project - of course I can only discover it after working around the first occurrence and cueing up yet another render attempt - the multiple renders it takes to work around buggy programming issues continues to waste further time in working on projects.

So the 2nd occurrence was from a DVD quality mpg that was exacted from a blu-ray disc - that is, it was an extra on the bluray that was formatted in 720x480 full screen mpg. I use makemkv to extract from bluray, so my original file was an mkv, which Vegas won't acknowledge, so I had used tsmuxer to demux the video and audio into separate files, and as a result was running into the freeze issue.

What to do...

So - I looked through my toolbox, and found mkvextract, and used that to extract the mpg from the mkv. It pulled out another silent mpg, with the exact same file size as the silent mpg that tsmuxer had extracted.

Yet - Vegas has no problem with this mpg, and has proceeded to the 3rd freeze, of yet another source that I now have to move on to troubleshooting....

Why is Vegas freezing on tsmuxer demux files, but perfectly find with identical content extracted from mkvextract?

[armyofquad]

And now it freezes at a different spot for one of the replaced files that it previously rendered past.

Ugh.

I hate how Vegas keeps holding my work hostage!

Does anyone make video editing software that actually works?

[aedipuss]

first thing i'd do is update to a newer version of vegas. unless you're running on win7, v13 is really outdated. i'm stuck on v16 which works really well but it's as new as i can run with win8.1 vegas pro goes on sale often for little money. i also have premiere pro, but much prefer vegas pro.

[armyofquad]

This is absolutely infuriating!

It seems my mkvextract file is having the same problem as the tsmuxer extract.

The problem is - I have no alternate method of getting an mpg from this bluray source. The only thing I have that can extract from blu ray is mkvmaker, which means I can only start with an mkv, and tsmuxer and mkvextract are the only tools I have that will get an mpg out of an mkv, but they keep giving me mpg files that break and freeze Vegas.

All my hard work is being held hostage by this absolute crap programming - I hate that computer programmers continue to churn out this garbage that keeps interfering with my work!

How in the heck can if just get a damn video editor that actually works like it's supposed to? For the love of almighty - someone please let me actually get a render of this hours worth of work!

[armyofquad]

first thing i'd do is update to a newer version of vegas. unless you're running on win7, v13 is really outdated. i'm stuck on v16 which works really well but it's as new as i can run with win8.1 vegas pro goes on sale often for little money. i also have premiere pro, but much prefer vegas pro.

I don't even know if a new version will do what I want it to do. The thought of paying money for what will likely be a piece of crap that is completely unintuitive and set me back at the start of figuring out how to do anything since no one can leave well enough alone hardly seems like a good idea. I mean - how many times do we have to deal with frequent calls from people that can't figure out how to do something in outlook, because some update moved around a bunch of settings? In the over 20 years that outlook has existed, Microsoft can't figure out how to layout the damn menu? This is one of the huge problems with software programmers - they can't agree on a damn layout, and stick with it! So, no, once I have a layout I'm used to, I am not inclined to "upgrade" to something that is going to mess with my workflow that I've spent years getting in the swing of.

[Alwyn]

I don't have a Bluray rip to play with at the moment, but I'd suggest giving AVIDemux a go to "convert" the MKV to MPG.

Open your MKV, on the audio menu choose the track you want to keep, down the left hand side choose Video>Copy, Audio>Copy, and for the Output Format choose MPEG PS Muxer (assuming your Bluray video codec is MPEG2).

Then save it. It should smart-render to an MPEG file.

Otherwise, I'd second aedipuss; V13 is pretty old.

[armyofquad]

For the sake of argument, I checked out the trial version of Vegas 21.

It also freezes on the mpgs if I do a test render on a portion of one.

Absolutely ridiculous that in 21 versions they haven't been able to come up with something stable enough to render from a standard .mpg file.

[armyofquad]

I don't have a Bluray rip to play with at the moment, but I'd suggest giving AVIDemux a go to "convert" the MKV to MPG.

Open your MKV, on the audio menu choose the track you want to keep, down the left hand side choose Video>Copy, Audio>Copy, and for the Output Format choose MPEG PS Muxer (assuming your Bluray video codec is MPEG2).

Then save it. It should smart-render to an MPEG file.

Otherwise, I'd second aedipuss; V13 is pretty old.

This worked!

Turns out I already have avidemux - just didn't think to use it since avi wasn't any part of the conversion I was looking to do.

Not sure what is going on, but it seems there seems to be some deep flaw in Vegas that doesn't like dealing with an mpg stripped of it's sound, which has carried over all the way to the current version. Which only further supports my decision to not upgrade.

Thanks Alwyn, I owe you a coke.

[Alwyn]

Good oh!

[aedipuss]

vegas and other editing softwares are designed to take in first gen video/audio mostly from cams/mics. these type editing software is not designed to input and work with finalized end user output type video.

[Alwyn]

Magix video editors have been eating MPEG 2 and 4 for breakfast for many years.

Any half-decent NLE will have no trouble with this, provided the file is compliant, which in this case from Tsmuxer and Mkvextract, it appears was not.

[armyofquad]

Magix video editors have been eating MPEG 2 and 4 for breakfast for many years.

Any half-decent NLE will have no trouble with this, provided the file is compliant, which in this case from Tsmuxer and Mkvextract, it appears was not.

Turns out there is something to this. I ran into this problem yet again - and again I didn't think to turn to avidemux because I'm not working with avi files.

It seems a big part of my problem may be my use of tsmuxer and mkvextract - they appear to be tools designed by someone not knowing what they're doing, that can create out of spec or flawed is some way mpg files, that will crash Vegas.

These apps should be approached with caution, and be the first thing to scrutinize when running into problematic extracted files.

[davexnet]

Does tsmuxer even create mpg files?
mkvextract yields the elementary streams, m2v and mp2/ac3 audio - you still don't get a muxed mpeg

[armyofquad]

Does tsmuxer even create mpg files?
mkvextract yields the elementary streams, m2v and mp2/ac3 audio - you still don't get a muxed mpeg

Ok, perhaps "create" isn't the technically correct term.

My understanding of using tsmuxer to demux, or using mkvextract to extract, is they should just be extracting what exists. But, the bottom line for me is, the files they produced in these cases, were files that ended up causing problems and flat out caused Vegas to crash, with the results of avidemux producing a file that worked fine in Vegas. I don't know why that is, but that is my experience, and it cost me hours of time.

[rgr]

It seems a big part of my problem may be my use of tsmuxer and mkvextract - they appear to be tools designed by someone not knowing what they're doing, that can create out of spec or flawed is some way mpg files, that will crash Vegas.

Is your mpg file being opened in Vegas by mcplug2 or by mxhevcplug?