I'm having endless problems with Vegas Pro 8.0b rendering such that it's proving totally impractical for any kind of reliable weekly video podcast.

Now admittedly the problem is mainly my fault - I spent all my money on camera gear, and am saving for a decent workstation set-up so my hardware is under-powered, but I'm now thinking maybe I just have to abandon the PC world and go the Mac route - which is a pain as I use PCs for work.

What annoys me is the way Vegas "Locks up" at random, completely different parts each time I try and render or do a "Burn to Blu-Ray". I thought at first this was because of disk space or HD-workflow, but even when rendering to 320x240 and dividing a 30 minute "show" into 10 minute chunks for YouTube the wretched thing just locks up.

Sometimes it just stops with "The program has stopped responding", other times it just sits there with a Cancel button but no new frames being generated.

I'm running Vista Ultimate, an over-specced laptop (4GB with the most powerful processor I could get when purchased 9 months ago), 45GB hard disk (NTFS) space free and an external drive with about 200GB free (FAT).

So will my problems go away when I buy a decent workstation or is Vegas just as flaky as I think it is when it comes to rendering hi-def source material (my camera can't capture SD so that's not an option) and would I be better off just moving to Mac and Final Cut Pro?

All-in-all I love using Vegas (although Pro Titler also seems very buggy - with black text being almost impossible to subsequently edit) but the rendering makes it unusable and it's frustrating as hell to have to keep kicking off 3-8 hour render cycles that then just lock up at 99% or 78% or 51% or ....

I have never had problems with render apart form the time i have some dodgy/error footage,
I have in the last week the Border plugin has caused an issue, but only sometimes.

I have rendered to MPEG1,2, MOV, WMV, but not to Blu-Ray.

Have you tried just rendering to file?

Yes most of the failed renders were to hard drive. I've tried switching between the external hard drive (FAT) and the internal one (NTFS) in the hope that maybe it was some sort of hard drive issue to no avail.

When you render to Blu-Ray I believe it renders the image to a file on disc before burning the Blu-Ray anyway so reference to Blu-Ray is a bit of a red herring.

I have a new show to put together this weekend so it will be interesting to see if I have the same problems or if this is a one off with the project I have been using.

Try an unstall and re-install to see if that helps or hold the SHIFT key while booting Vegas that will re-set all parameters to default.

Check some other software is not have a conflict with it, try an turn as much off as possible.

Render small chunks to see if you can isolate the bad section

Thanks all for the replies. It does seem that there is something about a particular project causing the problem. New projects I've created today are all rendering fine. I'm changing my workflow to render out segments which then get pulled in to another project and that seems to be working for me (touch wood!)

If possible, try grouping tracks and render them solo, then merge back into the project.
Too many fx jobs can put Vegas into not responding state.

It's even possible to get it in Not Responding state without using any video files at all.
See my post here;

http://www.videoforums.co.uk/sony-ve...r-problem.html