I ran into the following problem yesterday.  A friend wanted me to create a picture video which I thought would be fairly simple.  Problem was, her pictures were still prints.  She got them scanned, but the company scanned them 4 - 6 to a sheet so I couldn't simply add all the pictures, ripple a transition and add music.  I added each .jpg file to the project the number of times a picture appeared on it.  For each file, I panned and zoomed so the real picture filled the screen, animated the picture and zoomed a little closer to add movement, and then repeated the process for each picture in the .jpg file.  I did this for all 80 of her .jpg files, added the album Montage opening and ending, rippled transitions, and added some CD tracks.

When it came time to render, a little over a minute into the process, I got an "Export Failure (render error)".  Nothing seemed unique about where it failed, so I tried again.  Long story short, no matter whether I made a DVD folder, a .mpg file, or a .avi file, I got the same error.  I copied the project and all files to my laptop and got the same results.  I shifted some of the pictures around where the failure was occurring and still got the failure in about the same spot (realtive to time, not picture).

 Turns out the specific picture didn't matter, the hardware didn't matter (Dell XPS 410 desktop with 2 GB RAM or Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop with 2 GB RAM) and the OS didn't matter (WinXP/SP2 on the desktop, Vista on the laptop).

I ended up rendering the project in approximately one minute increments (discovering that some failed at 57 seconds, so I had to go smaller), and then pieced them all together in a final project, getting "almost" the video I wanted.  When I had to break during the song, even though I stopped and started at the right time, after the transition between pieces I lost a small amount of the song since the video clips got "combined".\

Any one with a similar experience?

Render without audio. If this renders fine, tell us what how you add the audio file and what's the file format.

I deleted all of the audio files (1 minute portions of .mp3 files) (not sure if you meant "mute the audio" or change the settings to not include audio) and rendered with the same results: Export failure (render error).  When I render to a "file", it gives me the location.  I should mention that EVERY time it fails, it is just as it is about to start a transition... all of my transitions are dissolves, the 2nd transition available in the 2D list.

 Anything else?

I reduced the project so now all I have are 29 graphics (actually only 7 files since I pan and zoom in each), dissolves between each (a little under 2 minutes), and it fails consistently at the same spot (00:01:40.14)... the beginning of one of the transitions.  The .jpg files are each less than 1 MB.

Do you by chance be using a pictures from a camera that records WAV memos? Check the folder where you have these pictures and see if you can find any .WAV files in there. If you find one move it elsewhere. Then remove and reimport the image where it usually fails.

These images did not come from a camera and there are no .WAV files in the folder with the images.  A company took the paper pictures my friend had, scanned them 4-6 pictures per image, then copied the scanned images (4-6 pictures per .jpg file) to a CD.  I copied the files from the CD to my computer and imported them from there.  If I reduce the size of the project from many minutes to under a minute, everything wokrs fine but I have to then combine the resulting .mpg files.  For the 16 minute project, I did many 45 second segments, so I am confident the pictures themselves are OK.

I think the problem comes because something inside Studio does not like me panning and zooming so much into all the images, or the fact that the same images are used multiple times (again, there are 4-6 pictures in each image I want to display in the video). I have made videos with many pictures that did only a little panning and zooming, using the same transitions, with no problems.

Would you like me to send you the project that fails and 7 .jpg files?

A little more info...

I deleted the transition where the failure occured and the failure point moved to the new transition.

I restored that transition I deleted, deleted the transition before that, and it failed at the start of the picture where the transition was.

I removed all transitions and the render was fine.

I restored the original project (with all transitions), and removed all pan, zoom and rotates and the project rendered fine.

Based on my testing, it looks like Studio 12 has a problem (memory leak?) with many (25+) pan/zoom/rotate/transition combinations.

I don't have S12, but you may be on to something.   I noticed another thread along the same lines recently was posted.

Others with S12 may want to check this out to see if it is a potential bug for everyone.

 

I don't know if this is the exact same issue, but I had a project with a lot of Jpg's with pan and zoom's applied (large files from 8 Megapixel DSLR). When ever I would try to render it would get "out of memory errors" (Studio 10.8). Though my system has 4GB of Ram. In the end I broke it down in to smaller sections of 10-20 pictures, with pan and zooms, and rendered those to AVI and added sound files (MP3's)  after. That did work, as it was a project with hundreds of Jpg's. It was more time consuming, but in the end the program didn't seem to have any problems with many avi files. I saw a similar thread about this, but unfortunately I can't find/add link, and it was a suggestion in there to do the project in this manner.

I have encountered a similar issue with Studio 12 running out of memory where as the user was using a 3GB system. We tried turning off the Page file and it helped the situation. Try that out and let me know.

Marc,

I have tried this with windows-managed pagefile and with my own managed file (min 2 GB max 4 GB)... same results. As I mentioned, I did not get an "out of memory" error, but a Export Failure (Render Error)... I suppose that could be masking a memory error.  Additionally, I have run the same project on my laptop: Dell Inspiron 1525 running Windows Vista, 2 GB RAM, and an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU @ 1.83 GHz.  (My desktop is a Dell XPS 410 running Windows XP/SP2, 2 GB RAM, and an Intel Core 2 CPU running at 2.39 GHz.)

Also recall that I already have a workaround of breaking the project into 1-2 minute pieces, rendering them, and then rendering all the pieces to create the whole. Because this works, I am confident there is nothing wrong with the project itself.

As a software developer myself, I am always looking for problems that are reproducible. As an assist for your the engineering staff and/or developers at Pinnacle, I have created a video showing how with one .jpg file, pans, zooms and transitions, I can consistently get Pinnacle Studio 12 to crash while rendering with normal options. I am hopeful this will lead to a patch.  Here is the link to the video (about 10 minutes, 45 seconds) showing how I create the project and it failing to render a .mpg file twice and a DVD once:  http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3195549/9041422 .  The .jpg file is about 748 KB... nothing special.

I hope this helps lead to a patch.

FYI - Link didn't/doesn't work.

Currently attempting to reproduce. Thank you for posting the video. I hope all bug reports would be this detailed.

Looks like Marc P. was able to get to it... can you still not get it?  Not sure what to do if you can't.  I've tried it from other computers, also.

(Sorry to butt in on the problem you are trying to fix, but the workflow you are using is not likely to get the best end results.  Rather than using the multi-image scans and using P&Z to focus on one photo, I think you would be much better off cropping the image files into single images, and using those for your Studio project (unless the intended effect was to zoom into a single photo from a group).  Almost any image editing software can do this, and there are many free ones out there if you don't already have a favorite.)

Greg,

Had this been the only file I was trying to use, that's what I would have done (if I had time, I would have scanned the photos myself!!).  However, my friend brought over 65+ .jpg files, each with 4-6 photos scanned, and I didn't want to have to load each file and crop and save every photo individually.

I thought it would be quicker and easier to use the tools inside Studio to make the slideshow.  Once it failed, I broke it down to its simplest form to help illustrate a problem and get a little closer to a patched version.

Very good points MrBillSt, but Greg's pointing on a very good work around for your issue. Wouldn't you agree?

Don't get me wrong, I'm still working on reproducing the issue with your very helpful video and hopefully I would get this on a bug report for the QA team, I'm having trouble looking for a comparable JPG to yours in the video. Would it be possible to upload a sample copy of that image though imageshack? That would put the drive our tests faster

Agreed, that would be a workaround, but as I think I mentioned earlier, in this post or another, I already came up with a workaround:  I simply broke the already completed project into smaller segments, rendered each of them separately, then combined the rendered pieces into a single video slideshow... Since I had already done the pans and zooms, that was a lot easier than starting over.

I have hosted the image to imageshack...  how do I make a click here link without showing the real link?:

[click to view image]

direct link:  http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/5230/dc26078ee60485aw4.jpg

MrBillSt:

I have hosted the image to imageshack...  how do I make a click here link without showing the real link?:

[click to view image] <-- This hides it.

 

Marc P.

Any word from engineering / development on whether or not they can repeat the problem?

Bill

Marc is currently on leave but I will ask him when he returns. Hopefully, he will be here on Monday or so.

I've noticed another peculiarity (after reading about OTHER render problems)... I normally turn off background rendering because it tends to slow things down while I build and edit my project.

With this project (Quick: see the link to my video a few posts earlier on how to easily build a project that reliably fails to render), I deleted auxialiary files and turned on background rendering.  While in Edit mode, the project rendered itself in a couple minutes without problem. I switched to Make Movie mode and it rendered itself again... (why render a 2nd time?)  I had the Task Manager running and saw the VM for studio.exe peak at about 410 MB while background rendering in Edit mode and VM peaked at about 480 MB when rendering in Make Moview mode.  I was able to render the file without failure (proving there was nothing inherently wrong with the project!!).

I turned off background rendering, deleted auxiliary files, and tried to render the same project. Task Manager reported the VM grew to over 1.3 GB before I again got the Export Failure (Render Error) message.  (This same project rendered fine a few minutes earlier!)

BOTTOM LINE:  I am more convinced now that studio handles memory management better in bacground rendering than in real-time rendering.

As a possible workaround to the Export Failure (Render Error) message,
1) delete auxiliary files,
2) turn on Background render and wait until it's done,
3) render your movie.

Bill

Thank you for the result. You gave me something to do over the weekend

Am tearing my hair out.

I loaded in some pics, used SmartMovie and have the same problem.  Luckily, I saved the project after loading the pics.  So I got to experiment.

ProjectX -> apply smartmovie -> wont render properly, wont create dvd/avi ..... Export Failure.

ProjectX -> apply different smart movie -> works fine.

ProjectX -> apply another smartmovie -> wont render properly, wont create dvd/avi ..... Export Failure.

Seems to be exceptionally unhappy if there's panning/zooming.

Attempts to get support are like threading cooked spaghetti upwards through tea strainer.  Eventually (and I mean eventually) it got 'escalated' and I'm still waiting.  Meanwhile have spent 5 days on a project that Studio 12 Plus should have done in about 2 hours (max). 

 

What's the resolution of these images?