VS 2020 crashes w/large project

[Cyberherbalist]

A Video Studio project of mine is about 48 minutes long. I've tried a few times to render it to mp4, but it always gets to about 70% complete and then Visual Studio, without any fuss at all, just quits. It's running fine, and then suddenly it vanishes, the render apparently just dying. It leaves three files in the location its rendering to. They are an .mp4 file with 0 bytes, and two other files, a .a and .v file. I'm presuming they contain audio and video information.

For what it's worth, this machine is an ASUS laptop with an i7-7500U CPU with 2 cores running at about 2.6GHz, with 12 GB of memory, and the 2 TB hard drive has 1.4 TB free space.

Perhaps it needs more onboard memory to render a 48 minute long video? Or might there be something else?

EDITED TO ADD: The problem turns out to be a problematic MP4 file. I converted the file to WMV (on advice below), and tried again. Succeeded this time.

[cybernick]

During render check the preview and find out the problematic media. Try to replace that media. Or convert it to VMW if it is MP4.

[Cyberherbalist]

During render check the preview and find out the problematic media. Try to replace that media. Or convert it to VMW if it is MP4.

How do you check the preview during the render? The render window prevents that. [See below]

And what would you look for, if you could see it? And by the way, I cut the video into two parts, and the problem occurs in the second part, but not the first. The second part is only 28 minutes long -- and perhaps one of the component videos does have a problem. All of them were created in VS2020 or VS2019, by the way.

EDITED TO ADD: I just noticed a little click box next to the Pause icon. I clicked it and the preview started following along with what seems to be the render progress. Perhaps I will watch that carefully. This must be what you mean by checking the preview. I'll revisit the question if I find out anything...

[cybernick]

During render check the preview and find out the problematic media. Try to replace that media. Or convert it to VMW if it is MP4.

How do you check the preview during the render? The render window prevents that. [See below]

And what would you look for, if you could see it? And by the way, I cut the video into two parts, and the problem occurs in the second part, but not the first. The second part is only 28 minutes long -- and perhaps one of the component videos does have a problem. All of them were created in VS2020 or VS2019, by the way.

EDITED TO ADD: I just noticed a little click box next to the Pause icon. I clicked it and the preview started following along with what seems to be the render progress. Perhaps I will watch that carefully. This must be what you mean by checking the preview. I'll revisit the question if I find out anything...

Yes this is what I mean. A title, an effect or an overlay in that particular moment can cause that.
In my experience I always had issues with MP4 files in VS2020. Therefore before editing them I convert them to VMW. just a side note for you.

[pogonips]

I had a similar problem a while ago, and as I recall, if I chose a different format than MP4 to render to, maybe AVI, VS still crashed, but instead of leaving an empty file it left a video file that I could play right up to the point where VS encountered the offending content, which helped me identify what to remove.

[cybernick]

I do not know what's wrong but in my case even the high res mp4s are very muddy in VS2020 and unstable (with or without smartproxy). I do not know if I need to install a codec but I convert all videos to VMW which has better quality in my case.

[canuck]

What is vmw? You keep mentioning that in your post or do you mean wmv?

Converting mp4 to wmv will not improve the quality.

[Cyberherbalist]

During render check the preview and find out the problematic media. Try to replace that media. Or convert it to VMW if it is MP4.

How do you check the preview during the render? The render window prevents that. [See below]

And what would you look for, if you could see it? And by the way, I cut the video into two parts, and the problem occurs in the second part, but not the first. The second part is only 28 minutes long -- and perhaps one of the component videos does have a problem. All of them were created in VS2020 or VS2019, by the way.

EDITED TO ADD: I just noticed a little click box next to the Pause icon. I clicked it and the preview started following along with what seems to be the render progress. Perhaps I will watch that carefully. This must be what you mean by checking the preview. I'll revisit the question if I find out anything...

Yes this is what I mean. A title, an effect or an overlay in that particular moment can cause that.
In my experience I always had issues with MP4 files in VS2020. Therefore before editing them I convert them to VMW. just a side note for you.

Yep, was able to identify the problematic file. I did what you suggested and converted to WMV, put that into the project, and was able to get it to render without blowing a fuse.

Thanks for the tips!

[Cyberherbalist]

What is vmw? You keep mentioning that in your post or do you mean wmv?

Converting mp4 to wmv will not improve the quality.

In connection with all this I found this article to be interesting:

MP4 VS WMV: What's the Difference and Which One Is Better?

I think that a practical effect of using WMV might be better stability in VS2020.

[cybernick]

What is vmw? You keep mentioning that in your post or do you mean wmv?

Converting mp4 to wmv will not improve the quality.

Oops sorry typo. WMV.

We strange WMV output of VS2020 is way better then MP4.