Can't render videos

[cryptyk]

I'm getting errors trying to render videos.
I first tried Mpeg2 and got the following stack trace (which, of course is in a MessageBox window and isn't copy/pastable, so I'll type it out...):
Exception: Unspecified Error
at UltraGauge.RenderVideo.BuildMainConceptGraph(...)
at UltraGauge.UltraGaugeWindow.V(...)

I get the same thing when rendering out to uncompressed AVI.

When I tried WMV, I got a slightly different error:
Value cannot be null: sourcePin

[cryptyk]

This is pretty frustrating. I had my video project working in the trial, and spent $250 to purchase the software thinking that I'd have been done in minutes.
I installed the pay version on my Vista desktop and chose my "home" license. That's when I got the render errors above.
So I installed everything on my Win7 laptop, which is a fresh, clean install of Windows. Same error there. So I figure maybe it's a Vista/7 thing. Fine.
I spin up an XP SP3 box, fresh install because I want to get this stupid video done tonight. I choose laptop for my license type, but that fails because my other laptop is apparently using the license. The message tells me to deactivate the other machine first. Fine.
I open up the Win7 laptop and look for a way to deactivate. No menus say that, no help topics say it, so I uninstall figuring that should work. But of course, it doesn't.
So now I have a laptop taking up the license for an uninstalled version of the software. Whatever. At least now that I have XP installed, this thing will probably work. I tell the XP laptop to use the "work" license, and recreate my project (for the third time, on the third machine).
Go to render, and I get the exact same error as the other two machines. I'm convinced now that there is no way this can possibly work. I took three brand new operating systems and installed nothing except Dashware, and all I get are error messages.

[cryptyk]

I had a thought. The common thing between all of the machines is the video/data file I'm using to create the project. Even though the video plays just fine in Dashware, it might have some weird setting that prevents DW from encoding it. I'm going to go try rendering something in Motion.

[cryptyk]

Ugh. It was the video file.
Here's what I've done to work around the problem. I opened up Motion and created a new project of the same length as the video Dashware wouldn't open. I rendered a blue background there, ran Dashware against that file, then brought the resulting Dashware movie back into Final Cut Pro where I chroma-keyed the real video over the blue-screen.

Hopefully this helps someone else in the future.

So how to I deactivate my unused keys?

[Rolf]

Sent you an email.

[skeewbob]

I'm getting the same error message as shown below and can't render video. I've tried several input video formats (avi, mp4, wmv, etc) and none of them work. I am running DashWare 1.1.1, Windows XP SP3, Adobe Premiere CS3, DivX codecs, and I am using "Alive HD Video Converter" to try different video formats. I can load and watch video in DashWare, but can't render. Cryptyk's fix is not a good workaround for me. Are there any other solutions?
Thanks,
Bob

I'm getting errors trying to render videos.
I first tried Mpeg2 and got the following stack trace (which, of course is in a MessageBox window and isn't copy/pastable, so I'll type it out...):
Exception: Unspecified Error
at UltraGauge.RenderVideo.BuildMainConceptGraph(...)
at UltraGauge.UltraGaugeWindow.V(...)

I get the same thing when rendering out to uncompressed AVI.

When I tried WMV, I got a slightly different error:
Value cannot be null: sourcePin

[MarkVaden]

Hi Bob,

We have tested our codecs with DivX, but sometimes codec settings need to be changed depending on the container, codecs etc. Can you ftp me a sample video that doesn't work, so I can try it out? I will pm you with the ftp information.

Thanks,
Mark

[skeewbob]

Thanks for replying Mark. I've ftp'd a video clip that was giving me trouble and look forward to any help you can provide.
-Bob

[MarkVaden]

Hi Bob,

I was able to reproduce the problem. DashWare is having a hard time with that video clip because there is no audio track. I found a bug that was causing some formats without audio to not be able to write video. In the short term, maybe you can add an audio track, and that should solve the problem. We are releasing a new version of DashWare in a week or so, and this bug will be fixed in that release. If you need the bug fix sooner pm me, and we will see what we can do.

Thanks,
Mark

[skeewbob]

Mark, thanks a bunch for looking into this for me. I'll try it again with an audio track and will also look forward to the new DW update as many of my videos don't use the audio track.