Video renders but playback fails at same spot

Hi. I'm using the 18.1.4 build 9 (paid for) version of DR. Yesterday a strange problem cropped up.

I (apparently) successfully rendered a video of just over 1 hour. It's a pretty basic video of a lecture. It appears to render to the very end of the video perfectly. The out point is at the end of the video, and when watching it render I can see that it renders to the end.

But when I play it in QuickTime, or upload it to YouTube, the last few minutes are missing. I have re-rendered a few times and the playback always fails at the same spot - in the middle of a section with one long video and audio clip. Nothing different is happening at the spot where playback fails.

I've tried clearing the (unused files) render cache. There is plenty of space on the drive where I'm saving the file. For formatting, I have selected the default YouTube settings on DR.

The file is MPEG-4 movie at 4.29GB. Duration 1:05:12, but QuickTime and YouTube only show it as 55:25.

I need to get the video uploaded, and am at a complete loss as to why this is happening and how I can fix it. Does anyone know what could be causing this? Thank you.

P.S. This is my usual way of rendering lecture videos. I have done this many times and have never had a problem like this before.

On the Deliver page, under the Viewer, you have the Render set to Entire Timeline?

UPDATE: I still don't know what is causing the problem, but I've found a workaround. I duplicated the project in DR and tried rendering it from the copy. Same problem. But, in the copy, I split the video into two sections and rendered each separately. These both work. It's certainly not what I had originally planned, but it will get the job done.

I'm still interested in hearing from anyone who has had the same experience and/or has suggestions for what might have gone wrong. Thank you.

I had the In point at the beginning of the video, and the Out point at the end. There was a gap at the start of the timeline that I did not want to render. I always do it this way. In fact, when I did the workaround and made the two smaller videos instead of one long one, I did this and it worked perfectly.

No forgotten out point left behind on the timeline?

The file is MPEG-4 movie at 4.29GB.

Is there any chance that you're rendering the video to (or perhaps copying it to) media that doesn't support files larger than 4GB? This is a limitation of file systems often used with SD cards or flash memory drives. I can visualize your video file simply being truncated to the 4GB limit if that happened.

… or not enough disk space in the destination?

The file is MPEG-4 movie at 4.29GB.

Is there any chance that you're rendering the video to (or perhaps copying it to) media that doesn't support files larger than 4GB? This is a limitation of file systems often used with SD cards or flash memory drives. I can visualize your video file simply being truncated to the 4GB limit if that happened.

That's an interesting point! All the fusion work I did on the intro and outro boards certainly made the file larger than usual. I will try to find out if my external hard drive has a 4G limit for individual files even though it has a much larger capacity overall. Thank you for this suggestion!

The file is MPEG-4 movie at 4.29GB.

Is there any chance that you're rendering the video to (or perhaps copying it to) media that doesn't support files larger than 4GB? This is a limitation of file systems often used with SD cards or flash memory drives. I can visualize your video file simply being truncated to the 4GB limit if that happened.

Thank you again Sean Nelson. The problem was, indeed, a restriction on my external hard drive for individual file sizes. Because (overall) it holds 2TB, I thought that file size couldn't have been a problem, but it was. With the help of a Seagate customer support person (thank you, Miltos!), I've reformatted the drive and this shouldn't be a problem any longer.

Again, thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

The problem was, indeed, a restriction on my external hard drive for individual file sizes. Because (overall) it holds 2TB, I thought that file size couldn't have been a problem, but it was.

Glad to know you found the problem. To be honest, I'm a little surprised that your system wouldn't have given you some sort of warning message when copying a file to a file system that doesn't support files that are that large, but I figured it was worth checking because the amount of time your video was missing seemed roughly proportional to the amount that it was over 4GB, and whenever I hear of people having trouble with files near that 4GB limit it's one of the first things I think of. You're now the member of a not-very-exclusive club of people who've run afoul of that rather clandestine restriction.