"I'm At My Wits End!" -- Wits Now Restored, And Vegas Now Works! 8^)

I had a "Well, DUH!" moment this morning, and thought
to try something new (I had tried the new Sony Vegas HDV
..dll with my old project, but I could not open the project no
matter what I did - it would never quite finish "building peaks",
even with the sound removed completely from the project).
The best I could do with the old .dll is produce a video with
many black frame "blinks". I tried opening an empty project
with the new .dll installed, then imported the defective video
file, and it worked! (Or, at least I think so...;-) I have not yet
dared watch the three copies I made, but I saw nothing wrong
on the camcorder viewing screen during copying. BTW, I
brought in an earlier video with red/black frames (one black
"permanent" one at output with the old .dll), and this one was
not improved (but the single bad frame could be cut out
without problems). Maybe happy editing is ahead with
Vegas...(?)
--DR

 

Extremely promising David, and glad to finally hear some favorable news.

Smarty

 

An update. The three copies of the last were fine on tape, but
for "fun", I ran my first three HDV videos through Mpeg2repair
to check them. The first (that went through three editing
programs to finish it, and which showed red frames on the
Vegas timeline) had 0 errors(!). The second, which had red
frames on the timeline and a black "blink" frame, had 2 bad
frames and 1514 corrupt bytes, but Mpeg2repair brought
the errors to 0 (but left that one black frame, which I could
not successfully edit out). My last video, which showed no red
frames until I tried to output it, went out to tape successfully,
and had 0 errors in Mpeg2repair. So, two were fine as-is with
the old Vegas .dll file (but it didn't look like they were at the
time), and one was mostly correctable.

On to my experience with the new Vegas Pro 8 .dll (thanks
for pointing it out to me - and most of the below is now on
the Sony Vegas forum in the .dll thread).

I am now happy to finally have computer hardware and a
new .dll that permit trouble-free editing with Vegas and
HDV - except that I tried a capture using Vegas with scene
splitting, and it failed in the same way it always has for me
(there were three frames at the tail of the clip before, and
two at the head of the clip ahead that needed to be
removed for a clean picture cut - and there was usually no
sound with the last five or six frames in a clip before the split).

I ran some tests that may be of interest here. I ran a single
clip split by Vegas (with the bad ending frames) through a
program called Mpeg2repair, and it reported (not surprisingly,
at least for the picture) 1 corrupted frame, 0 corrupted audio,
69 corrupted video bytes, and 0 time stamp gaps. I also
made a file of a few unmodified clips butted together (these
showed bad frames at the ends, but I did not use clip ends
at the loop ends when making the file), and when this file
was scanned (surprisingly - but I guess making this file was
essentially reconstructing the original unsplit video), it
showed 0 errors. I then made a file of a few clips that I
had modified by removing bad frames at the ends, and
the scan (not surprisingly) showed 0 errors. It will take
me a bit more time to prepare clips for editing (if I want
to do this all at once), but I can skim quickly along the
timeline and stop at the easily-spotted cuts and remove
the three frames on the left and two frames on the right of
each cut fairly easily and quickly. This is not perfect
(especially with a cut that is tight), but this is workable for
me and it is a minor problem compared with my earlier
ones (and I can use HDVSplit for capturing with frame
accurate scene-splitting if desired).

I just made a five-minute test video from the 19 clips
captured for the tests above (which were trimmed manually,
using cuts instead of rolling back the ends, if that makes any
difference), with added head and tail leaders, a title, some
brightness-contrast keyframing, and transitions between most
of the clips. The output file appears to have no flaws, and
when scanned with Mpeg2repair, it showed no errors.

YAY! 8^)

Thanks, again!

--David Ruether
www.donferrario.com/ruether

 

Yay!!!