Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 5/29/2007, 6:57 AM
Use the Support button at the top of this page, if you have not done so already, and submit this as a bug report. I don't think that people at Sony read these forums with any consistency, and it's never been clear, when they do read them, exactly where that person actually works in the organization. However, I am pretty sure that the Support submissions get read by someone whose job it is to not only provide responses to you, but also submit bug reports to engineering.

This asylum is pretty much run by the inmates.
ro_max wrote on 5/29/2007, 7:01 AM
Hopefully others are tired of this as well......

Oh, yes. It has already messed up several hours worth of rendering.

Edit: I can't find a "bug report" feature, just general support requests.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/29/2007, 9:22 AM
people have complained about this for years. it's a very unstable bug that's near impossible (i've found) to reproduce on different machines. IE it can happen on my machine in the exact same spot in a project, but if you did every single step i did with all the same media, you couldn't get it.

best you can do is use phone-mail support. :/ looks like the bug reporting feature is gone (but they added a 3rd party support company?).

Hey, the third part is a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Perhaps call them & have them fix it. :D
johnmeyer wrote on 5/29/2007, 10:23 AM
people have complained about this for years. it's a very unstable bug that's near impossible (i've found) to reproduce on different machines.

I think this one is a little different (although perhaps not) in that it is being reported with HDV only, and is always exactly two frames.
john-beale wrote on 5/29/2007, 11:36 AM
On my system, it happens with HDV (never saw it with DV) but it is sometimes one and sometimes two frames. If you zoom way in on the timeline, the thumbnail image of the frame on the timeline is good, but the preview window shows black. Sometimes if you close and reopen the project, it's ok again. It is "real" in the sense that rendering the video does show you that black frame in your output.
jrazz wrote on 5/29/2007, 11:42 AM
This asylum is pretty much run by the inmates.

John,

I caught your reference... that was a good book; I read it while on a plane trip.

j razz
ro_max wrote on 5/29/2007, 11:50 AM
Yes, with HDV and always exactly two frames (so far at least). And they stay in the same place too. Sometimes I can make them go away (for a while) by closing the current project, opening some other project, closing that and reopening the first project. On the other hand, if I just close Vegas and reopen it with the same project, the black frames are back.
jeff-beardall wrote on 5/29/2007, 5:09 PM
it's a memory cache issue...as far as i can see...and at least in my experience, if you change your ram preview amount the black frames go away...it went away for awhile permanently...version 6.0 (with DV), but is back with a vengeance on HDV footage in version 7. several times I've taken preview DVDs to clients and just hung my head in shame when they popped up. oh well...am i tired of this...yes, do i think anything will ever be permanently done about it...nope.
johnmeyer wrote on 5/29/2007, 5:23 PM
I caught your reference... that was a good book; I read it while on a plane trip.

Alan Cooper and his wife Susan used to be good friends. Alan invented Visual Basic which he sold to Microsoft for an embarrassingly small amount of money. He then started consulting on user interface design, and that book was a major part of that whole stretch of his life. Absolutely fascinating guy.
Serena wrote on 5/29/2007, 11:13 PM
I've no desire to tempt the fates, but I don't encounter this black frame problem, neither editing nor rendering. Starting with Vegas 5 and DV, and going through v6 and v7 with HDV. I guess I did get some black frames using V5, but they were caused by my not closing cuts up properly. Is it somehow related to hardware (and firmware) rather than to Vegas? I used v5 on a Sony laptop and otherwise AMD CPUs.
It might be useful to see whether there is any common factor (other than Vegas) which might point to the source of the error. System hardware, OS, size of project (length and number of tracks, HDV, DV). What percentage of users encounter the problem?
ushere wrote on 5/30/2007, 3:32 AM
i for one have / am suffering two black frames here and there. cap with internal and with hdv split. no rhyme or reason, but they crop up every so often. bloody annoying to say the least.

leslie

3.2-2gb-asus mb. projects media (capture) usually 30mins plus.
JJKizak wrote on 5/30/2007, 5:39 AM
My very weak theory on this subject is during ripple edits sometimes a clip will be dragged all the way from the end to the beginning creating a black frame. This only happened to me while dragging a clip from the end to the beginning of a project over the in-between clips. Sometimes all hell would break loose. I use the copy/paste now but sometimes it gets shaky and copy/pastes over existing clips and I traced this to the clicking/highlight/mouse action----the mouse pointer not being exactly in a clips "neutral area" because the timeline wasn't espanded enough to view the insides of the clip properly. Couple this action to not "unhighlighting" another forgotton clip event prior to copy/pasting and "gazowee" what the hell happened?
JJK
Laurence wrote on 5/30/2007, 5:57 AM
There is nothing like waiting six hours for a render, only to find you need to do it again because of this problem. Often a second or third render has new black frames in new locations. As far as I'm concerned, native m2t editing is not practical until this bug is fixed.

I get it when I work with m2t files regularly but I never get it working with Cineform. It is an absolutely horrible bug in my opinion, and yet Madison doesn't even seem to aknowledge it's existence.

Until it is fixed, my recommendation is just to work with Cineform.

MarkFoley wrote on 5/30/2007, 9:11 AM
It appears I only get the bug when the cips run for extended time with no breaks in the timecode.
mbryant wrote on 5/31/2007, 4:55 AM
I reported this as a bug previously, as did another forum member. See this thread:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=519409Black frames thread[/link]

After going through several stages of them closing the item with a "try this and see if it helps" response I finally gave up.

Mark
MarkFoley wrote on 5/31/2007, 6:53 AM
After looking at that thread, I decided to put one of my m2t files on the timeline and one of the Gearshift-produced proxies above it...and the 2 blackframes were only on the proxie....hmmm....so know I don't know if this is indeed a capture issue or a dv proxie creation issue....
PeterWright wrote on 5/31/2007, 7:05 AM
It's not just proxies, Mark - I have this with m2t files, both from tape and from DR60 direct to HD footage.

So far I've solved it by rendering to new track, which brings the missing frames back, but it's not a good situation ....
ro_max wrote on 5/31/2007, 7:44 AM
...maybe not, but at least it is a workaround. I'm going to give that a try. Thanks for the tip.
john-beale wrote on 6/1/2007, 10:25 AM
Editing a 2-cam shoot, just came across the 2-black-frame HDV bug again, on both cameras, within seconds of each other! So I am forced to cut between them at the split second between the breaks. This must get fixed. I submitted the below comment to Sony support- let's see what they say.
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Sometimes, two consecutive black frames appear in HDV format 1080i video from a Sony FX1 when viewed within Vegas 7.0e, although the video is otherwise normal. This is a bug in Vegas. I have checked and these two black frames do NOT appear when the same .m2t file is viewed in other applications. Womble MPEG Video Wizard (2005) and Nero Showtime 2.0.1.9 both display the .m2t file 100% correctly with no black frames.

The spurious black frames appear both from within Vegas, and on rendered files after export (for example Cineform HDV-Intermediate and MPEG2 output). It is not just me with this problem- many other people see this problem also, for example see
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=529347&Replies=18

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submitted - The reference number for your question is '070601-000056'.