I have a minature video cam that saves video in AVI

A really basic question here -- which one?

It is a key chain cam. 720 x 480 30 fps. I will be using is to shoot video when mounted on radio controlled aircraft. It weighs 15 grams and looks like a car alarm actuator. It is a product from China so there is not a lot of information on its internal specifications. A lot of the gleaned info from owners is listed here:
http://www.chucklohr.com/808/

Other info is located at:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1115052
http://forums.parallax.com/forums/default.aspx?f=15&m=378648&p=1&ord=a

Thank you.

Download and install the demo version of the MainConcept MJPEG codec.
As long as you're not using it to encode, it won't put the watermark on the output.

Mike

Thank you. If I install the demo version and then make an mpeg 2 video from Vegas, will the watermark appear? Currenty I encode the video with the MainConcept MPEG-2 codec supplied in Vegas7. There is no watermarks.

If I install the demo version and then make an mpeg 2 video from Vegas, will the watermark appear?

No. MJPEG and MPEG are two entirely different codecs. Apples and oranges.

Please let us know if Mike's solution worked for you and I will add it to my beginner's tutorial. Thanks.

IMHO something about the avi is *off* -- know that doesn't sound too tech, but without playing with it can't say which part, which in the end won't likely matter anyway. Avery writes V/Dub to handle pretty much anything legal, & on a huge range of hardware. Sony doesn't have to do that with Vega, if they could, so they don't or can't or something. Your problem is getting the video into Vegas...

You might get away with changing or setting the default decoder for this avi on your system -- I didn't read far enough into the fan page to look for the fourCC code it uses, but V/Dub or mediainfo, or one of the fourcc changers should tell you [the changers let you swap it to something else]. Vegas likes RGB vs. the YUV types, & in some cases like HUFFYUV, all it takes is a checkbox in the codec settings.

The avi files themselves could also be slightly mis-written, & a stream copy in V/Dub might fix it with no re-encoding quality loss. Or you could render to an intermediate, or frame serve using V/Dub, or AviSynth -> VFAPI to get your video onto the timeline. You could also research putting the internal video into another external wrapper format, as when you save it to Quicktime -- I'd just watch the CPU activity to try & make sure the video's not reencoded, but just copied into the Q/Time wrapper.

Far as why Vegas won't take it, could be it can't, period, or it could be the file's off like I started.

Or it could be encoded MJPEG, as Mike's response, as well as internet search results, indicates.

It worked….but. The clip loaded into Vegas but the last represented frame on the time line was solid red. I dragged another copy of the file into the time line. It also had the last represented frame as a solid red one. I then dragged the second clip to the same track as the first one and slid the start of second over the end of the first to make an automatic fade transition. The red disappeared on the first clip. The resultant transition was jerky. I separated the clips and shortened the length of the first clip. When I lengthen it back out, the red frame was gone. I again slid the clips back together and the transition is still jerky. It may be just the quality of the video.