Blank Video Preview Window?

JoeMess wrote on 4/14/2008, 12:14 PM
On my main desktop system I am running into the oddest behavior I have ever had with Vegas. This machine has run Vegas 4, 5, 7, and now 8.0b. I can not get the video preview window to show me what is on the timeline. It remains a black box. Anything I put in the trimmer displays perfectly, but the timeline produces nothing. I have no effects on. The slider is to 100%. I have opacity at 100%. It doesn't care if the window is open on the primary or secondary monitor. I am running an ATI 2600 Pro driving two matsushita made CRTs. Both are running at 1024*1280. Blackness for timeline, trimmer is flawless. Any ideas? 8.0b is and has been working flawlessly on my notebook(Vista) and was working flawlessly on this XP machine. This issue started on my XP desktop in the past couple of weeks. The only real change on this has been updating Quicktime to 7.4.5 Pro.

Best regards,

Joe

Comments

Jim H wrote on 4/14/2008, 2:05 PM
I have no clue what could be happening here, but I'm happy to blame it on Apple. (sorry, couldn't resist)
John_Cline wrote on 4/14/2008, 2:42 PM
Any chance that you have accidentally selected the "Preview on External Monitor" button at the top left of the preview window?
rs170a wrote on 4/14/2008, 4:36 PM
Make sure you didn't accidentally click the "Split Screen View" icon.
It's the two-coloured circle at the top left of the Preview window.

Mike
JoeMess wrote on 4/15/2008, 12:39 PM
It doesn't appear to be the split screen or use external monitor buttons. Odd behavior I found last night: I dropped some photos on the time line so I could try to figure out what was going on. When I would resize the duration of the photo, the image would appear in the video preview. As soon as I stopped the resize, the preview would be black again. The image only appears when I am actively changing the photo image. In the case of video, I see occasional flashes, but primarily just a black preview screen. I am getting ready to do a re-install and maybe swap out graphics drivers.

Joe
John_Cline wrote on 4/15/2008, 1:01 PM
There is one other remote possibility; do you have "XP Themes Support" enabled in the Vegas preferences? I know that sometimes the scroll bars in Vegas will turn black with it turned on, but I've not heard of it affecting the preview window. However.... stranger things have happened.
baysidebas wrote on 4/15/2008, 1:13 PM
I don't know what your setup is, but here's how I can reproduce the symptoms you reported.

1. Insert a new video track, make sure that it's track 1 [at the very top].
2. Solo the empty track.
3. Scroll the timeline display so the empty track disappears from view.
4. Slowly go crazy trying to figure out why the preview window is black.
JoeMess wrote on 4/16/2008, 11:01 AM
Wow, chalk this one up to my stupidity. Who would have thought that there was an option menu option to "Mute all Video Tracks"? Well that was it. It appears that Alt + D is the keyboard control, and I must have hit it unintentionally. This setting spans sessions, so it screwed with me for a couple of days. Thank for all the help and input!

Joe