Clip problems

Digital Dan wrote on 9/30/2005, 9:26 AM
From my previous post on a series of questions:

4) At the end of each 'clips' I appear to have 2 black frames. This causes discontinuity with the next clip from the same continuous video. Is 'clipping' caused by frame drops? BTW: This does not seem to corespond to GOP errors caused by tape imperfections although I have noticed a few and am going to upgrade the quality of the tape I use.

The thinking seemed to be that this was a source recording issue. I've examined the source material and there was no issue during recording.

I'm new to all of this so bear with me. The source is a contiguous 20 minute video. When captured that becomes 12 clips in Vegas. At the end of every clip I have two black frames. The number of clips seems very high to me bases on the short length of the video.

The black frames of course cause discontinuity between clips in the timeline.

So I have three followup questions...

1) Does this seem like a large number of clips for a continuous 20 minute video? If so what would typically cause this (keeping in mind the source material seems ok)?

2) Are the black frames between clips caused by frame drop during capture and if so is frame drop causing so many clips?

3) After recording cature seems to be the most critical step. (I can deal with long render times as long as the result is what I expect although I am ordering two new machines to do network render) Should I have a dedicated machine just for capture or is a seperate capture drive really all thats needed?

I've been given some good technical links to start reading up on the whole process and technology. I'm new to this so maybe I should have taken baby steps instead of jumping head first into Vegas and an HDV-HC1. BUt I'm technically savy and have the time to play around.

Thanks in advance

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/30/2005, 12:32 PM
VidCap probably should not be creating separate files if the video is continuous. However, there is a setting for maximum clip size in MB. Do you have this setting checked? If so, the capturing process will roll over to a new clip when that size is reached. Without it checked you can capture continuous files as large as your drive can handle.
bakerja wrote on 9/30/2005, 12:44 PM
Personally, I have a hard time organizing my work flow when capturing multiple clips. I prefer to capture each tape as 1 solid clip. Makes it easier for me to wade through a timeline rather than a folder full of clips.

JAB
Digital Dan wrote on 9/30/2005, 7:12 PM
Everything is set to default in Vegas. I'm leaning towards this being a frame drop issue during capture as the clip sizes can range anywhere from a 10s of MB to a Gig or more.
Digital Dan wrote on 9/30/2005, 7:14 PM
I agree. I'd love to have a single file per tape or at least a single file per video session. But in my case either something is wrong during capture or something is attepting to be intelligent about clip creation. In any case I'd prefer to have a single file.
Digital Dan wrote on 10/5/2005, 8:30 PM
The large number of clips I was experiencing was 100% without a doubt because of dropped frames during capture. I finally got my second hard drive into my machine. A Maxtor 250GB SATA with 16MB buffer.

I recaptured my footage to the drive and it went from 12 clips to 3 clips. I tweaked my setup a bit (disbale indexing, recycle bin, paging, etc on the drive and set the Vegas process priority to 'high' and the recaptured as 1 clip without any frame drops.