Connect HD minor update

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teaktart wrote on 4/8/2007, 12:41 AM
Just installed build 38 and:

I've had a crash with "DrWatson DeBugger" window popping up and an error that mentions "mdmp" which sounds like some kind of memory dump perhaps?
Then Vegas froze when trying to load a CFDI clip to timeline from Vegas explorer, end program, lose project

I now have a new trick happening....
I was doing a long series of "undo's" after using Ult S 3 (multi-cam for a two camera edit) and wanting to go back to an earlier setup...
When the Master Video track showed up it was half red clips and a track lower with my corresponding CFDI footage had likewise turned up as solid red.

This is kind of trippy looking!
But not exactly what we were looking for...double the red video clips...!
Looks like whatever is doing this is still happening with the latest build 38 for me at least....

Eileen
David Newman wrote on 4/8/2007, 8:46 AM
Laurence & Eileen,

you are letting everyone else down if you don't provide clips that have this issue. Those have shared in the past, nolonger have issues, maybe it is karma, maybe they helped fix their issue. Remember Vegas 6 does not have these issues, nor does any other NLE application, help use find which ails Vegas 7.

pathlight,

That is not related to this thread, and it a typically a hardware issue, bad firewire port, or hard disk controller, you are dropping firewire packets when the CPU is busy, nothing to do with software. Try a different firewire port, if the problem persists contact support for more directed advice.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm
mark-woollard wrote on 4/8/2007, 9:11 AM
David

In posting my problem with build 38, I should have stated that the previous, and primary problem I was having, seems to have been fixed by 38--namely Vegas randomly disappearing from the screen when using HDLink captured/converted clips.

Re: pixel blocking, thanks for your suggestion of a hardware problem. I'll experiment as you suggest. But it does puzzle me that the Vegas HDV capture utility works fine but HD Link does not.
David Newman wrote on 4/8/2007, 9:48 AM
Thank you pathlight, you have another vote for 38 fixing issue. So it is only Eileen and Laurence we need to sort of.

As for -- "that the Vegas HDV capture utility works fine but HD Link does not", they are completely different. Vegas is not doing any work to convert the M2T to an AVI, a large CPU requirement. This is the issue you PC is having. If you use HDLink to capture M2Ts only, you will capture with issue. This is typical of a system that suffers from Firewire packet loss.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm
Laurence wrote on 4/13/2007, 9:48 PM
Just a little update on my situation: I've figured out that it's not the 720p Cineform avi's per se that are causing my crashes, it's the audio waveform drawing with Cineform codec clips. I thought it was the 720p format because my old 1080i projects were working fine, but it turns out that Vegas crashes quite frequently when I first load any kind of Cineform and Vegas is figuring out the sfk audio waveform file.

Sfk audio waveform writing works fine for m2t and SD codec clips.

I just spent a couple of hours doing the following:

1/ starting Vegas
2/ dragging Cineform avi's one at a time to the timeline.
3/ as it crashed (which it did every second or third time I dragged an avi to the timeline), I'd restart Vegas and drag again until each avi made it through the sfk waveform write process.
4/ once all the sfk files are written, I can work without the constant crashing.

Yeah, it's a lousy way to work, but once all the sfks are written it stops crashing, and doing it this way will get me through my current project.

My PC is crashing a lot these days and this may be a symptom of a different problem, but at least I have a temporary work-around until I figure things out.
Laurence wrote on 4/14/2007, 12:15 AM
Well it's about 3:10 in the morning and if you look at the times between this and my last post, you'll see that I've been dragging files one by one into new restarts of Vegas for a couple of hours now. Sometimes Vegas has to be restarted two or three times just for a single clip. This is really getting old.

Just wondering if this might have something to do with the fact that I'm working of an external firewire drive and the response time for such big files might be slower than some threshold that Vegas thinks it's crashed at.
Laurence wrote on 4/14/2007, 1:24 AM
Well it's 4:20 AM and I'm going to call it a night. I've just crashed and restarted Vegas I dunno, maybe 350 times! Anyway, four out of five subdirectories of Cineform clips now have sfk files and no longer crash Vegas.
David Newman wrote on 4/14/2007, 2:33 PM
Laurence,

Seems like a system issue or Vegas bug, as CineForm does nothing with audio.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm
Laurence wrote on 4/14/2007, 8:43 PM
That makes sense. Cineform is just a video codec. It only happens on Cineform clips though. Could it be that Vegas is just timing out and exiting when it takes longer to draw one of these sfks than expected?

I'm still seeing quite a bit of red clips on the timeline with Cineform clips. As long as there is an sfk, its not crashing, but I am seeing red quite often. Not always on the same clips, and when I zoom in and zoom out, the red usually goes away. Could this be related?
David Newman wrote on 4/15/2007, 7:28 AM
It is that red clip behavior that went away on other systems with build 37 or 38. So for your scenerio we are back to need a repeatable failure to assist in debugging. Maybe the NEO HDV will work better for you, although it is mostly an upgrade Connect HD -- we are discountinuing the Connect HD name. Read more on NEO here http://www.cineform.com/products/NeoHD.htm
Laurence wrote on 4/15/2007, 12:13 PM
OK, here's something that might help. I've converted a projects worth of old Cineform codec clips to the latest codec using HDLink. I'm still having a lot of the same problems I had with the old Cineform format before the conversion. I have just realized however that if I do the conversion with Virtualdub, the converted clips work much better. In fact they work exactly as they should. I suppose I really should start from scratch and batch convert the clips with Virtualdub rather than HDLink. I don't have access to the original tapes anymore or I'd just recapture.
Laurence wrote on 4/15/2007, 10:35 PM
In thinking about it, I realized that VirtualDub was doing a VFW conversion rather than a directshow one, and that I could do the same thing with HDLink simply by selecting the "smartrendering in Vegas" tab in the HDLink preferences.

1080i Clips converted with this option don't crash for me in Vegas. Clips converted with the regular Directshow method (smartrendering tab unselected) crash and occasionally show up red in the timeline.

Could it be that I have a problem with my Directshow hardware? In any case, at least I can finish my current project.
Laurence wrote on 4/18/2007, 8:05 AM
OK, I checked out the same project on my slower P4 2.8 laptop (which I haven't been using for editing). I but it on an external 7200 RPM firewire drive, installed the latest version of Vegas and gave it a go. OMG what a difference. On the laptop, Cineform codec stuff is snappy and quick and so far works perfectly! At preview resolution (which would look horrible at SD resolution but actually looks pretty good with HDV) gives me no dropped frames and CPU usage of under 30%. What an incredible difference! Now I see what all the fuss is about!

I might mention that this laptop just had a hard disc die recently and so it's a brand new format and install of Windows XP with hardly any crap on it. It's a P4 2.8 with two gig of ram and a shiny new 5400RPM 120 gig hard drive.

Now, I suppose I have to fix whatever it is wrong with my studio computer. I'm going to start with formatting the hard drive and reinstalling everything from scratch. If I can get the same performance out of my studio computer as I'm getting out of this laptop, I'll be in editing heaven!

Is it my imagination or does a given installation of Windows XP just kind of fall apart after it's been on your hard drive a while?
Laurence wrote on 4/19/2007, 12:43 PM
I just did a fresh install of Windows XP (and upgraded the size of my hard drive while I was at it). What a difference. I am now getting absolutely great performance with Cineform codec on my studio computer as well as my laptop. I can preview on either machine at draft resolution (which looks fine for editing in HDV) and get no dropped frames with less than 30% CPU usage.

Over the years, I must have accumulated some kind of garbage or mixup in my Windows XP operating system which was causing the poor performance and more recently, constant crashing.