Corrupted HD Capture

2G wrote on 4/27/2008, 3:34 PM

I moved to HD a couple of months back and sadly had to give up my beloved SceneAlyzer for capture. I'm now back to capturing with Vegas 8.

I've got a huge problem!! The captures are getting corrupted. It's not happening every time, but often enough that it's very serious. Repeating the capture on the same tape will see it occur at a different spot on the tape or not recur at all. But I'm getting about a 40% failure rate. And at 1hr capture/recapture per tape, it's a huge hit to have to recapture every tape from a wedding several times hoping to get a clean capture.

The first indication that it's a bad capture is that when I bring the M2T clip onto the timeline, the audio waveform just flatlines some percentage of the way through the clip. If I play the clip at some point past the beginning of the flatline, the audio is actually there (most of the time). But when I go back to the point where the flatline begins. The audio drops out and I have 3-4 red frames in the video.

I tried rendering it out to see if the clip improves, but the audio disappears after the flatline on the render.

Finally, when I'm editing and the red frames come into view on the timeline, I get an exception popup and Vegas crashes.

I even went so far as to purchase a new firewire card for my computer. I have a new Intel QuadCore and 2G memory. I have 2 Z1's and tried capturing on both. No change in any situation. This does not appear to be a hardware problem.

Several questions:

-- Is this a known problem in Vegas capture?

-- Is there a workaround?

-- Does anyone know if SceneAlyzer is ever going to move to HD?

-- Do you recommend another capture program that doesn't corrupt the files?

Please help!

2G

Comments

Serena wrote on 4/27/2008, 3:46 PM

Capturing HDV with Vegas worked for flawlessly for me, but some others found problems with it not splitting clips precisely. My machines are exclusively used for video production and are not connected to the net, so I'm not running firewalls or virus checkers. Stuff running in the background, and particularly stuff like Nortons, often cause problems. Many people like HDVSplit for capturing, which is a free download. I prefer Cineform, but that isn't free.

Konrad wrote on 4/27/2008, 3:51 PM

So on you new computer did you clean up shovel ware, install good anti virus that can be turned off and turned it off, How is the HDD that you are capturing too connected and is it primary or secondary? Did you create a capture profile in vista and stop as many services as possible from starting? Setup threads for multi core?

2G wrote on 4/27/2008, 5:47 PM

The computer is 10 months old. It is not a canned system. I built it. It is running XP, not Vista. (I am software archtect with 35 years of experience. I know what I'm doing).

If you can tell me why antivirus software can corrupt HD in Vegas, I'm more than willing to pursue it. But I'm not interested in destroying my entire system configuration on a guessing game.

I have been capturing SD flawlessly with ScenAlyzer ever since I got this computer. I capture 10-15 hours of tape a week with zero problems. Now I move to Vegas capture on the same machine and get this. The data transfer rate is approx the same for HD and SD, and the amount of data is the same for HD as SD. So I'm having a hard time believing that the problem is a bogged down computer. The CPU utilization is hardly registering during capture on any of the 4 processors. The harddrive is SATA. Again, there is ZERO stress on the system during capture. This is a very powerful computer. When I was capturing SD, I could have two or three renders running in the background and be editing on another project, with absolutely no glitches in the capture. But the difference was that it was ScenAlyzer rather than Vegas doing the capture.

And the correct response of a capture program if the computer can't keep up with income data tranfer is to report dropped frames. Vegas does not report any dropped frames in the capture... ever.

But independent of anything related to how the file was corrupted, there is no excuse for Vegas throwing an exception and crashing when I bring the clips onto the timeline.

Are you aware of other freeware/shareware/cheap HDV capture programs available? It looks like my only hope is capture with something else. At least when I do that, and the problem never occurs, I'll have some evidence that it's really a vegas problem.

2G wrote on 4/27/2008, 5:49 PM

I missed the earlier reference to HDVSplit. I'll download that and give it a shot.

Thx.

Serena wrote on 4/27/2008, 7:23 PM

While appreciating that you have better knowledge of your system than most, don't be too ready to focus entirely on Vegas as the cause of the problem. The peculiar thing is that some people have a lot of trouble and others very little, and the differences seem to be associated with different hardware archtectures. Capturing HDV (which isn't actually HD, but close) appears to be a more intensive exercise, so I presume (but don't know) that Vegas does more than just copy the files. You might want to try the demo version of Cineform's NEO HDV, using its HDLink for capture and conversion to 4:2:2 avi files. I experienced dropped frames and corrupted files with HDVSplit, but nobody else seems to have had that problem.

2G wrote on 4/27/2008, 8:47 PM

I'm sure that it does more than copy the data. But that's just even more an indictment that it is a capture software problem. I've changed firewire cards, written to different harddrives, used two different Z1 cameras, and the CPU is running at 10% while capturing. The only thing constant is Vegas.

I think blaming hardware is an easy out and overrated. The data comes in and is read as raw data by the application. Either the data got there intact or it didn't. If it didn't get there, it's the fault of the . If it didn't get there correctly no matter if it's the fault of the tape, the camera, or the firewire, it's the responsibility of the receiving application to detect the failure and report it. The fact that Vegas did not report an error, and the fact that Vegas does indeed have to do processing on the data prior to writing the m2t file points to software problem.... not a hardware problem, and definitely not a CPU starvation problem.

The fact remains that Vegas took the data and wrote a corrupted file that it would subsequently crash on when it read later. This is a bug. If the original cause was hardware, which I do not suspect, then Vegas should still be smart enough to detect the hardware failure (inbound data corruption) and report it. Having spent a 30 year career in software development, I can safely say that there is no possible situation where it is acceptable for a program to write a corrupted file, no matter what the reason, hardware or otherwise, and then throw and exception and crash when it reads it. Vegas wrote it. Vegas needs to yell and say it can't write a valid file or it should read it. This is simply poor programming. And blaming hardware and giving Sony a pass for poor quality programming isn't going to help the situation.

BTW.... I have now captured two tapes with HDVSplit with zero problem.

Serena wrote on 4/27/2008, 9:43 PM

Glad HDVSplit worked. Yes, I've also worked long in software development and while accepting all of your statements it is also true that software is seldom platform independent. It should be, but it isn't. And software should identify and report problems, but the developers don't always anticipate all of the problems that platforms and circumstances throw up. I'm sure you've worked through the design difficulties of just such issues. This isn't excusing Vegas. It happens. We notify. We seek work arounds. We hope for software fixes.

johnmeyer wrote on 4/27/2008, 11:27 PM

If you use Vegas HDV capture, disable scene detection. Didn't read everything closely, so I don't know if you said you'd already done that.

2G wrote on 6/22/2008, 7:54 PM

I've disabled scene detection, and I still get hundreds of individual clips per tape after capture. How do I tell Vegas that I only want one m2t file for the whole tape?

I thought that was what scene detection meant (???)

jamesfrankham wrote on 7/7/2008, 3:47 PM

I've experienced something similar. I have a 1.5TB external 7200 drive connected via Firewire800 and when capturing to that Vegas was writing numerous clips even with scene detection turned off. When capturing to internal drives however it didn't do this, and wrote a single clip. Bizarre.

With the bus rated to 1000 Mbps, the firewire at 800 and HDV only taking 25 of this, what should be the problem? Again it captures the clips OK then crashes with an exception when playing them back or even drawing thumbnails. It's infuriating. And it can't be blamed on system architecture - mine's made by Sony themselves!

I'm starting a large new project this week and the last doc cut with these errors made life a nightmare. Any advice appreciated.

I've heard HDVSplit is a good alternative, but also heard it writes the m2t files with a slightly different structure which previews poorly in Vegas. Cineform has also been pitched but other posts reveal this is a less than perfect result as well. Help!

EasyLooping wrote on 7/8/2008, 12:05 PM

I'm having the same problem. I got hundreds of .m2t files when capturing HDV tapes with scene detection turned off. And I'm capturing on a dedicated internal drive, different from the system drive!

VP 7e, Windows XP SP2, Camera SONY HVR-V1E,

Any idea how to get only ONE .m2t file for a clip when using Vegas built in HDV Capture?

Thanks!

goodtimej wrote on 7/8/2008, 5:26 PM

Same exact thing was happening to me. Reinstalled Vegas and it started to work again. Vegas is getting really buggy. Seems buggier by the day....

EasyLooping wrote on 7/9/2008, 1:40 AM

I could try reinstalling Vegas, but it is already an almost fresh install on a new computer... Apart from that, all the rest is working fine. Strange... (but that's what bugs are, isn't it ;-)