The thing is that I run it to fix a problem i had -- no matter how hard i tried i always got teh kind of results from my render files:

http://www.patrykrebisz.com/problem3.jpg

The problem is that i'm getting this kind of problem in playback now inside of Vegas (or Windows Player for that matter). I'm worried whether there might be a problem with my hard drive or Raid car it's connected to.

That could well be a raid problem, but looks more like a codec problem. Do you have other NLE or video-related software on the machine?

That problem could not have been caused by fragmentation. Fragmentation has absolutely nothing to do with integrity or lack thereof of the data. The only problem that fragmentation can fix is slow access speed. Even if the drive is full of completely fragmented files (no two blocks adjacent to each other or even on the same track so that the read/write head has to seek for every block), the files will still be perfectly fine and there will be zero data errors because of the fragmentation.

What you have in your sample image is either corrupted data (which could happen even without fragmentation or running defrag), or the encoding and decoding codecs aren't completely compatible with each other.

Just to chime in on this, had some clips in project - play project and I would get single frames from a different clip in the middle of a clip. Check drive for fragmentation, clip in time line was fragmented ( 4 fragments I think)
I could put same clip in new project and get the same one frame flash from other clip.

Hunter

My system is set to auto defrag all drives every night. I've never had it corrupt a video or audio file. By keeping my drives defragmented, usually my captures are in pretty good shape to start with.

Same story here. System Mechanic runs defrag every night from 2 a.m. Every drive but the RAIDs are done. It's a great thing...lets me be lazy and productive.

I guess i'll chime in once again with my opposition position ;)

Disk defragmenting is vasty and grossly overrated. With most modern drives 5400rpm or faster and 33MHz IDE or faster defragmenting is just about never necessary. A completely fragmented drive (no two consecutive sectors adjacent so the head has to see for every sector) is still pretty much fast enough to keep up with a DV video stream. If you're having problems with capturing or printing to tape the problem is probably somewhere else and not related to fragmentation.

If you're having problems with rendering, corrupt files, and the like then your problem most definately has nothing whatsoever to do with drive fragmentation.

My first 1394 devices would do this. Probably at the point the HD cache was filled but it's just a guess. The artifacts would look different under different codecs because they compress differently. Uncompressed would give single pixel glitches

This is not to say that defragging didn't cause this. If you say it wasn't there before the defrag then it wasn't there. But if you're defragging a firewire drive and it (or the 1394 card) is spotty to begin with...

Rob Mack