red: are you using Premiere-captured clips? Premiere rendered clips?

If all the footage was captured and rendered with Vegas, then this is probably a simple project or render settings issue. If the source material is coming from elsewhere (Premiere) that could be the problem.

need more detail!

also: is recapturing an option?

Thanks for the replies, guys. I was starting to lose all hope.

Here's as much detail as I can hope to give:

Windows 2000, Vegas 4.0c, Premiere 6.0, DV Raptor capture card, Pyro firewire card.

Footage was originally captured in Canopus codec via Premiere batch capture. I've now used the original Canopus footage, AVI's with the MS Codec rendered from the Premiere timeline, Frameserving from Premiere into Vegas, and Canopus AVI's rendered from the Premiere timeline.

I didn't consider recapturing - it might work, but I'm hesitant to do it, if only because of the sheer volume of the footage involved - it's spread across forty hours of tape, which would take days just to recapture.

I'm also going crazy because the problem seems to be relatively simple, yet doesn't have a rational solution. As I said, sometimes just moving the clip around on the timeline fixes it. Other times, nothing seems to work, unless I change it to Progressive.

One other wrinkle - if I leave it as is, and render the first and last frames of the two clips to a new AVI, then open that AVI in WMP, I can see the mismatched field by scrubbing through the file. It's definitely the last field of the second clip - which would seem to rule out a frame rate calculation error, else why would the final field be jumping to the front? Especially if this happens regardless of where I set the in/out points of the clip in Vegas?

Also on that topic, it seems to somehow be tied to the placement of FX and pre-rendering or rendering. If I just slap the two clips in end-to-end and play, there's no jumping. But if I paste the event attributes to those clips, then I end up with the problem. Also, sometimes the problem doesn't appear until I render or pre-render - which is why I didn't notice it until the project was complete. Going frame-by-frame, each clip appears whole, but once pre-rendered, I can see the extra field when I frame-advance to that first frame of clip #2.

Possible Solutions:

I could recreate the timeline in Vegas using footage captured in Vegas - but that could take weeks (it's a two hour project with thousands of cuts, and every clip has some sort of FX on it - mostly CC.)

I've tried using the EDL's, but nothing imports - even simple cuts-only CMX files with only a couple of clips generate mostly empty media events on the timeline, or duplicate the same clip several times in the wrong spot. I've considered re-formatting the EDL to match what Vegas outputs, in the hope that it will then read correctly. But that begs the question of the frame/field issue.

What about this: Premiere can create a "trimmed" project which contains only the footage actually used. I can then generate a batch capture text file from that. Is there a way to load this batch capture list in Vid Cap, or do I have to manually re-enter the timecodes for these hundreds (thousands?) of clips?

Or, what about re-exporting from Premiere as a Targa sequence rather than an AVI? How does an image sequence handle fields?

I'd really love to solve this thing, not just for the project but for my own sanity.

Before we get into edl issues...

If you capture a few DV clips in Vegas and use those in a new project as a test, do you still have the frame/field problem?

"Frameserving from Premiere into Vegas". Just as background, what frameserver are you using to serve from Premiere to Vegas?

I'm using Satish's frameserver, the Pluginpac I believe.

SonicEPM, I'll try capturing in Vegas and seeing what happens. I'm out of town until Sunday, but I'll try then and see what happens.

Thanks again.

Okay, here's the test: I captured the exact same two clips in: (1) Vegas using the SoFo codec; (2) Premiere using the MS Codec; (3) Premiere using the Canopus codec; and (4) the Canopus RaptorVideo stand-alone program.

I then placed all of these clips on the timeline, and copied and pasted the event attributes from the clips giving me trouble in the original project.

I then rendered each combination of the two clips (i.e., Clips A and B from Vegas, Clips A and B from RaptorVideo, etc.).

NONE of these combinations resulted in the field error I was seeing before, where the final field of the clip appeared as the first field of the clip after rendering. HOWEVER, in each and every combination other than the two Vegas-captured clips, the final field of Clip B would appear very quickly as you frame-advance between the final frame of Clip A and the first frame of Clip B. In the original project, not every edit point would have the field/frame error, but almost every single edit point did show this behavior. This makes me suspect that, if I captured a dozen or so clips in either the Premiere or RaptorVideo programs, the field/frame error would eventually reappear.

The best conclusion that I can reach is that Vegas is somehow treating the clips that are captured in these other two programs differently than natively-captured clips - perhaps this is back to the different frame rate calculations that Adobe and SoFo supposedly use, however it is strange that the Canopus program behaves exactly the same way. In any event, if that is the case, then the question is what to do next?