Gray Blocks after capturing

Cbrus wrote on 10/26/2007, 11:25 AM

I had an issue last night after capturing a few minutes of video. I captured Mini DV footage to my PC with firewire and when I was done and went into Sony Vegas to edit, all of my clips had gray blocks.

The voice played really, really slow and the picture is all scrambled. I captured using Sony Vegas like I always do and have pleny of room on my hard drive. Also, the tape plays fine IN my camcorder so it has to be something between my PC & Camcorder.

Any idea what is going on & how to fix? This has happened a few times before and I've not been able to figure it out.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 10/26/2007, 11:33 AM

REboot your machine and re-capture. If the problem persists, use Windows Movie Maker. If the problem is there too, then the problem is with your tapes and there's nothing you can do.

Cbrus wrote on 10/26/2007, 12:59 PM

The problem would lie with my tapes even if they play back just fine when I watch in via my camcorder screen?

Eugenia wrote on 10/26/2007, 1:33 PM

Possibly not then, except if your camcorder is non-standard. As I said, reboot and recapture and use Windows Movie maker too. Might just be a codec issue too.

Cbrus wrote on 11/2/2007, 1:08 PM

I tried this again after rebooting and it seems to have worked.
The other thing I notice is that this happens when I try to capture to my C drive (main program drive) vs my D drive, strorage only. AND when this does happen, it only happens to the first clip in a series - never beyond that. Strange.

Tim L wrote on 11/2/2007, 7:45 PM

Cbrus,

This might not be what happened to you, but I'll offer it as a possibility because it has happened to me a couple of times. And this only applies if you are trying to work with NTSC (U.S.) video.

There was some kind of bug in the Vegas VidCap program that sometimes would end up saving an NTSC video capture as PAL. That is, the data in the file is really NTSC, but the media properties identify it as PAL. So VMS tries to decode the data as PAL info, and then you end up with a very blocky, mosaic-looking video image. I don't remember what happened with the sound.

As far as I could tell, this ONLY happened when I tried to start capturing with "snow" (video noise) on the screen. That is, if the tape had a gap between recorded video, where you just get video noise in between, and I started the capture during that part, then the capture would look fine and indicate NTSC while capturing, but sometimes when the file was saved it might be saved as PAL format. If you get another one of these (or still have one of the old ones on your hard drive), check to see if Vegas thinks it is PAL format.

You don't mention what version of VMS you are using. I was thinking I saw something in the past year (in a Vegas or VMS update) that indicated maybe this bug had been addressed. My workaround was just to make sure I was on a good video frame before I started capturing.

Tim L

cstoner wrote on 11/7/2007, 5:04 PM

I had a problem with grey blocks and garbled video on DV capture some time ago. My problem turned out to be a problem with my ASUS motherboard. ASUS published a fix. If you have an ASUS MB, try here http://www.motherboardpoint.com/t7532-firewire-wont-work-a7n8x.html or google: asus firewire camcorder toggle

Good luck.

fishbelt wrote on 11/8/2007, 7:25 AM

I have had this happen before. Just about always when there is music from a radio or wedding playing in the back ground. As if seems to be copy right material will scarmble the video. Try off line when when you edit your video. You will have to recapture the effected frames.