HD Black/Red Frame Prob - Is Sony in Denial?

2G wrote on 6/26/2008, 9:17 PM

I have been getting random solid red frames on the timeline on m2t files. The audio usually drops out and flatlines at that point. When I'm playing the clip or when I'm rendering it out, the screen goes black and the audio goes silent IF I'm lucky enough not to have Vegas simply crash completely when it hits that point. (I'm on 8.0b) This is happening way too often and is affecting my delivery of videos to my clients since I'm continually having to work around this.

I initially thought it was a capture problem and/or the actual media file was corrupted. But I now realize it has nothing to do with a corrupted media file. The same media file that red-frames and crashes vegas reads and plays fine in Premiere. I needed some audio from a clip that vegas wouldn't play. I ended up having to read the clip into Adobe Audition and re-render it out as a WAV from Audition. This is inexcusable for a supposedly 'professional' product. Today, I rendered a project from vegas to an m2t file and brought the m2t back in, and IT has the red frames and crashes (and where the red frames are in the rendered file, there are no red frames in the vegas project at that time point.

I only moved to HD a few months ago. But I remember reading complaints about the "black frame" issue for what seems like a couple of years. Come on.... there has never been a more obvious blantant BUG in the program. Is Sony in denial? Has anyone actually been successful in talking to Sony about this?

I would open a formal problem report like I would do with any legitimate software vendor. But the last two times I've found and reported bugs through the formal channels, it was a joke. In both cases, it took TWO WEEKS to get even an acknowledgement from Sony. Then I got what looked like an autoresponder suggesting I read an article on what digital video is.... I replied and NEVER heard back... that is, until I got the "survey" telling me Sony values my opinion and asking how much I liked their excellent service. I replied and never heard anything else, and the problems never got fixed. I just finally figured a way to work around them. Tell me why I want to go through that useless effort again....

I want this problem fixed. But I don't need the pain and zero results from trying to open a formal problem report again.

Sorry for the venting. But I'm building my video production business with a dependency on having a working product from Sony. And to me it's inexcusable that this severity 1 bug has been reported for as long as it has with no apparent interest by Sony to address it.

Has ANYBODY gotten an official word from Sony on this problem? Is there anything that can be done short of wasting my time going through the useless Sony problem report channel?

Back to post

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 7/5/2008, 10:36 AM

AFIK, unless you work with uncompressed HD, a RAID is never necessary or needed for anything you do with Vegas. All you need is a basic 7200 RPM IDE or SATA drive. That's the beauty of all these modern video formats: they require relatively low data rates relative to what hard drives deliver. If you go to the Cineform site, they definitely make a big deal about how they can capture directly to a non-RAID disk drive (http://www.cineform.com/press/rel-Intensity.htm for example).

blink3times wrote on 7/5/2008, 10:43 AM

I do a lot of uncompressed work but don't bother with hardware raid or huge drives. If you have vista ultimate (or even xp pro *I THINK*) you can set up DYNAMIC DISKS which is kind of a software raid. Admittedly it's a bit slower than hardware raid but the advantage is that you can easily span one partition over multiple drives (without losing any space to raid operations) within windows (no rebooting necessary).... and then very easily reverse the procedure back to single drives when the project is done.

John is quite correct in that Cineform does take extra space... but it doesn't require the speed of a (hardware) raid set up.

rmack350 wrote on 7/5/2008, 10:51 AM

I think you're running into a major point of the problem - it appears in a media file on some systems but not others.

Rob Mack

rmack350 wrote on 7/5/2008, 11:04 AM

Generally it's a throughput issue so if you take a file and do a little math (size/duration) you should be able to get the MB/second and then compare that to what HDTach says your drives deliver. You probably want to stay well under the drive throughput.

My math here is vague and general so you'd want to work it out to get it right. John Meyer could probably give this to you off the top of his head, I can't.

If you can avoid RAID your life will be much simpler. Some disks seem to spec out at as much as 100 MB/s which is the same as what my striped pair on an nvidia RAID controller gets. Not a very good RAID controller.

Rob Mack

johnmeyer wrote on 7/5/2008, 11:08 AM

And I can get it to disappear or re-appear on my computer depending on various things I do (such as change preview resolution). It is very elusive, but very real.

Until and unless Sony fixes this there will continue to be two types of Sony Vegas users: those that have already experienced the black or red frame problem; and those that haven't, but will.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/5/2008, 11:15 AM

johnmeyer said:

"Until and unless Sony fixes this there will continue to be two types of Sony Vegas users: those that have already experienced the black or red frame problem; and those that haven't, but will.

I was in the second club, now I'm in the first.

With regards to hard drives - I've read some glowing reviews of the WD 640GB sata drive - how would this workas a standalone video drive? I currently have all Seagate Barracuda IDE drives - have been meaning to upgrade to SATA's and use the Seagate IDE's for backup (They're less than 2 years old).

That a good idea???

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

rmack350 wrote on 7/5/2008, 11:19 AM

Kind of like the description of people traveling in southeast asia: Those that know they have parasites and those that don't.

Rob

2G wrote on 7/5/2008, 11:23 AM

Has there been any indication as to when the beta test fix will be available?

I now have a project where I cannot load all of the media. Vegas crashes every single time. I can load groups of all of the media into separate projects. So it's not a bad media file. But when I try to load everything into one project, it crashes.

I assume this is the same problem just manifesting itself differently. But I'm complete DEAD on this project. I played around with it for a couple of hours yesterday trying different things to try to get around the problem. NOTHING.

The exception is 0xC0000005 (access violation) WRITE:0x0 IP:0x2302b990
In Module 'mcmpgvdec.dll' ad Address 0x23000000 +0x3B990
... followed by stack dumps, etc.

If anyone wants more info on this one, it is unfortunately very easy to recreate.

Hopefully the beta will fix this....

chrisw10 wrote on 7/9/2008, 6:12 PM

I have a unique situation that should shed some light on this issue. I am NOT using m2t files and am still getting this error. My source footage is an AVI encoded using the codec Huffyuv v2.1.1 -CCESP Patch v0.2.5. And I get red frames in my timeline and black frames in my preview and when I render. They show up in random places each time I load my project.

Several observations:
First, since certain frames are red/black during one instance of Vegas and they are intact during other instances, this does not appear to be an issue with the source footage itself. In fact, viewing the footage in another viewer like WMP or VLC shows that there are no black frames.

Second, I doubt that re-capturing footage would fix the problem unless the problem manifests in more than one way. Using Cineform... well maybe. This seems to be an issue with how Vegas interfaces with the codec of your source footage and how it does so to display or render your footage. Doesn't seem to be an issue with the footage itself, or with the process of capturing the footage, nor is it limited to m2t.

Perhaps if the Vegas people are keeping tabs on this thread, they can start experimenting with HuffyUV encoded AVI files as well as .m2t files. Perhaps media length is an issue as well, as I am using some very lengthy files.

bdg wrote on 7/9/2008, 8:09 PM

Oh Wow, I read halfway through this thread and then clicked to what you were all talking about:

Black Frames are what I have been getting intermittantly for years now with all the various versions of Vegas I've had (5 to 8b).

However I only do SD widescreen and I don't have a movie camera.

My "movies" are created using Vue (a natural landscape software) using the DivX codec of the day.
I thought the black frames were the fault of Vue!

The black frames are so frustrating (especially after rendering a movie in Vue for a week or so) and I too have found that the only way to fix them is to render (in Vue) a short piece that covers the frames of the black frame area and then put it in the timeline in Vegas above the black frame area.

But black frames don't always happen.
Crazy no?

John_Cline wrote on 7/9/2008, 8:10 PM

I have used some very long (3+ hour) HuffYUV files in Vegas and have never had a problem with them. These were both SD and HD source files. I have seen some issues when "Quantize to Frames" is turned off and the video gets slipped off a frame boundary.

Bill, as an intermediate file for editing, there are certainly better codec choices than DivX; i.e. Lagarith, HuffYUV, PicVideo MJPEG.

chrisw10 wrote on 7/9/2008, 9:00 PM

Which version of HuffyUV, if you recall? The CCESP patch seems to be a third party mod of the original HuffyUV. Could be some differences there, but who knows.

Anyways, Lagarith *might* solve this issue for me in the same way Cineform solves it for everyone else. I'll have to experiment. I do know that Quantize to Frames is turned on for me at least. I'm simply using the DVD Architect 24p NTSC Widescreen video stream preset.

John_Cline wrote on 7/9/2008, 9:31 PM

I'm using the "straight" HuffYUV v2.1.1 codec, available here:

http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/huffyuv.html

I've been using Lagarith more lately since it is also Vista64 compatible.

bdg wrote on 7/11/2008, 8:01 AM

Thank you for the info on HuffyYUV John, I have downloaded it and will try it when I get some spare time.
I note that they say it only runs on up to W2K so I'll have to see if it runs OK on XP. (it installs OK on XP).

John_Cline wrote on 7/11/2008, 3:11 PM

It works fine in XP.