Yes, under View.

Thanks farss, the project can load without crashing Vegas now, but this doesn't solve the actual problem that Vegas is crashing when it generates these thumbnails. Anyone privy to this problem or a solution?

We had this here a couple of times already. It IS HDVSplitt. Vegas doesn't likes how HDVSplitt is splitting the scenes. Use Vegas for capturing and forget HDVSplitt. This issue kept me from working with Vegas since I changed from Vegas 7 to Vegas 8 and it took me and some other guys two weeks to figure that out :-)

Axel, San Jose

This has been a problem since I first started using Vegas!
Back then it was just 1,000s of HiDef stills.
Now with everyone using HD it's become a more widespread problem. I'd wonder how Vegas would cope if I tried to import 20,000 2K 16bit tiffs from a film scan. It should cope, other apps do so it's not like it's mission impossible stuff.

Bob.

Thanks for your suggestion, darg. The reason I was using HDVSplitt is because I own a Canon HV20, and I was shotting in 24p.

However, it turns out that neither Sony Vegas or HDVSplitt are giving me true 24p HDV clips to work with, and I'm still not entirely sure why. I'm not sure what I'm going to do - I've heard that Ulead VideoStudio can capture 24p HDV, but that's how much additional money I would be spending for one particular capture method?

So, when can we expect 8.0c?

The issue appears to be clips captured with HDVSplit and used in Vegas 8b. The same 1 hour and 20 minute project (nothing fancy, just clips from a Canon HV20 and jpegs) that crashes repeatedly in 8b works with no problem in 7d. Sony support appears to be well aware of the issue.

I got errors similar to yours Jonathan with clips that I had smart rendered in Womble MPEG Video Wizard. 8.0b would load about 30 of them onto the timeline but any more would make it crash. And thumbnails were randomly black too.

8.0a didn't have a problem with these clips so I went back to 8.0a, smart rendered my entire archive of 3500 HDV clips to HDV, and now these all load beautifully into 8.0b and it's solid as a rock.

I used to think the problem was simply that the Womble flavour files were program streams (handled by MainConcept codec) whereas the Sony flavour files were transport streams (handled by Sony codec) but now I'm not so sure it's as simple as that.

So you could try rolling back to 8.0a and see how the clips behave. If they're better then perhaps you could smart render them in HDV in 8.0a and then use them with more stability in 8.0b. I used Veggie Toolkit to batch render mine.

As for HDVSplit, I've never captured my 1080-50i HDV with anything else. I love it. Clips captured with it are rock solid in 8.0b for me on my systems.

Well, I disabled Waveforms and Frames viewing and finished editing, but now I'm unable to render. The render hangs somewhere between 57% & 68%. I tried pre-rendering clips and sticking those together, but Vegas caught on to my clever make-shift solution and went back the mcmpgvdec.dll crash.

This is an absolute defeat for me. Vegas is still the best editor, but it's really a bummer when I can't show anyone my work.

I ended up having to copy my project from 8b to 7d to overcome the crash issue.

HDVSplit does seem suspect as the ultimate cause of the problem, as I've had no problem in 7d using the same HDV clips captured using HDVSplit that are crashing 8b.

I've been exchanging frequent emails with Sony support in an effort to try to get to the bottom of this annoying problem. As has been the case with many others, a clean reinstall of 8b did not help. As a test, I am in the process of recapturing about 4 hours of clips using Sony capture. 8b handles the first three hours of these recaptured clips with no apparent problem. Unfortunately the Sony capture application and HDVSplit did not split scenes at the same points, so I can't do a 1:1 substitution of the Sony-captured clips into the project with the HDV-captured clips that crashes every time in 8b.

HDVSplitt is splitting the files on the frame, that means the scene ends with its last frame and the new scene begins with its first new scene frame. On the other hand Vegas is splitting a little different. It has still the first one or up to three frames of the new scene in the old one. I think it has something to do how the MPEG codec is organized from frame to frame. There was a big discussion about mpeg is not able to cut scenes on the right fram due to GOP organization. I'm assuming HDVSplitt gives a rats ass about the GOP and is giving us a headache with this.

For me, I'm only using now the Vegas capture tool and have the need to cut out the last two or so frames for each scene. It makes the work flow more complicated (especially in regard to backwards running video) but as long as it is not solved the only way to do it.

When you are using HDVSplitt splitted file in Vegas, you will see how your page file usage is skyrocketing by using only 30 or so files. With 30 HDV files in the time line my PF Usage went up to 1.78GB and it crashed. Now I can have more than 300 files in the time line and it has barely 1Gig.
It will also produce a crash if you have the Auto Preview setting on in the explorer window and preview around the same amount of files. This will not happen when you used the Vegas tool.

Axel, San Jose

I've gone around and around with this type of crashing. Here's what I know about it:

1/ These crashes are caused by formatting errors when you record HDV to tape: especially regular DV rather than HDV rated tape.

2/ You will get these from both HDVSplit and Vegas captures, so there is no real advantage of using one over the other.

3/ Turning the video preview off during capture helps a little but doesn't fully fix the problem.

4/ Don't do anything else with your computer while you are capturing HDV. I try not to even wiggle the mouse!

5/ The problem really became apparent in Vegas 7e when Sony updated the video preview engine. The good was that in 7e the preview was more CPU efficient. The bad was that it was also more prone to crash after the update. You'll find that there are still a lot of Vegas 7d fans out there, mainly because of this one issue.

6/ The problem isn't just rendering the audio waveform. If you work around that, you'll still crashes when you try to render.

7/ You will find that there are just a few clips (I usually get one or two per tape) that are causing the crashing.

8/ Womble MPEG Wizard, Womble MPEG VCR and MPEG Video Redo can all be used to fix these crashing clips. Just load the clip into one of these programs and resave it. It will "smart-render" so there is no generation loss, but in the process it will reformat the clip and somehow change the header so that Vegas will play and render them with the old mpeg engine. This is less CPU efficient but at least it won't crash anymore.

9/ Don't even try to smart render clips that are crashing into a final mpeg2 master. Use Cineform or something. The errors will still be there after the fix mentioned in point 7, and as part of a new larger file, you'll get crashes in your new master.

10/ It's not just Vegas that will crash. WMP will crash with these clips as well.

11/ The new Z7 and S270 will give you HDV clips that don't have these problems when you record to a fast enough card. If you record to tape, you will still have this issue. I'm sure that this is true of HDV recorded in SP mode with the EX1 as well but I haven't tried this.

12/ This is an absolutely HUGE problem and yet it has never even been officially recognized by Sony. I have seen many reports of this on other forums and read posts by people that will never use Vegas again because of it.

13/ You will only run into this with HDV recorded to tape. AVCHD video rerendered into HDV will never give you this problem. HDV recorded to memory card or hard drive will never give you this problem. It is a tape problem only.

14/ If you are recording HDV and want to natively edit it, you should use tape rated for HDV. If you are downconverting on capture or using a Cineform intermediary you can get away with regular DV tape.

15/ I've only used the "Sony Master Quality" HDV rated tape once, and that was the tape that came with the camera. I still got errors even with this tape however, so my guess is that while you will get fewer formatting errors with the higher quality tape, it is by no means a complete fix.

16/ The best way to avoid this problem is to go tapeless. Recording to a hard drive or memory card will avoid this problem entirely.

17/ Some people have never had these errors, others (like me) get them regularly.
I fully expect that there will be a couple of posts following this one that completely disagree with several of my points. None-the-less I am very confident of my assessment. I have fought this issue for too long not to know it well.

This issue is probably the main reason I sprung for my new Z7. I was just so tired of these crashes and spent horrible amounts of time working around them, With video recorded to compact flash on the Z7, I have finally discovered how wonderful Vegas can actually be when working with m2t footage. HDV m2t is absolutely rock solid off the card. It previews beautifully, and smart-renders lightening fast. All without the errors that make working with the same video off a tape a total pain in the butt.

Actually, I can not follow the approache of seeing this as a hardware or better tape issue. I have never used explicite HDV tapes. I think HDV tapes are like CD-Safe loudspeakers in the 90ies :-) Marketing, nothing else because the data amount per millimeter square is exactly the same like DV and I never had any dropped frames or so.
Since I capture with the Sony engine I never encountered a crash again, so for me it was only HDVSplitt or it is Vegas which has a problem of handling the GOP from other software. Since I have no other capture software for HDV material I can't test it if it will happen also with that.
Vegas 7e didn't showed the issue but it was running more jerky on HDVSplitt files than on it's own captured files.

Axel, San Jose

"13/ You will only run into this with HDV recorded to tape. AVCHD video rerendered into HDV will never give you this problem. HDV recorded to memory card or hard drive will never give you this problem. It is a tape problem only."

Not splitting the scenes also seems to work. I have not had any crashing at all by simply capturing the tape as one whole scene and then manually splitting on the time line. Of course it'll take an extra hour or so to go through the tape and split the scenes on the time line, but it does seem to avoid any and all crashes

I've had plenty of crashes when I don't split the scenes. The trouble then is the crash is in part of a larger clip instead of a small one and harder for me to fix.

I've had plenty of crashes when I don't split the scenes. The trouble then is the crash is in part of a larger clip instead of a small one and harder for me to fix.

I simply re render and "render loop region only" where it crashed and then re import the sections and render them together with smart render. The section rendered before the crash is still okay.... just trim of the last couple of seconds prior to the crash and couple it together with your loop render

That makes sense. Don't forget though that every time you smart-render HDV you may not be losing anything video-quality wise, but you are decompressing and recompressing the audio.

I ran MPEG2repair on some of the files, and I'll print out some of the results with text bolding over the areas that never appeared to changed between them.

File Size Processed: 539.61 MB, Play Time: 00h: 02m:47s.
1440 x 1080, 29.97 fps, 25.00 Mbps (25.01 Mbps Average).
Average Video Quality: 101.81 KB/Frame, 0.54 Bits/Pixel.
MPEG Audio.
0 of 234 video frames found with errors.
0 of 0 audio frames found with errors.
0.000000 seconds of video timestamp gaps.
0.000000 seconds of audio timestamp gaps.

Again, I meticulously bolded the areas which did not change between the clips I tested.

The Vegas capture utility doesn't work with my Z7 so I need to use HDVSplit.

I have just realized over the last couple of days that whatever errors I am getting during the drawing of the HDV clip audio waveforms and during render are a result of errors that were accumulated during the video capture.

I now realize that I can get around this by disabling my virus protectection, my spyware protection, and anything else I can think of that is running in the background during capture.

I just shot and captured two tapes this way today for a local triathlon event and had no problems whatsoever.

Man, I am just totally mystified by all these reports. I run V7d with HDVSplit v.77b and have not had a single issue with crashes or mysterious effects, and that's with capturing a lot of footage from my FX1 and HC3 cameras. The only thing I run up against is the very occasional 2-frame thing. That's all.

I'd like to help, but don't know where to begin. I hope the Sony guys can sort this out.

Try the Cineform Neo HD or HDV trial. I'm sure with a capture utility made for Vegas you will not have these problems and you get a lossless intermediary.

Could you elaborate a little more on that, MH_Stevens?