Is this VV-captured footage or 3rd party capture?


MPH

VV3 bld 138 capture, in my case.

What bugs me the most is that I can jump through the project, removing black frames, and a day later there are more of them.

If "black frames" (it is really empty space on the timeline) appears at the junction of two events it is almost always due to human error and the result of you sliding events around and not totally having them bump up against each other. If you zoom in you can see this. If a black frame happens elsewhere in an event that is the result of other things, so too for nearly solid green frames or a series of them spanning a lot of space on the timeline or having a lot of large artifacts in them.

Not in this case. I also have this black frame issue and I've zoomed in as far as I could go and the clips are butted up to each other. I think this is a legitimate bug.

Actually seeing a "black frame" on the timeline and in the final video are different things. Do you see a black frame flash by in your external monitor when playing back from the preview window? If not, nothing to worry about, if you do and you're sure events butt, then that's a different story.

I also have the black frame problem and have noticed that after several
"select clip to end" actions that a black frame appears where there was none
prior. Usually catch them on final timeline run-through.

James J. Kizak

The black frames are visible when playing back in the preview monitor.

And this is all VV-captured footage and not 3rd party capture.
And the frames do abut against each other on the timeline.
And I can jump through the project, removing black frames, and a day later there are more of them in different locations.

I gather from all the posts that this is not a simple issue of a setting change or some trivial (and non-existant) operator error.

Any suggestions, SoFo?

Ditto on the black frames. Sometimes mine turn off my digital recorder when PTT.
Have to zoom in to remove them same as the others who posted.

Hi All,

Will a black frame go away if you move the whole event left or right a bit then back?

Or, if there is a color background on a lower track, will the color show through?


MPH

Mine go away if I zoom in close and move them a tiny nudge to the left. Gets worse if I go to the right.

Don't know if a color will show through from another track, have not noticed that.

One very wild and crazy theory would be during the "select event to end"
movements that if a clip joint is near the cursor it might snap to the cursor
instead of remaining joined to the clip but this does not allow for it being
only one frame off every time.

James J. Kizak

I'm also experiencing these black frames as described above. My .02 cents.

G

I've seen three kinds of black/blank frames.

type #1 - Due to Human Error. You've been moving events around and leave a tiny gap between events... hence a blank space on the timeline which shows up as a black frame if you render that way.

type #2 - If a MPEG you're not on a "I" frame so it may show up as a black on the timeline. If you move the event slightly or do a little snipping, it goes away or may appear elsewhere. I have never see this type of blank/black frame impact on the render.

type #3 - Sometimes small sections, other times large sections of your source file are blank or black, may include heavy blocky pixels throughout and some frames may be mostly or totally green. If there is a audo track you may hear squeals, whistles, other distortion, playback is slow, may have long pauses or refuse to show at all in preview window or scrubber control is not responsive. Can be a sign you're low on system resources. Save your work, exit, shut down, and reboot. Usually goes away. If not, could be coruption in the source file especially if some exotic codec created it. Try opening in VirtualDub, redner as a AVI, reopen in Vegas.

Good analysis, Billyboy. Just wish it applied. The only one that comes close is No. 1, moving things around.

Problem is, if it is fine one day, after I checked the time line, and there are several randomly spaced black frames the next, with NO moves, where do they come from?

The $64,000 question is do the black frames show up in the render? If not, I wouldn't worry about it. Just a guess... if you zoom in and out of the timeline a lot that determines what you see at point X on the timeline. Not zooming at all you may see a black frame, if you zoom in it may disappear or move a tad left or right. Again, just guessing. I've made a lot of videos with Vegas and the only time I had any black frames in the render was when I got careless and didn't zoom in on the timeline and look for gaps before rendering. In other words all the black frames I ever saw were due totally to my action. That isn't to say there may not be some bug, but I haven't stumbled onto one if there is one, and you would think if there is some bug it would have showed itself by now. <wink>

There are currently some issues related to the first and last frames of certain events...

A relevant question is if/how the issues are related.

In that regard,

When do the black frames appear?
Will moving and replacing the event resolve the frame?
Is there a constant realtionship between the black-frame and the prior or following event?
Can the issue be repeatedly replicated?
Does "slipping" the media in event resolve the frame, or move it?
Does a lower layer show through?
Does adding the same media again as a "take" resolve the frame?
If you apply the Invert FX, does the frame turn white?
Is the audio the exact same length as the video (zoomed waaaay in)?
Does this occur with footage from different cams/decks?

Your answers to questions like these may help to establish a thorough profile of the issue, so clues and workarounds may be found. I am fairly certain that any relevant information you can contribute will help SoFo resolve the issue all the more quickly.


MPH

Martyh:
I wish I could relate it to some action but it seems after a thorough
run-through with no black frames everything is fine. Then some changes
are made with some form of clip manipulation (not sure about the sound)
and a black frame will suddenly
occurr at random but it will not be observed until the final run-through
and it is always after where the majority of the changes were made, at
least in my case. Does not happen all the time, only at random. Does not
bother me too much as I travel through the entire clip with a fine tooth comb
before I render. I am using the default snap settings. I have split some
clips and meshed them together and they were perfect and maybe two days
later there would be a problem at that junction and I would have to split
a pencil line off the end of each clip to get them to work properly. There was
some sort of degradation (black) about one frame wide at the end of each clip
or only on one of the clips. I am primarily doing slide show stuff now and there
is mucho timeline manipulation going on. Also many different sizes.Its no
big thing but it is annoying.

James J. Kizak

When I´m editing MPEG 2 files there could be black frames after rendering and sometimes I have seen a picture in the preview window when the timeline frame at the cursor shows a black frame - is this due to working with MPEG 2 files?
I work with MPEG 2 files because I can store a lot of material on DVD disks (as data files).
I know its not recommended to edit MPEG 2 files but I find it rather good as long as I´m just doing basic editing work.

As a few of you, I have the same little problem. Snapping is on and the events won't snap perfectly all the times. I, too, have to zoom in 'til I can see China and "stick" these together then zoom back to my editing room...

I notice that among all the postings on this topic there are none from Tech Support.

I gather Tech Support's silence means they have no idea as to why these black/blank frames occur or how to prevent them.

Oh well, at least we all know how to remove the blank frames.

But it IS a pain.

we are watching this closely- there's a number of issues being discussed but rest assured we are paying attention to them all.

I have been in touch with SF several times over the past few weeks about similar anomalies. Sometimes I get black (or "empty") frames too. It seems as though the time stamps that identify to VV3 where clips begin and end get corrupted. When the cursor sits on a boundary between two clips, usually the first frame of the succeeding clip shows in the preview window (this is the way it's supposed to work), but sometimes the last frame of the preceding clip shows. Then, just to make things really odd, sometimes nothing shows at all, and to really top everything, once in a while the LAST frame of the SUCCEEDING clip shows up, really screwing up the continuity with a very obvious "glitch" when rendered out. On the project I just finished, I resorted to going through the final avis, and when I found a last-frame anomaly, I would split the video track before and after that frame, and just after the following (good) frame. I would then delete out the bad frame, make a copy of the good following frame, and paste it into the hole. I now would have two identical frames at the beginning of the clip, which is unnoticeable when running. Had to do this maybe 6 times on an 80-minute movie.

Surely it must be some combination of things I am doing that causes this odd behavior, but what? Lots of times when I need to insert something, I will split, then CTRL-click the video and audio tracks just after the split, choose "Select all events to end", then grab the clips and slide them to the right. Could this be corrupting the timecode somehow?

Anyway, even with the above-mentioned glitches, VV3 is superb software, much more stable and remarkably more powerful than the NLE I was using before.