Infuriating dropout bug

Robert W wrote on 8/25/2008, 9:11 AM

Sometimes I really hate Vegas and its range of daft bugs.

About a month ago I noticed a bunch of odd dropouts on the stereo master track of my concert project. There were about 60 across the whole project. I was suprised as I had been very careful to avoid them. When I looked at the project file there were indeed dropouts there. There were occasional cuts in the audio track which did not actually do anything, they were just the vestigial remains of earlier cuts in the video track they had been attached to, or they were parts that had been cut and then reinstated later. We took care during the edit to ensure that there were no droputs, disabling autofades.

However when I examined the tracks there were lots of what seemed to be autofade afflicted cuts that faded out for two frames and then faded in again. Even stranger, there was lots of cuts faded out like an auto fade but which then went straight into the next clip without a fade in. I was not quite sure what had happened, but I spent a good few hours correcting the issue. It took hours because when I came back after the first pass, I seemed to discover a load more of these odd fades, many of them I was sure I had already corrected.

Well, I just played the track back again, and stone me if the flipping thing is not riddled with fades again! I don't want to be funny but this is certainly nothing I am doing because we have made no edits in this project for months now, and there are at least 45 occurrences of this problem in the project.

When are Sony going to actually make this program reliable again? This really is no use to me whatsoever. I started this project sold on the accessibility Vegas gives to the video form. However it is now just a complete joke in my book. If they can't write simple memory handling routines and they cant stop critical errors like this occurring then really they should discontinue the product so we can get on with using the software that actually works.

Comments

daryl wrote on 8/25/2008, 9:32 AM

That's a VERY odd problem that you've described. I've never had any similar problem, nor have I heard of anyone else with this problem. I really don't think it's Vegas. Maybe someone else can reply that has seen this before, hope so anyway.
Good luck.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/25/2008, 9:33 AM

i've never had that happen unless I did it. when you move an event & it slightly overlaps (even 1 sample) it auto fades. if you move the audio event away the fade dissapears, if you delete the fade stay.

so I'm betting someone did something that made them.

johnmeyer wrote on 8/25/2008, 9:39 AM

Well, I've had this happen. Several things to look at.

First, there is an auto-fade for audio events in the Preferences menu. If you have that enabled, you will get slight fades where audio event abut.

Second, if you turn off "Quantize to Frames" you will get all sorts of strange things happening where events touch each other. Even after you turn this back on, all the events you have already placed will have strange things going on. You can run the Quantize to Frames script to correct events that have already been placed on the timeline.

Third, if you use media that doesn't match the project settings, Vegas has to make some tough decisions on what to do with the edge of video frames. For instance, put a 25p (PAL progressive) video onto a 29.97 timeline. Where should the frame boundaries go?

So, while I'm not 100% sure that I understand what you are describing, these are things that I have definitely seen that seem to be close.

Robert W wrote on 8/25/2008, 11:43 AM

I don't think it can be caused by any of the reasons above. We have not actually edited these audio part or altered them in any way since I corrected them last. Nobody has worked with these files except for me, and all I have been doing is altering the FX settings on the nested video track. Also, all the cuts were quantized to frames, and everything runs at the same frame rate.

Looking at my notes this project definitely comes from the correct lineage as immediately after I corrected the issue the first time I fixed a troublesome sync error. Right after that I checked the fade error again just in case it had come back and apart from a couple that I assumed I had missed in the first pass (at the opposite end of the project to the sync error) it was all clear.

These fades are weird. On pretty much any cut without a fade, at the point where the event is split, at some point it acquires a one or two frame fade at the end of the event. The start of the next event starts cold without a fade.

I could spend days trying to work out at which point they appeared, but I definitely did not carry out any action that lead them to appear. I have not made an edit in these tracks for months.

musicvid10 wrote on 8/25/2008, 11:57 AM

After any editing session, I save the .veg project under a new sequential name.
Then, if any gremlins creep in (which, of course, "I" never had any part in, like unintentionally moving a group of events ;?), I can always go back a session and start again, even if I can't remember everything I did. And, if I don't like the result, I can take the project in a new direction without starting completely over.
Typically, I will have 15-20 saved backups by the time a long project is completed.
Now, if I could just track down those gremlins that lose and misplace files on my computer desktop . . .

Jeff9329 wrote on 8/25/2008, 2:08 PM

What version are we talking about?

Robert W wrote on 8/26/2008, 6:51 AM

I operate in a similar (and rather quirky) fashion. My file names start with the date, a short description of the content, the stage of work, and then end with a letter of the alphabet. Most new saves have appended letters of the alphabet. On most busy days i get up to about "m" versions. So if I really wanted to I could track back and find the exact stage it became corrupted. But there is absolutely no way any of these tracks have been altered since then. And certainly no way the 40 or so weird fades could have been accidentally added.

Like I said, I keep detailed notes, the file is of good lineage and I checked the version in which we corrected the sync error and the fades were not there then. So the fades must have appeared afterwards.

The Vegas version we are using on this project for consistency is 8.0a.

Robert W wrote on 9/2/2008, 5:13 AM

Well, just to update, after triple and quadruple checking that all of these odd fades were gone, I left the project for a week. Loaded it back up today and they are all back.

And they call this piece of junk "Pro"?

farss wrote on 9/2/2008, 7:12 AM

The only thing I cannot fathom is what leaving it for a week has to do with it. If there's a bug then saving it as one project name and then another etc and then closing Vegas, restarting Vegas and opening those projects should immediately show the problem.

Bob.

Robert W wrote on 9/2/2008, 7:17 AM

The mention of leaving it for a week was really just to indicate how frustrated i was with it. However, I just did a save and reload of the project and the repairs remained in tact. Well it will do the same after the machine is restarted is another question altogether.

musicvid10 wrote on 9/2/2008, 7:33 AM

If I'm reading this right, the behavior occurs on the audio tracks. So, the logical question is what reverb / effects / plugins do you have applied to the audio? Does the behavior disappear when you remove all effects at the track and event levels?

The other thing that happens a lot is when you turn 'quantize to frames' on and the beginning / end frames are not trimmed to full length or aligned to frame boundaries. It's real easy for a group of events to snap without much provocation.

But the notion that a project file somehow changes its parameters between the time it is closed and opened again is just plain voodoo. And to verbally trash the software for a behavior that no one else has reported or been able to duplicate, well . . .

Robert W wrote on 9/2/2008, 7:38 AM

Nope, there are no effects. These are one frame fades that appear at the end of an audio event.

Everything is quantized to frames, at no point has their ever been anything that does not start or end dead on a frame.

I am not verbally trashing the software purely for this bug, I am trashing it for the raft of daft bugs it suffers from that should never have got into a release. And actually there are lots of people who seem to get these diverse errors, which I still think points to poor memory handling causing variables to get over written with nonsense.

LongTallTexan wrote on 9/2/2008, 7:46 AM

I have noticed audio drop out frequently with Vegas Pro. Very un nerving. Never really makes sence. I get them when I render to HDV 60I as well as NTSC DV. Rest assured this has been going on since it was released. Especially with the known issues with capturing. I have abandoned Vegas as a capturing app and gone to HDV split which I have never had an issue with. I support myself with Vegas Pro and have used Vegas since verision 1. I am not a Vegas hater, this audio thing has been a thorn in my crawl for some time now. I get the drop outs with rendered MXF files as well. The intresting thing is that when you render to a straight audio format this doesn't ever pop up only with video renders. Often times I have to render the streams seperate and match thm up with another application. Just my thoughts.

L.T.

Former user wrote on 9/2/2008, 7:51 AM

I know you said earlier you are using 8.a for consistency. Do you have a computer you can load 8.b on and see how it reads the project?

Dave T2

farss wrote on 9/2/2008, 1:17 PM

I've tried to repo your problem in V7, including a cold restart of the PC with no luck. Not to say that your issue isn't very real as a few years back I had something equally funky going on with dozens of project files that couldn't be opened without crashing Vegas. They were backed up onto two different HDDs and optical media.

Have you disabled "Quickfade Audio Edits" in Options?
That should not be the cause of your problem but it's the most likely culprit.

Bob.

johnmeyer wrote on 9/2/2008, 1:51 PM

I just re-read your posts and may have missed it, but did you say what file format these audio files are? Are they part of a video file, and if so, what format (DV, AVCHD, HDV, etc.)? Or, if audio-only, what format?

Following further down this path, is this audio coming from a nested VEG file?

I ask this because I have seen some interesting (for lack of a better word) issues when using nested VEG files when the project settings from the source project do not match the project settings into which the nested file is placed.