Intermittent black video in preview & render

John Romein wrote on 1/3/2013, 1:24 PM

Since installing ver 12 I've been experiencing intermittent problems with both the preview window and the results of renders where the video is black.

My timeline always has a few clips of AVI with a Blackmagic motion JPEG codec. Sometimes levels and colour corrector have been applied to the affected clip, but sometimes no fx.

1) Preview window - I'll have several clips on the timeline and I'll be scrubbing through and go back to a clip I just looked at and it no longer displays in the preview window. Opening and closing the project brings the clip "back" so I can see it in the preview window.

2) Render a series of clips defined in regions usually to "DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream". I find that one or more of the clips in the middle of a region of clips is black! This is the most irritating issue as I cannot rely on the renders to always work!

I'm on the latest Vegas release (build 394). I've turned off GPU just to eliminate this as the problem (made no difference). Windows 7 Pro, 16GB RAM, GeForce FTX 550 Ti with Nvidia 306.97. I've been on Vegas since ver 4 and the last ver, 11, worked fine.

Anyone else experiencing these issues? Anyone resolved or have ideas as to were to look to resolve them? Help?

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 1/3/2013, 6:02 PM

Have you tried a less memory-intensive codec than MJPEG? Maybe DNxHD?

Laurence wrote on 1/3/2013, 6:46 PM

Vegas has done that with certain codecs since version 10. I stopped using Cineform because of this. It is an old but unit old but unacknowledged problem.

NickHope wrote on 1/4/2013, 4:15 AM

I occasionally get those problems with the UT Video AVI codec in Vegas Pro 10. I can always avoid getting the black clips in the final render by restarting Vegas as the very last thing before I render.

Disappointing that it sounds like it's not fixed in 12.

John Romein wrote on 1/4/2013, 12:35 PM

Thanks Nick for the tip. I'll try opening and closing Vegas before rendering and see if that helps. Anything to avoid sending out a rendered clip with a black section in the middle!

John

Marc S wrote on 1/4/2013, 1:54 PM

I have had this problem with Cineform but I've seen it with uncompressed video in Vegas as well. It happened in an SD project recently where I rendered all my DV footage to uncompressed.

larry-peter wrote on 1/4/2013, 2:03 PM

It's an annoying bug, and happens to me intermittently with Lagarith, Cineform and Matrox (i-frame w/alpha MPEG). The restart immediately before render almost always works, but QC carefully. I have had a couple times when I got a black clip in render even though it previewed correctly.

Just happened to me this morning with Lagarith clips. Seemed that after awhile Vegas just got tired of decoding them and they started going black from the end of the timeline forward. The more I worked on the timeline, the more went black, but there was always a point on the timeline where all clips prior were fine and all clips after were black. Restart before render provided a master with no errrors.

Serena wrote on 1/5/2013, 8:50 PM

An extremely annoying problem that is a long term bug in Vegas. Occasionally SCS have responded to trouble tickets, but never with effectiveness or enthusiasm. It is intermittent and sample clips sent in generally play fine because there is nothing wrong with them. No need to restart Vegas, just close and reopen the project. Saves a lot of time.

TheRhino wrote on 1/6/2013, 3:36 PM

The render-to-black bug was a big problem for me in V10 & even bigger in V11. Thanks to this forum, I started re-opening final projects just before render which seems to help alot. Another practice that seems to help has been keeping all of my source video on faster RAIDs. It appears that whenever Vegas has trouble accessing a source video file, for whatever reason, it can render that portion to black. IMO certain codecs, like M-JPEG & Cineform, seem to allow certain errors to be saved into the file & those errors trip-up Vegas. For instance, if I move a copy of the VEG file & all source files to a different workstation, the same problems occur with the same source files... However, if I make a fresh render of the source file - even using the same codec - it seems to work fine.

I haven't used V12 for editing because I do not like the extra steps required to access the color wheels... However, I have used it for some final renders when V10 or V11 crashed. IMO V12 appears to be more stable and to date I have not had render to black issues. However, the project was newly opened and rendered immediately which seems to be the only fix we have for the render-to-black issue that continues to plague Vegas...

berkesnd wrote on 1/7/2013, 11:44 AM

I work with a lot of large sized JPEG stills and have found that since V10, this has been a persistent bug. I am able to restore the image by changing the preview quality setting to anything other than what was when the problem occurred.
.

mdindestin wrote on 1/7/2013, 6:11 PM

That's disappointing. Somewhere at SCS, there's an engineer advocating focusing limited budget dollars on reliability while a bean counter in upper management is advocating adding more bells and whistles to increase sales.

Some of us have a lot of money invested in software and third party plug-ins only to incur downtime to resolve IT type issues and all it's frustrations.

RustyB wrote on 1/9/2013, 10:50 AM

Add me to the list of disappointed. I upgraded from 10 to 12, and am now having major trouble with preview+render to black.

I thought it was just an issue with the preview, and had to restart the project to correct it each time. But after rendering/burning 8 DVD's and 6 Blu-Ray's of a 90 minute video, and shipping them off, I've discovered the "render to black" problem.

The clips vanishing are Cineform AVI.

Never once happened in version 10. Kicking myself for this upgrade. Re-installing 10, before it sends my business into a tail-spin!

musicvid10 wrote on 1/10/2013, 9:52 PM

Undo-Redo buffers take up a lot of memory. Saving and reloading the project, or closing and re-opening Vegas, both flush the buffers and free up a lot of memory.

Ever since Vegas 2, I've saved, closed and re-opened Vegas before rendering. On very long projects, I'll generally reboot the system as well. Having a saved project and fresh memory is good peace of mind when starting an all-night render.

mdindestin wrote on 1/12/2013, 7:58 PM

I do the closing down and reopening, but have not tried restarting the computer.

Interesting side note is that I'm also using Cineform AVIs - primarily because I need to deinterlace one of the cam's clips.

PierreB wrote on 7/16/2013, 3:44 PM

I'm using 10.0e and Cineform Studio Premium files, and I've been experiencing the black video in preview and render (and blank thumbnails on the timeline).

To date it's been random, but on this particular project, 2 clips have been reliable and persistent culprits: neither re-opening the project, re-starting Vegas, or even re-booting the machine helps.

This does, however: under preferences/video/thumbnails to show select "none". Restart Vegas (re-opening the project alone does not work) and open the project. The clip is now visible in the preview window (but not on the timeline) and will render properly. If you then change the preferences back to "head, tail and center" all the thumbnails become visible (including those of the culprit clips).

Hope this helps.

PB