Invalid VEG file & 'slipped' clips

Paul Masters wrote on 12/7/2008, 2:10 PM
Installed Vages 8.1 in Vista 64. Opened a project I had been working on for about 1 1/2 years (yah, I know I shouldn't but I have upgraded Vegas and DVDA in the past with no problems.)
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After about 25 minutes to rebuild the audio (project is 6 1/2 hr. of video - 12 hr uncut), I realized I did not have a plug in installed. So I closed the project saving the file and closed Vegas. Then 'just for the heck of it' I opened Vegas which loaded the file - then said it was invalid.
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OK, back to Vista 32 and try Vegas 8.0c. (This is a triple boot PC - XP, Vista32, Vista64). After about 20 minutes to re re build the audio, I went to make a change I had in mind.
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That's when I noticed a cut a little before that place didn't look right. I fixed that and went on. Then I noticed that in some places, not all, where there was an additional audio track, it did not sync with the video and locked audio. I fixed that. But I found a lot more of those.
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I canceled the updates and went back to 8.0b. Fortunately I had a older version of the VEG file that I could use.
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I sent the following to Sony: 080921-000025 VEG file invalid, 080925-000034 'Slipped' clips.
It took some time for a reply. They kind'a merged these together. I never got a clear answer about the invalid VEG file.
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In short they said the 8.1 and 8.0 looked at the MPEG files differently. That they added a frame at the start of a (clip? never was quite sure where) in case there was a problem. Later they said the problem was with open / closed GOPs. Something about B frames referenceing backward (yes they do) but at the start of the video, there was nothing to reference back to. (Doesn't make sense to me. How would the endocing program / process reference something that it knew wasn't there?)
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Anyway,these areas of slipped clips were all 15 frames to the right. That is, the cut was 15 frames further to the right on the time line than it should have been thus 'exposeing' 15 framse that should not be seen.
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The video is in about 1 hour segments and the slipped clips were not at the start of one of those segments. So, as Vegas is non distructive, the 'prior' video was there in the file and Vegas should have known that - if that is what it was.
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The video is from a Canon XHA1 captured to the PC (XP at the time) using the Sony capture process. I have no way of knowing if the camera sent open or closed GOPs or what the software wrote. There was no problem with the video before this as I have created some test discs using DVDA (3 DL discs) and they all are OK in that regard.
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I am far from expert on these matters, but it 'feels' like they are not telling me the whole story. At one point they said that 'some clips would be shifted 15 frames'. But if some, why not all - they didn't answer. If they knew about it, then why not adjust for it? Or why not 'reformat; the VEG file and say it can't be used in an older version. They have done that before.
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I am afrade to open an old project in either 8.1 or 8.0c because of these problems. (I wanted to go to 8.1 to hopefully get better rendering time.)
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Anyone else see anything like this?
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Any way around it? (He asked hopefully but expecting nothing <g>).
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Thanks.
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Paul Masters

Comments

jetdv wrote on 12/8/2008, 6:23 AM
First of all, look for the "myproject.veg.bak" file and try renaming it and remove the ".bak" extension. See if that file will open for you.

Going forward, make sure you have MULTIPLE copies of your VEG file. You can just manually save a copy under a new name periodically. You can also automate it using something like my AutoSave custom command for Vegas Pro 8 which will save a dated version every "x" minutes.
johnmeyer wrote on 12/8/2008, 7:29 AM
It has been my experience that Vegas is totally inept in dealing with even simple MPEG-2 files, much less m2t or AVCHD. I just did a project this weekend with mixed 4:3 and 16:9 MPEG-2 files from various consumer camcorders. In the end, I only had two 4:3 files, so I decided to pre-render the two 4:3 files to small 16:9 MPEG-2 files so I could smart render this cuts-only project in Womble (I still use 7.0d which doesn't have smart MPEG-2 render).

To do this, I simply double-clicked on the event to create a loop, and then rendered that loop to MPEG-2.

However, when I brought these two MPEG-2 files I had rendered back into Vegas and put them on the timeline above the originals, when I A/B'd between them, I found out that somehow the render had chosen to start at the beginning of the event's media, rather than at the beginning of the event, which like you, I had cut/slipped. I have pre-rendered hundreds, if not thousands, of events in a similar way in the past eight years, but usually to AVI files.

I repeated this exercise three times, making sure I wasn't doing something stupid. Thus, I am 100.00% certain that this is a Vegas bug, and has probably been there for a long time, and given how negligent the development team has become about fixing long-standing bugs, it would not surprise me if it is still there, and capable of manifesting itself in different forms.

I wasted four hours yesterday trying to track this down until I finally decided to take a completely different route so I could deliver -- late -- the project to the client.

If you notice the tone in my posts, I am have become totally fed up with Vegas, and the total lack of caring and competence from the people in Madison Wisconsin. They are all disappointing. I waste SO much time working around all the rough spots.

It is too bad, because I had several emails from people on the development team (marketing has always been totally clueless) 3-4 years ago when things were still happening, and there used to be some people there who were both competent and caring. I no longer see any evidence of their contributions, so I assume they have left the company or for whatever reason no longer care about their legacy.