I encountered my first flash frame on a 10 minute project this weekend using V5. Noticed a flicker while previewing from the TL before rendering and used Contour Shuttlepro to actually freeze the affected frame. The frame image was from an earlier event on a separate track and it was appearing in the middle of another event with no fx or anything. Throughly searched all tracks and no stray event found. Interestingly, when I lowered the level of the track, which the flash frame appear on, from 100% to 99.8% the flash frame disappeared.

Therefore, maybe a possible fix is to lower track level slightly. Who really knows though - just a FWIW.

Wow, the reports about flash frames and fixes are getting more and more weird. If it wasn't that several said they still see it in a single track project you'd think it has something to do with a lower track bleeding through somehow when it wasn't suppose to during rendering or something weird like that.

Talk about weird. Way back years ago, version 3, I had a project with lots of audio tracks. I did lots of shuffling around, then once done, playing it back the wierdest thing happened. Just a few seconds of some audio from around two minutes in the project was playing over where I was in the timeline... about twenty minutes. Then after that point, other brief portions of eariler audio somehow got mixed further down the timeline. After isolating it to a single track, I created a new track, moved the contents and everything was fine again. Go figure. The trouble is phantom things like this are very hard to track down because you can't really duplicate them with any confidence or see it on the timeline, why I call them phantom. <wink>

Talk about phantom yesterday I rendered out a little project and 1 frame of a credit role appeared .Now I never even introduced a credit role in this project . I was however using credit role the day before in a totally different project . So my only conclusion was one frame jumped out of 1 project into another . ( SWEET )

Jon

Hey... that sounds like the "nested project" new feature in V6!

Good grief! Jumped from ANOTHER project?

These are reasons why I refused to believe that Sony/Sonic Foundry actually tried that hard to reproduce infamous bugs like this one spanning 4 generations of Vegas.

If Sony were were REALLY interested they could have reproduced this all by themselves.

It has happened to TOO many people and our just accepting it has been the MAIN reason they haven't put someone on the issue full time until it was reproduced and resolved.............along with a bunch of other notorious annoying editing problems.

John

John,

Just got back online after a few days travel. I tried to download your Blank Frame Project file, but Yahoo says that the folder is empty. I am logged on with my Yahoo id. Is it still there, or do I just not have access?

Randall

There's plenty of annoying editing problems but once you learn not to rely on certain things not working reliably then you can get by, nice if they got fixed but I think we can all live with them.
Having an errant frame appear from elsewhere for no apparant reason I don't think is something we can live with, the only viable workaround is to not render your project out.
If I was working on a 90 minute longform that I'd spent months editing I wouldn't complain, after I'd put it to bed I'd watch it several times to check for any one of a number of things that I might of missed and I get others to watch it as well.
However our bread and butter is at times churning out 60 hours of video a week. It's bad enough having to spend 60 hours capturing and 40 hours encoding and around 20 hours burning masters, to add another 60 hours intentently watching this stuff looking for this problem is pretty well the difference between the business being viable or not.
Unless this issue has been fixed in V6 (and something mentioned in what is rumoured to be the new feature set indicates it might have) this could be a major disaster waiting to happen. Clearly V6 is targeted at attracting the serious side of the game, broadcast, those quys work under tight schedules, they don't have the time to check everything. I can just see it now, a frame from yesterdays porno makes it's way into a segemnt aired on the 6:00 PM news on a major US network.
Bob.

Now that is a great post. Informative, intelligent, insightful, and funny as hell.

Bob,
That is hillarious and a great point.
Even though I didn't buy Vegas 5 and probably won't buy Vegas 6 because Sony/SF doesn't seem interested in improving the BASIC editor I have to admit that Vegas 4 was their highpoint. It was worth buying Vegas 2 and 3 to finally end up with Vegas 4.

What I am referring to are the color correction tools. Since I started using Vegas 4 and it's color correction tools my videos have been beautiful. Stage productions under funky lighting are actually able to be corrected so they look better than they did when people watched them live. That's quite a feat.

Even my "flash frames" have beautiful color.

John

Me too, me too, me too! Almost a coming of age event... once Vegas had good color correction tools starting in V4, it started getting noticed.

Here's hoping the flash frame "bug" gets resolved.This thread is testimony
that it is a problem since many seasoned Vegas users have reported it.

I just thought I would post a recent update to this. My most recent flash frame (It's been nearly a year since the last one) occurred in the following manner:
Using Vegas 4.0:
After rendering a 2 hour and 9 minute production to .avi I loaded it back on the timeline to render a test sample for Mpeg 2. After watching the video meticulously for 2 hours and 9 minutes I can assure you it contained No flash frames.
I split the video and rippled using the "F" key to close the spaces of the sections I deleted. No markers. No regions. The end result was an hour of areas I wanted to render as Mpeg 2 for testing purposes before I rendered the entire production. After checking for gaps (there weren't any) I rendered separate NTSC DVDA template video and AC3 audio streams using default settings.
I loaded it into DVDA 1.0 and rendered a single movie file and watched the hour long video taking notes and much to my surprise it contained a flash frame.

What is different (for me) in this case is that all previous flash frames have been detected in the .avi render and never appeared in an Mpeg 2 render. I can assure you that there were none in the .avi render and that the flash frame did not occur where there was a split on the timeline. It was just in a random place in the middle of an event.

In all fairness I might note that SonyEPM has indicated that they HAVEN'T forgotten this issue and they believe it may have been resolved in Vegas 6.

John

Honestly,
The only thing that makes sense to me in terms of variables that can generate this phenomenon is THE AUDIO. Every combination of settings has been tried by multiple users including myself using everything from the simplest systems to the most complex, and no one can pinpoint the cause of the "flash frame". Since the audio files are constantly being changed when one re-renders I think it must have something to do with the audio. What do you think?

This is pretty much what I had happen and it is NOT reproduceable, run the exact same render/encode again and the problem is fixed. This is the stuff nightmares are made of from a debugging point of view.
I suspect though the issue is more common than is realised, how many of us check our output that carefully. Just think about the issue of DV dropouts. Pretty well every camera tape has one, usually no more than a single pixel one frame long or a few samples worth of audio with a glitch yet almost no one complain about them.
What's going to make this a bigger problem is mpeg-2 encoding, it doesn't cope well at all with a single errant frame, this applies to both encoding for DVD and DVB broadcasting that uses mpeg-2. All mpeg-2 encoding systems will turn a 1 frame error into a many frame error making it much more noticeable. That's how I noticed my problem, it was in the DV file but I didn't see it until I'd made a DVD and watching that it really stuck out as a bigger glitch, watching the DV file it was much harder to see.

I hope that V6 which seems to have a lot of the code rewritten has fixed the problem. Now that Vegas has achieved 'broadcast' quality with SDI support I'd hate to see it loose credibility if this sort of thing gets into a tape destined for broadcast.
Bob.

Anyone know if this kind of thing is happening in other NLEs? Maybe others that use the Main Concept encoder?

Just a wild guess.

That's a good thought Brian. Is it an encoder that's doing it? I don't want to hate Vegas, but I do, and if V6 isn't the answer to the flash frame DISASTER, then I'm off to Premiere without a second thought. Flash frames happen to me every (yes, every) time I render something longer than 30-mins. Yes, every time. Yes.

What about my thought that the audio (which is changed every time you re-render) is at the source of the problem? It seems like the only variable that would explain it. And I mean that the audio may be causing a glitch (errant frame) in the video.
Brian and Stokey,
I have searched in the past for posts regarding other NLE's that may have had instances of "flash frames" or something that sounds like or describes that phenomenon and haven't found any to date.

John

You'll also find that Vegas does a number of things that no other NLE can, interesting isn't it.
Bob.

Well, if this isn't showing up in other NLEs, then I think John's on the right track.. it must have something to do with the audio. Remember, Vegas is the only NLE that started life as an audio-only application. DAWs work with audio at the sample level, not frames, as video NLEs do.

I hate to bring this up again, but how sure are we that the black-frame and flash-frame issues are indeed separate problems? Sony has acknowledged that, at least through V5, audio sometimes would not precisely match video (see http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=385921). Supposedly, this is fixed in V6, but some are still having problems with small gaps that Sony, so far, cannot repro.

Are we 100% certain that the flash frames are not slivers left over from previous edits? Maybe a cursor that is snapping to the end of the audio, and not the end of the video, leaving a small (maybe sub-frame) video sliver remaining? I know the DV codec has built-in error correction that maybe masks such slivers during timeline playback or print to tape. Maybe this error-correction is lost when rendering to MPEG-2, making these flashes more visible?

Does this make any sense, or am I just whistling in the dark here?

Supposedly, this is fixed in V6, but some are still having problems with small gaps that Sony, so far, cannot repro.

If you're referring the the "V6 black frames" thread, I'd like to hear from cacher and others who may be still having this problem. I posted a series of questions in that thread and they've gone unanswered... definitely interested in helping resolve this whole issue.

- jim

I wanted to update the flash frames quest.

The problem is still present in Vegas 6 as confirmed in a recent post which brings us back to "How do we resolve the problem once and for all"?

In my last project (a musical) I was getting them consistently with every render. The project consisted of thirteen tracks and lip synched audio from one performance matched up with the lips moving in the video of another. I was constantly shifting events from one track to match up with another. That brought me back to my theory that the audio seems like the only LOGICAL explanation for the flash frames as everything else has been eliminated. See discussions above.

Re-boots and rerenders often made the problem go away for a lot of people including me in the past, but not this time. Here is what I did:

I disabled all running audio processes and interfaces instituted by the sound card software and the flash frames completely disappeared. To verify that this was consistent I rendered three DV avi renders transfered to tape and three mpeg 2 renders which I authored into DVDs. I sat glued to the screen for two hours for each of them and not a single flash frame. Then I repeated this lengthy test, but this time with the audio card's mixer-volume control panel interface running and the flash frames came back in all but one render. So I disabled it again and rendered one avi and one mpeg 2 and again the problem completely disappeared.

I am convinced more than ever that this age old plague regarding "flash frames" has to do with the AUDIO despite the fact that it appears in the video. For those of you having the same problem even occasionally try doing what I suggested and see if it gets rid of them.

John

Wow! That's very interesting. What audio card? ASIO drivers?

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. All I did was to close the control panel that takes the place of the little Windows (speaker) volume control. Different audio cards and different drives and different features enabled/disabled may be a logical explanation as to why some people get flash frames and some don't ever get them. It also may be that not everyone wants to spend the time glued to the screen looking for them each time they do a project and they miss them. To a non-Vegas user or even a client a "flash frame" would be more likely termed a "glitch" which most people don't fret about (except those who produced it).

John

John, not that I'm doubting you, I'm just curious. How would the audio card be at the heart of the flash frame issue?