Looking for help with an explanation for black preview window

JackW wrote on 2/2/2018, 11:27 PM

Last night one of our editors came to me and announced that the preview window in Vegas 13 had turned black. I went through all the troubleshooting steps I could think of to no avail. No joy.

I found a solution on YouTube that has mystified me. I selected the entire project and copied it. I then opened a second instance of Vegas and pasted the copy into it. And there was the preview window in the new instance, working perfectly as designed.

So two questions: any thoughts on why the preview window suddenly blacked out, and why would pasting a copy to a new instance of Vegas correct this?

Comments

JackW wrote on 2/3/2018, 11:25 PM

Any thoughts?

OldSmoke wrote on 2/4/2018, 3:13 AM

A muted track or maybe the opacity slider was accidentally set to 0? Both would explain why copy and past in a new project worked.

Proud owner of Sony Vegas Pro 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 & 13 and now Magix VP15&16.

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Former user wrote on 2/4/2018, 9:11 AM

Split screen could have been enabled.

JackW wrote on 2/4/2018, 1:20 PM

Good suggestions, but I checked both immediately and both were o.k.

red-diamond wrote on 2/4/2018, 2:47 PM

I had this issue with SVP13 all the time. Closing & reopening always did it, but then I found that simply switching views would do it as well. Also, saving project under an alt name like 01 Project to 02 Project. There are so many bugs with 13 like this I've just learned to live with em. I never had this problem till I went to an R390 card. If you're an editor, crashes are a way of life.

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JackW wrote on 2/4/2018, 5:11 PM

Interesting red-diamond. I've been using Vegas in three suites since 2009, vers. 4 through 13, and have never had this occur before. Also can report very few crashes for any reason. Just lucky I guess. I can live with it, especially as I now know how to work around the problem should it happen again; just curious why it happened and why opening the work in a new instance of the program solves the problem.

For reference, rebooting the computer and/or reloading the program did not fix the problem.

NickHope wrote on 2/4/2018, 11:20 PM

What format footage is in the project and how was it created?

Dr Zen wrote on 2/5/2018, 2:37 AM

If you own an Nvidia Graphics Card and updated the Driver, that can cause the preview window to go black.
Particular combinations of Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia Drivers cause this problem.

I posted a solution for this on the forum a while back here:
https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/latest-nvidia-drivers-378-66-may-break-preview-window-in-vegas-pro--105688/#ca654203

Regards
Derek