it's not on my C but it is on another internal drive. the wierd thing is that if I rename the source media and then specify a new file for the old file, I temporarly get the media back. Then it disappears again. It's some kind of bug in DVDA's multiple angle feature.

It's possible your second hard drive wasn't installed correctly.

Many people install their second hard drives in the operating system but don't bother to install it in the BIOS. (That's the set-up that opens when you press ESC or F1 or whatever when the logo screen comes up during a boot, just before Windows loads.)

When the hard drive isn't set up in the BIOS, the operating system sees it as a new drive every time you turn on your computer -- and quick possibly while it's running. And this could be confusing DVD Architect so that it's losing the connection to the video.

Is that at all possible in your case?

What kind of AVI did you use? AVI is just a container that can hold any number of codecs. Most DirectShow codecs (DIVX, Xvid, etc) can be unpredictible in Vegas and DVDA if you don't have a Video for Windows version of its decoder installed. For best results, render your AVI using the DV, Huffyuv, or Lagarith codec.

Rob

IF you have cccp codec package uninstall it and the media problem will get solved

Thanks for your responses

Bstro: I used the NTSC DV Widescreen AVI template from vegas.

Steve: no chance of hard drive not being installed properly...thanks anyway.
This only happens when multiple angles are involved. I've authored hundreds of projects with media being on the same hard drive but this only happens when I try to author a DVD containing multiple angles. DVDA projects without multiple angles work just fine.
In the last few days I've tried starting new DVDA projects with multiple angles and I get the same results every time. My media randomly dissapears.
I finally found a workaround to get DVDA to see my media (at least until I closed DVDA) and I was able to author my multiple angle DVD.
The problem is all the additional angles are extremely low quality on my DVD. Video Track 1 turned out just fine but the video on the other tracks (2, 3 and 4) look like a mosaic filter was applied to them. They look like low quality web video. The encoding bitrate for those tracks was at 6.5 so the bitrate was not the problem. But I'm assuming this is sort of a side effect of the real problem...my media disappearing.

I should also note that when my media disappears, DVDA does not give me a message saying my media is offline. My videos are still there in the timeline, except all the thumbnails turn black and when I try to preview it, all I see is black.

Imo: I don't remember ever installing that codec. And I doubt that could be the cause anyway because my regular DVDs are fine. It's just the multiple angle ones that have issues.

If anyone wants to see my DVDA project file, I can e-mail it to you. Just simply replace the audio files with audio files and the video files with video files.
I just opened up my project on another computer that can not see my original media. I replaced all my ac3 files with a song I had on that computer and I replaced all the AVIs with a picture I had on that computer. The same exact problem occured. Random black video tracks. So it seems as if anyone can repeat this problem by simply opening my DVDA file and replacing the media.