Thanks, Liam. Glad it's not a serious issue.

Not to get you worried, but I have had them make it through the final render.
I think you are experiencing the infamous phantom frame Sony can't duplicate, very weird bug .

This bug showed up the same time dynamic ram preview appeared in Vegas 4. Don't use ram previews here and have never had this problem. Setting the dynamic ram preview to 0MB before rendering might be a cure. Are people only seeing this with DV renders?
This is different from the mixed fields frame problem that results from unquantized Vegas generated media and stills and transitons. In that glitch you'll have a frame with a field from the last frame of the first event mixed with a field from the last frame of the second event. It can happen on cuts or transitions. Cause is unquantized generated media & stills that have a video event snapped to it. Events added with "cut to overlap conversion" can cause this also. This really isn't a bug, more of a Vegas Preferences interface weakness. It should only allow frame level adjustments based on the project settings. BTW, factory default setting for NTSC DV are wrong for generated media length (9:29 is really 9.29 and 3/4 extra frame) and new still image legth/cut to overlap conversion.

Craig H.

Yes I've posted a few times in the past about this ongoing bug. It's very irritating. Sony response has been "we cannot reproduce the problem"...kinda sounds like a car dealer service department huh?

If this many people have seen it there is definitly something to it. Sony's lack of interest in looking into this further is a bit upsetting. So anytime you want to render out a long project it's best to save- close Vegas, then open it back up without changing the project and starting the render as is. JUST to be safe.

Had that happen once ina dv render. Adjusted nothing from the timeline, but rerendered and the problem was gone.

I've only had it appear in the final render when there actually was a real frame that ended up in an odd place. Although I missed it in basic scrubbing / previewing from the timeline... I have caught it a couple of times and when i check the timeline sure enough there was a single "flash-frame" there. Obviously I didn't mean to have a single frame end up here but somehow it did (maybe a big with Ripple editing - who knows).

I too have experienced it and it did end up on the final burned disk. A fix in MY case was I opened Vegas up twice and copied the details from one opened instance of Vegas to the other and everything was fixed.

This is a VERY frustrating bug that others have reported but never seemed to be duplicatable. But it is a REAL problem. Rare, but REAL.

Yes, it is rare. I've been working about three weeks on the same project and the phantom frame appeared three times. As I said, any manipulation of the clip at all made it go away. In the future I'll restart Vegas before rendering.

Now I have another question: Has anyone here experienced the strange disappearance of audio crossfades in a project? In my situation many of the crossfades mysteriously disappeared and were audibly broken until I tweaked each event a little (and then ctrl-Z'd it). Instantly the fades reappeared. I was hoping v.5 would fix this, but no. Weird!

Doug

The bug is real. I have seen stray frames in both DV and Mpeg renders.

Gary

I don't doubt that it is a real bug. Real from the sense that somehow the flash frame got there.

How it got there is open to question.

There are two effects that I see.

One is a flash frame while editing on the timeline - but this is not a "real" flash frame in that it will go away if you exit Vegas and re-open the project (may be other things make it go away also).

The <real serious> bug (at least as far as I am concerned) is when one of the flash frames turns out to be a real single frame that ends up in the project. No idea how it got there - and it is not like I would ever deliberately slice up a single frame and put it there.

I've had this happen both while editing and on final render. I used to see it in VEGAS 4 and thought it was gone with the new version but have had it show up once again in VEGAS 5.

Maybe Sony honestly can't duplicate it. I say this because I'm not really aware of what it is that I do to make it happen either. It's just a random thing that is there sometimes, not there sometimes. It really sucks when it shows up in your Final Render after you've spent all night rendering a project with the intent of delivering that day.

It really sucks when it shows up in your Final Render after you've spent all night rendering a project with the intent of delivering that day

I totally agree. This is one of the reasons why I always render to AVI (rather than go straight to MPEG2).

This workflow allows me to easily re-render the tiny section covering the error and then to very quickly render the MPEGs again.

Of course this is not <just> to compensate for this random (and for me - rare) "bug" but also to cope with those silly times where I have made the sin of a spelling error on a title that I (and the client) perhaps didn't catch in all the rough cuts.

I have it quite regularly and was sure this was going to be fixed in V5. The fact that Sony cannot replicate it is troubling. I am fairly sure it has something to do with the ripple tool as it usually appears after I make some ripple moves.

Marc

>>I have it quite regularly and was sure this was going to be fixed in V5. The fact that Sony cannot replicate it is troubling. I am fairly sure it has something to do with the ripple tool as it usually appears after I make some ripple moves.
>>

I've not been using ripple edit at all and still have the problem.

Doug Marshall

For me, it has always occurred when I have toggled "quantize to frames" on or off within a project.

As for Sony not being able to replicate it, they might have their head in the sand on this one. I e-mailed their tech support earlier this year, and they stated that they had not had any reports of the behaviour in Vegas 5 and had assumed that the issue was resolved. I truly believe that if they sat down and edited a few large projects, toggling ripples and/or quantize to frames, and payed careful attention to the final render, that they would eventually hit this bug. Hopefully, it would lead to a solution. For Gary Kleiner to claim it is real speaks volumes about this issue - and for me, it is the only serious bug in Vegas, which is saying a lot about how otherwise solid the programming is.

Kevin.

I'm sure Sony has seen it, but like everyone else they can't repeat it. If anyone could make it do it by following any repeatable procedure, Sony could fix it.

Just wanted to voice my agreement with the masses so that Sony can't again say " they had not had any reports ".

My Report : Have had it, done know why it was there, damn frustrating.

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com

I've just recently gotten the black frame bug to bite and it's a first for me. To the best of my recollection, here's what I had going:

I was trying to create a "loop" of footage among a series of clips, so that an object would go through these stages: Clip "a" a JPEG image ---> transition to clip "b" a short video ---> transition back to clip "a," the JPEG.

In order to get the transitions looking proper, I had to "stop" clip b from playing immediately, freezing the action on its first frame for a period of, say five seconds, so that the transition to the clip would appear fluid. To do this, I cut the first frame off of clip "b" and rendered it out as 30FPS HuffYUV uncompressed. The source material was 30FPS HuffYUV, as well.

Once rendered out, I dropped the clip onto the timeline and began stretching it to fit the required 5 seconds, only every other "frame" was black. The clip itself had the appearance of two frames -- or at least, one and a fractional frame -- and only one was the original image.

My timeline was a default Vegas 29.97 NTSC timeline, which I figured wouldn't matter much despite my using 30fps material and still images once render time came about. I repeated the render twice and still the black frame appeared. My solution was eventually to just render it out at 29.97fps, which "solved" the problem.

- jim

I too have had this happen, and also show up in the final render.
The one thing I had to teach myself to do before rendering is:
(Save my work, close Vegas, re-open and then render.)

Shabby fix, but seems to work. :o)

kpitrl

Just for the record, in case Sony reads this, I have seen this bug numerous times as well. I haven't a clue how it happens, as it appears totally random, and not related to anything in particular. As others have said, I have suspicions that it might be related to ripple editing.

The mystery frame happened to me this weekend for the first time, and it was on a final MPEG2 render. I'm running Vegas 5d. The mystery copied frame came from about 20 seconds prior to the mystery frame.

No problem with the prior render to AVI.

Render was done in best, VBR, 2 pass.

Anyone have any further information on this matter? So far it appear the only potential solution is to restart Vegas and render again.

Thanks.

We've never had the bug, but we always do Vegas renders off a fresh reboot. A lot of memory intensive programs suggest this. Also, you shouldn't have anything running but Vegas in renders, at least that is what we do.

Computers do weird stuff due to many things, memory leaks, process stacking, etc.

Reboot and no programs but Vegas running for best renders is what we did without even being told.