Need to Recapture HDV

jeffagwm wrote on 1/25/2010, 3:49 PM
I just had a hard drive failure and lost some of my media (HDV Video files). My Veg file is still ok as are my audio and other files since they were on a different hard drive. No problem, I thought, Since in Vegas you can right click on the events in the project media bin and 'recapture all offline media'. However, it appear that this very useful function only works with the external DV capture utility not the internal HDV capture.

Does anyone have any experience with this problem and have work around.

This is a dramatic production with lots of hours of video taken between all the takes and retakes. I don't capture with scene detection, nor do I capture the entire tape, only taking the good sequences that I need. If I can't find a solution to this then my veg file is useless and I would need to start fresh with newly captured media and loss an entire weeks work. Yes I know I should have made duplicate back up copies of the media files.

I am using 9.0c capturing video shot on a Z1 and playing the tapes back on a Sony M35U deck.

Thanks

Jeff

Comments

PeterDuke wrote on 1/27/2010, 2:54 AM
The trick is going to be capturing your files with the same names they had before. Do exactly what you did before and you will be most of the way there. If there is a consistent name offset, you might be able to use something like Bulk Rename Utility to save some of the tedium of renaming. Otherwise you will just have to rename them one by one, which hopefully will be less effort than re-editing. If you don't put the files in the same directory structure you had before you should be able to tell Vegas where they are.

I did a similar thing using DV tape with Pinnacle Studio, and found that the start of the first clip could be out by a few frames. You might check that.
willqen wrote on 1/27/2010, 3:54 AM
Do you still have the audio portion of the files? If so that would make it considerably easier.
farss wrote on 1/27/2010, 5:45 AM
I think you have a real problem, sorry.
This is my understanding of the situation based on some research I did some time ago.
Vegas cannot recapture anything from just the project file, for DV you need the vidcap file which logs the TC of the capture. If you loose that log you're in trouble even with DV.
The internal capture can load a file and capture a HDV tape from that however the file it needs is in XML. You can setup the capture by setting in and out points and save that file in case you do need to recapture. I doubt many realise this much less ever do it.
I did get as far as writing some VB code to create the XML file from a standard EDL file, that's not too hard except of course that would cause the capture to only capture the parts of the tape that were called up by the EDL and that's not what you've done. Even trickier is getting an EDL out of Vegas that uses the TC on the tape.
I'm trying pretty hard to think of a way this could be solved for you as easily as possible however I'm coming up empty.
If you are forced to rebuild the project I can't think of anything that's going to ease the pain. I've rebuilt projects from other people's edits from only the tapes and their rendered output but you've probably lost any reference to what your project looked or sounded like.

Bob.
willqen wrote on 1/31/2010, 3:39 AM
As I understand it Vegas does not keep track of time code for imported HDV files, as it does for DV, if you use the Vegas import utility. correct? or am I wrong? You have to import the whole HDV file into Vegas, then do your pick and choosing inside Vegas, however that it is you do it. correct? Or perhaps I am behind the times and vegas has this feature now?
Then if you should lose it you could recapture the whole file - tape. Correct? No matter how you try to fix this it won't be easy - good luck, may the great Video Spirit watch over and protect you!
Chienworks wrote on 1/31/2010, 3:54 AM
Seems to me that the easiest route would be to recapture scenes by hand, making sure to include at least a second or so extra head and tail. Give the files the same names as before. The names can be found by edit details or by right-mouse-button clicking on the events and choosing properties / media.

Once the capturing is redone and the files with the same names are back in the original directory Vegas will load the new files as if they were the original ones. The events will all be sync-offset by whatever amount of extra head exists. You can use the slip feature to resync them, unfortunately one by one, but it's easier than starting from scratch.