Ah well! back to the drawing board. The same thing happens with build 247. I'll just have to put up with the occasional missed frame or discard the offending clip from my project. It's a pity.

It may actually be a camera problem. Often there are corrupt frames that don't show as being different in a player, but get dropped by the renderer.

Try running your video through the "Quickstream Fix" utility in VideoRedo Plus first. It will fix them and reindex the GOP if they can be saved. Then the output from Vegas should be better.

Thanks Musicvid. I'll give that a try.

VideoRedo Plus has a full-function trial.
Many people like it so much they buy it.
There is also a more expensive h264 version.
http://www.videoredo.com/en/index.htm

Of course, I won't promise it is the cure for your problem.

I'm having exactly the same problem, I think. Occasionally in a rendered video, instead of getting the original frame sequence, such as 1 2 3 4 5 6, I'll get a frame that is repeated, such as 1 2 3 3 5 6. I haven't been able to isolate the exact circumstances that cause it. The original source video and the video on the timeline are fine, but the final rendered video has this frame problem.

I thought maybe it was build 256, but if it's happening in the previous build, it's not that. Maybe something has changed in 11.0 vs. 10.0.

It's somewhat of an irritation, especially in shots with smooth movement that now gets interrupted sometimes with a repeated and dropped frame.

If I render the offending portion of the video by itself, as a small loop, I don't see the problem. But when I render the entire video or a large segment, it's there.

All my video source files come right out of my Handycam, at 1920x1080-50i. I render to the template "Blu-ray 1920x1080-50i, 25 Mbps video stream". I've set everything to 25 fps and upper field first that I can find, and I'm still getting this problem.

I think it's a bug, but if anyone can suggest something else for me to try, I'm open to ideas.

Musicvid,
It seems like that's the problem. The offending clips play perfectly using Windows Media Player and also in the VMS11's preview window. However, after rendering, the problem shows up. I tried first to put the offending clip through VideoRedo then replacing the original clip with the clip processed by VideoRedo on the timeline and re-rendering. I had limited success with this. With some clips the problem re-occurred after rendering. I finally put the whole rendered project through VideoRedo and this did the trick (obviously because I wasn't re-rendering through Vegas).
It's early days yet. I will have to do more tests before I'm sure that VideoRedo's Quickstream Fix will work everytime but things look promising.
One question though. Is there a free utility that will do the same as Quickstream Fix?
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction Musicvid.

I have verified that this is a bug. Depending on the rendering settings you use, the rendered video may have repeated frames that are plainly visible both when playing the video at regular speed and frame-by-frame.

I created a video and rendered it first at fairly low quality, then at high quality. The high-quality rendering shows the repeated frame; the low-quality rendering does not. So there's something that happens in the high-quality rendering that messes things up. I'm trying now to see what differences between the two templates might be at fault.

I can now confirm some of what Anthony states. This is definately a bug. I thought at first it was my camcorder introducing corruption into the clips but I have since seen the missing frames on a rendered slideshow. I have spent hours trying different rendering values and have not come up with a definative rule of thumb for eliminating the problem. It does seem as if the problem is exacerbated the higher the rendering bitrate. Heaven knows how I can prove this to SCS. If I run the rendered clip through VideoRedo Plus's Quickstream Fix utility the problem disappears. However, I don't really want to pay $50 to fix something that shouldn't be happening. I have, however, come up with a workaround. I have Ulead's Media Studio Pro still installed on my PC from the days before VMS so I decided to re-render the clip through this. This worked. I then tried rendering the original clip with the compression values of the clip. MSP rendered it with no re-compression and the clip played fine. One slight drawback. Putting it through MSP messed up the timestamps a little. The rendered clip was all there but Windows reported that it was shorter than it actually was. I pulled it into DVDAS and created a DVD with no problems. It's a little bit of a bind having to run corrupted projects through MSP but hey, I've saved $50.

On a side note... or should I say, question:

I'm putting a film together with footage from four different cameras (two versions of the Drift Stealth and two versions of the GoPro Hero). I can play them all together in Vegas preview without a problem other than slightly choppy transitions which I blame mostly on the limitations of my laptop. The sharpness and color of each camera is noticable, but entirely expected. But when burned to DVD (and I've so far only tried one copy), I get the severe repeated frame/ chopped video as mentioned.

My next move, as suggested, is to reduce to render quality. Some of the cameras were filming in 1080, others, 720. The finished quality that I'd like to achieve is 720 across the board, and burn to dvd.

Still plugging away!

Hi again.
I'm still struggling with this one. I'd like not to have to use my workaround with MSP and have continued to try and find a reason for the missed frames. I know it didn't happen when I first started using VMS (v10 it was then) so I know it's not my camcorder. I have thought that I might have altered a setting in the render properties that has caused this. I wonder if one of you very knowledgeable gentlemen (and ladies, of course) could cast your eyes over the following for me and see if you can see anything amiss. I've left the audio settings out.
Video Tab

Output Type DVD
Width 720
Height 576
Frame Rate 25
Aspect Ratio 16:9 Display
I-frames 12
B-frames 2
Insert I-frames at markers Yes
Profile Main
Level Main
Field order Upper field first
Prioritze quality over speed Yes
Video quality 31
Insert sequence header before every GOP Yes
Variable bit rate Yes
Maximum (bps) 9,100,000
Average (bps) 8,625,000
Minimum (bps) 4,200,000

Advanced Video Tab

Write sequence end code Yes
Allow field-based motion compensation Yes

Non-linear Quantization I Frames Yes
Non-linear Quantization P Frames Yes
Non-linear Quantization B Frames Yes

Optimize to Table 1 I Frames Yes
Optimize to Table 1 P Frames Yes
Optimize to Table 1 B Frames Yes

Alternate Scan Pattern I Frames Yes
Alternate Scan Pattern P Frames Yes
Alternate Scan Pattern B Frames Yes

DC Coefficient 9 Bit
Video format PAL
Color primaries ITU-R Rec, 624-4 System B, G

Transfer ITU-R Rec, 624-4 System B, G

Matrix coefficients ITU-R Rec, 624-4 System B, G

VBV buffer size (KB) 224
Sampling format (greyed out) 4:2:0

System Tab

Stream type (greyed out) Program
Sector size 2048
Packets per pack 1
Sectors delay 0
Video delay (ms) (greyed out) 180
Auto-calculate Yes
Video buffer size (KB) 23
Audio delay (ms) (greyed out) 180
Auto-calculate Yes
Audio buffer size (KB) 2
System bit rate (bps) (greyed out) 9,009,200
Auto-calculate Yes

Align sequence headers to packets Yes
Frame timestamps Timestamps on I frames only

Project Tab

Video rendering quality (Use Project Settings)

My camcorder bps is 9,100,000 and I'd like to maintain this as my project maximum bit rate to ensure that there is no re-compression. I have tried various combinations of average and minimum bit rate with no success.
I'd be very grateful for any help I can get with this.