ongoing probelm with VV3

altphase wrote on 12/22/2002, 10:30 AM
I've used VV3 since it's been out and in general everything has worked great for me. I'm able to capture and export using FW without any problems, I'm pretty happy with the quality of MPEG2 exporting, but one thing has really been frustrating me in the past few months. Everytime I go to work with DV captured source that is stored on my external FW drive (IBM 7200rpm) playback from the timeline will stop every few second and the app will not respond to any commands. After a few seconds, playback resumes or I will get a "unable to mix audio" message. The drive can be fully derfagged or not, it doesn't matter. At one time I did some testing and I'm pretty sure the same error came up when using my internal 7200rpm drive. Since this has happened I have gotten a new motherboard/cpu and upgraded to DDR RAM, but the problem followed. I can play back the same DV clips in Win Media Player just fine without dropped frames or freezes. What could this be all about. This problem is making VV3 almost unusable for me for any extended projects.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 12/22/2002, 11:13 AM
If there were serious software problems with Vegas they would have showed up in this forum by now. Firewire drives are problemamtic at best. I've given up on them totally.

The 'unable to mix audio' message may not have anything to do with audio, just that Vegas is having trouble reading a file that happens to contain a audio track. I would be likely to blame Windows. Microsoft newsgroups are overflowing with firewire issues. It seems one problem is Windows loses the drive, BIOS may or may not see, then Windows may lose it or the drive fails to initalize, won't, read/write didn't use DMA and on and on. For what its worth I remember my first firewire drive wasn't even seen by Windows until I downloaded some Windows patch.

Pretty sure isn't good enough. When trying to pindown Windows problems you need to be as certain as humanly possible. If you can't swap out the suspected hardware, then move the file elsewhere. Close down Vegas, move one or more large files from your firewire drive to an seperate internal drive and see if Vegas still has problems. If it does it could be as simple as one or more tracks being corrupt. Several posts on that. The fix that always worked for me was to simply create a new track, move the problem events to the new track, then delete the problem track. A fix that only takes a few seconds and worked 4 for 4 so far.

Do you see a little icon (safely remove hardware) on the task tray where you can mount, unmount your firewire drive? If not, that may be the problem and a sign you're running a early version of Windows that didn't support firewire properly.
HPV wrote on 12/22/2002, 12:39 PM
This is a software bug that SF knowes about. It is fixed in the shipping code of Sound Forge 6. SF should release a 3.0d for Vegas to fix it, but don't know if they will.
Craig H.
MKS wrote on 12/22/2002, 1:20 PM
(( ... DV captured source that is stored on my external FW drive (IBM 7200rpm)... ))

Your problem may be with VV3 as another poster suggested. I don't know.

But IBM 60 and 75 gig hard drives are known to have excessive, (I mean really excessive), failures. If you have time, remove your IBM drive from the firewire enclosure and install it on a motherbd IDE port. Then download the "Drive Fitness Test" from the IBM web site. It will create a bootable floppy which will test your drive. I've personally had IBM drives not recognized and some with unrecoverable corrupt sectors. Even the Drive Fitness Test could not fix the corrupt sectors.

I read that IBM sold their hard drive division but I don't know to who. If anyone knows, please post as I definitely don't want to buy any drives from the buyer.

Mike
Spot|DSE wrote on 12/22/2002, 1:41 PM
Sonic Foundry most likely WON'T be releasing a patch, because the problem involved in working with all the OHCI work arounds different manufacturers have done is a rebuild of the whole of Vegas, like it was with ACID. V4 will have this taken care of, but in the meanwhile, using a solid Firewire box like the ADS rather than using the Lacie drives, etc will take care of this. Make SURE you have the Oxford 911 controller chip in your firewire box.
BillyBoy wrote on 12/22/2002, 2:36 PM
Just what "bug" is SoFo suppose to be aware of? I don't recall reading about any 'bug'in Vegas dealing with the firewire or Windows issues.
altphase wrote on 12/22/2002, 5:47 PM
I agree about the fact that FW drives are flaky. I never had any problems with SCSI drives but the prices could not compare to FW solutions. My external FW case uses the Oxford 911 chipset and I'm using Win XP Pro. In most cases the drive works great but there are times when it mysteriously disconnects or comes up with a delayed write failed message (does not happen often). In any case, I'm able to use it for sound editing with Cool Edit and other apps. and it never fails, but the combination of the drive and VV3 causes problems. I don't doubt that the FW drive is flaky at times but using it with VV3 is always a problem. Also, I moved some source DV to my internal drive and I was able to edit for 1/2 hour with no problems, so it's not just a VV3 bug. It's a VV3-FW drive combination that's causing me problems.
PeterWright wrote on 12/22/2002, 7:35 PM
I experienced this error with my first EXTERNAL firewire drive - it came up both on my laptop and my desktop machines. I found that the same file played from the same drive in Premiere did not exhibit the problem, and posted about it.
SF responded that this will be fixed in the "next revision", which may be 3.0d, but more likely VV4.

In the meantime, I have found that using USB2 with the same drive (it has dual connections) solves the problem in Vegas. Not sure what was causing it, but the additional speed of USB2 was enough to get past it.

Peter
JJKizak wrote on 12/22/2002, 8:15 PM
Ibm sold their hard drive division to Hitachi for 2.2 billion.

James J. Kizak
MKS wrote on 12/22/2002, 9:37 PM
Thanks for that info James. I DEFINITELY won't be buying any Hitachi hard drives in the future.

Mike
Spot|DSE wrote on 12/22/2002, 10:06 PM
Vegas (and ACID 3.0) are fairly strict in their OHCI compliancy and some other aspects of controlling external drives. Apparently it's a part of the base code. I'm somewhat parroting at this point, because it's never been an issue for me, but it is for many people, particularly those of the flavor of working with cheap mobos and hardware.
Anyway, because of this strict sense of compliancy, some of the OHCI drives kits that have skirted the strictest senses of the spec, have problems being controlled/accessed from Vegas. And Premiere. And DV Express. and many other media intensive apps. Part of this was fixed with the introduction of the Oxford 911 controller chip for OHCI drive devices. However, there are still some that are freaky in the way they are read for buffering.
For me, I use ADS datatanks with ADS, SIIG, and Unibrain cards. NEVER once have I had the timeout problem, and that's with a minimum of 1, and usually 6 Firewire drives on my laptop or desktops. I have nearly 2 terrabytes in SCSI, but nearly another 2 in datatanks and IDE drives. This just isn't an issue for me, probably because ADS has never played with the OHCI spec, and why their cards were the first to market with the OHCI spec intact. And why ADS is recommended by nearly every NLE maker out there....
This doesn't explain much, but to finish, SOFO is aware of the problem, and they have worked it out in ACID 4. I'm certain it will be a non-issue in Vegas 4 as well. But from my understanding, it's a ground=up thing to fix. And we all know SOFO isn't going to be doing another rev of 3 with 4 so close to being beta tested.