Print to Tape Massive Audio Dropouts

DavidPJ wrote on 8/31/2004, 3:23 PM

I never had a problem with print to tape until now. With Vegas 5b, print to tape or preview on device will play the avi video to the firewire connected camera, but with a huge amount of audio dropouts. The dropouts begin just 1-2 seconds after the preview or record to device begins. The video is fine. The audio is unusable.

Playing the avi directly from Vegas 5 plays both the audio and video fine to the camera's monitor. Playing from the timeline is OK too. Made a couple more avi files from short looped regions of video/audio with no special effects with the exact same results when using Print to Tape. The avi files were rendered using the NTSC DV Template. Audio 48,000 Hz, 16 bit , Stereo, PCM, Uncompressed. Video 29.97fps, 720x480, lower field first. Operating System is XP SP1.

Any ideas? The only change I made to my PC from when this last worked was adding a Matrox G550 Dual Head Video Card, which I know shouldn't make any difference. I've tried the usual power off and rebooting. I've upgraded DirectX to 9b. I've defragmented my hard drives, and made sure my Vegas temp files were not on my system drive.

Thanks for your suggestions, I'm at a loss of what to try next.

Comments

SonyEPM wrote on 9/1/2004, 7:11 AM

The new video card might be hogging more resources, limiting bus throughput. Try moving the Matrox, or the 1394 card to another PCI slot-

BrianStanding wrote on 9/1/2004, 7:23 AM

Go back through "File Preferences" and "Options" to make sure your temp and preview files are not going to your boot drive. I had to reset everything after upgrading from 5.0a to 5.0b.

DavidPJ wrote on 9/1/2004, 2:47 PM

Thanks for the suggestions.

I've confirmed my temp and preview files are are not on my system drive.

I've installed Scenalyzer and recorded to tape. The audio was very much improved but still has dropouts. A major improvement but still not usable.

I'll try moving the Adaptec firewire card tonight. I can't move the Matrox card because I only have one AGP slot. I may try putting in my old Nvidea graphics card instead of the Matrox.

DavidPJ wrote on 9/1/2004, 4:44 PM

Making progress! Moving the cards made no difference. Neither did replacing the Matrox card with the original Nvidea card.

However, I found that by moving the AVIs to my other two hard drives the problem goes away. So now it appears one of my relatively new Maxtor drives is the problem.

Any suggestions on what to look for on a low performing disk? I know about DMA, but I'm going to double check. Thanks.

DavidPJ wrote on 9/1/2004, 6:07 PM

Problem solved. Could not enable DMA on the hard drive with Vegas. PIO mode was stuck on. Deleted the primary IDE channel and automatically reinistalled on boot up. All drives now show DMA, and the Vegas Print to Tape and Preview to Device problem is gone.

I don't know what errors caused XP to force the drive to PIO mode, but I'll worry about that later if the problem reoccurs.