I have had to recapture M2T files that became corrupted during a lightening strike. In a real world situation Vic, I think the names will be the same (as in my situation) and I put in the appropriate tape and recaptured the parts I needed.

Why did you change the name?

j razz

Vic,, check and see if the clips have a timecode, no code no recapture

Thanks guys -

I renamed the file cuz I didn't want to erase it and figured Vegas wouldn't see it and so assume it was missing - which happened - sort of, I guess.
Vegas sez the clip is off line.

Yes there are (is?) timecode on the tape and in the timeline (I always show timecode on the timeline)

I was experimenting for knowledge of how to proceed if I lost one of my hard drives with media - I'm currently sporting 4 terrabytes of media and am scared of lighting and hurricane and general computer malaise.

I've created what I call "Assemblies" of every one of my tapes and keep those VEG files on a different hard drive, plus on a nightly archive on yet another HD.
I simply was wondering if I blew out the drive, if Vegas would reconstruct the assemblies (and therefore every subsequent edit made) automatically.

Perhaps I have to disconnect the drive, as suggested or erase the file entirely. Am too tired to do this kind of mental gymnastics now - will resume experiment in AM.

I WAS able to manually reconstruct the missing file by checking the TC before and after the missing clip and manually pushing the tape to a point just a little earlier in the TC. Vegas automatically reconstructed the missing clip - but in the event of a terrabyte going south, I'd really like a huge batch restore.

Also - why is the manual entry of timecodes greyed out in Capture?
That is why can't I type in 01;12;22;02 and have the machine find it?
All this in M2t format.

v

well i have never had to recapture hdv clips,, but now curious and doing some messing I see that i cant,, hmmm.. Hope I don't need to,,and like Vic the manual entry of timecodes are greyed out in Capture .

Further checking and some of my captured clips don't even have a code.....? Ok,, my head is hurting now

Just for fun, I tried capture and recapture using both Vegas7d and HDVSplit .77b. I capture 4 clips, look at them on the timeline, then throw them in a folder so Vegas can't see them, and recapture from tape.

(1) The Vegas recaptured clips lined up perfectly with the previous captured clips. I don't know anything about a "recapture" button; I just re-opened the Vegas capture utility, set the counter back to 001, and hit the red capture button.

(2) The HDVSplit clips also recaptured perfectly. One of the reasons I prefer HDVSplit is because it can automatically name clips based on shooting date and time, so it renamed the recaptured clips identically to the first batch.

(3) The Vegas and HDVSplit do not sync with each other. Vegas appears to throw in two clips from the succeeding clip to the previous clip, while muting the audio. HDVSplit cuts the clips cleanly.

So my conclusion is that, yes, you can trash a batch of clips and recreate them with frame accuracy using either capture method. I also conclude that I like HDVSplit better, but to each his own.

I seem to get quite a few errors either way. One thing I've noticed is that sometimes these errors will crash vegas just by being on the timeline, but other times it won't crash Vegas until you try to play or render the part of the clip where the error is. The clips with the errors will also crash Windows Media Player so I don't think it is Vegas's fault. Just mine for being too cheap to buy the proper HDV tape. Anyway, either http://homepages.roadrunner.com/mwilczyn/mpeg2repair/Mpeg2Repair[/link] or one of the Womble programs will fix these errors. The clips just won't play back as smoothly from either Vegas or WMP anymore, but at least they won't crash.

I've also noticed that the Vegas capture and HDVSplit will capture different numbers of clips from each other from the same footage.

riredale ,, i dont understand what you mean set the counter to 001,,are you just manually recapturing knowing where to start, or is vegas finding your timecode in and outs
thanks

Nothing that sophisticated. I threw in a tape and told Vegas to capture. Vegas names the first clip 001, then 002, etc.

Then I put those clips in a different folder, rewound the tape, and told Vegas to capture again. The capture program continued naming where it left off. But I wanted it to exactly mirror what it did the first time, so I set the name back to 001. Then Vegas would name the clips just as before.

As mentioned I didn't have to reset anything with HDVSplit, since it names clips based on the date and time embedded in the clip.

What I'm looking for is a RECAPUTURE in the event a drive fails.

Right now I'm accessing data off of four 500G drives.
I have all my VEG files on a separate drive which I back up every night.

In the event that one of the data drives crashes, there will be "media offline" showing in the VEG files. With my old AVID (I know, I know), I could recapture just the clips that are needed. It would go into a batch mode and then ask for the appropriate tapes (boy you better have them correctly labled). But it worked.

I believe that Vegas will do the same, but am not certain - especially with M2t.

Anyone have any firm experience in this? Right now, I'm just looking ahead, but it's a huge issue if you've got dozens of hours of footage digitized, and something goes down.

v

I think the bottom line is that Vegas cannot recapture offline HDV.

This came up a long time ago regarding Gearshift.
Gearshift works by making DV proxies and switching folder names to switch between proxies and the HDV footage. Simple suggestion was why not just capture the HDV via VCR downconvert and when you've finished editing, move the DV clips to force them offline and have Vegas recapture the clips without deck downconvert as HDV. Pretty much a classic offline -> online workflow very popular in Avid systems.

Idea wouldn't work which was why Gearshift was born, Vegas cannot do frame accurate capture from HDV. That from memory was the explaination back in V6 days. I don't know if that's changed or not with V7. There's also some issues I think with how the HDV decks handle timecode, only one of the Sony HDV VCRs supports tape cloning. Part of the problem might relate to the very structure of HDV itself. I'd assume you need to start a capture on an I frame, if you didn't the remaining frames in the GOP couldn't be decoded.

Now if you work from that you'll see an issue. Your project defines an In point that isn't an I frame and you try to start capturing from that TC you've got a problemo. The capture needs to start from the preceding I frame!

There's even a problem with recapturing DV with Vegas I think. Loose your VidCap log file and you're out of luck from memory. Problem is Vegas isn't driven by TC which is a good thing in many ways, it copes perfectly with no TC at all which has saved my bacon once.

Bob.

Well, in my brief tests, Vegas replaced the m2t files with frame accuracy.

At this point, I am comfortable in the opinion that if one of my hard drives went kablooey (that's an official failure mode term) then I would be able to easily rebuild an identical new drive, assuming I knew which clips were on the original drive.

Am I missing something?

Possibly,
did you actually try recapturing the tapes?

To the best of my knowledge a Vegas project only stores a time offset from the start of the file. It works this way because a lot of the media that you can drop onto the T/L doesn't have TC anyway.

If you can rebuild the exact same file then you're sweet but if you've done it the old school way of logging clips and batch capturing you could be in for a very long night. That's why I usually don't work that way and why I avoid scene detection. If something does go foobar then all I've got to do is recapture the tapes and re-align one file per tape and Vegas will do the rest.

Bob.

and that's the reason that I create a "Assemble All" edit, first thing out of the box.

I digitize an entire roll and then assemble all the clips into an "Assemble All" edit. That way, if the drive goes (all this in theory, now), I'll have an accurate rebuild of the original capture.

Link your edit back to that file, and you should be all back to normal.

At least, that's my theory - I just don't have the time to test it all out, right now, so anyone who does check it out - well that would be great.

v

Farss:

I'm not sure about your input method, but I assume you capture an entire tape as a single file, and then manually look through and jot down timecode entry points and relevant data about individual portions, right?

My simplistic method is to tell HDVSplit to name clips based on date and time. For instance, I will insert a full tape and hit Go. After 60 minutes my hard drive will have typically many dozens of individual m2t files, with names like "Tape14 20070628-110317." This means the clip came from Tape14 and was shot on June 28, 2007 at 11:03am.

In my experience, I could take those hundreds of clips, build my project and save it as a veg file. If I then erase all the clips from the hard drive, I can pull them back in again from tape and the veg file will be none the wiser as long as I strictly maintain my naming convention in HDVSplit. I've never seen a recaptured clip off by as much as a single frame, though I guess it could certainly happen.

I am having exactly the same problem with Vegas 7.0d.

I captured 3 hours of footage with the Vegas HDV capture utility, with scene detect enabled. I edited the project, and now I want to take all my m2t files offline, but keep the offline clips in the project.

In the Project Media tab, it shows Timecode Ins and Outs for all my m2t files. So this is encouraging. But when I tested one clip, "Clip 378," deleting the footage from Windows but leaving the clip it in the Sony project, the Timecode In and Timecode Out for this clip are now blank . "Recapture" is greyed out, and "Recapture All Offline Clips" is selectable but does nothing.

Where did that vital timecode information go for Clip 378?

In Vegas 7.0d is there really no way to:

1. Batch Capture HDV
2. Take all the clips offline (presumably by deleting in Windows) after finishing a project.
3. Recapture all the clips according to its original timecode.

This is how every NLE I've ever used works. It is disturbing to say the least if Vegas can't do it.

"Vegas replaced the m2t files with frame accuracy."

You may have gotten lucky, but Vegas does not recapture with frame accuracy and actually even the DV proxies created from HDV on the Vegas timeline will not actually be consistently frame accurate either. It's actually the dirty little HDV secret.

Right now the only way to truly save your ass froma data loss is to have your .veg and raw media backed up in another location, so therefore your m2t storage requirments are 11GB x 2 for m2t and 36GB x 2 for cineform per hr.

Bruceo:

Take a tape, pull it in with HDVSplit (where it splits and auto-names based on shooting time and date), use GearShift to make DV proxies. Okay, tuck those files away, recapture again and make new DV proxies.

The result will be that the m2t clips and the DV proxies will be frame-accurate with the previous ones, in my experience. Using V7d and HDVSplit .77b.

So are there any solutions in my case (please see above)?

Why do my HDV timecodes disappear?

This has been my greatest headache - how to ensure I can re-capture when a disk fails. Since I've started using the DR60 drive, I'm importing from it into a new Vegas projest with the same material saved on tapes and archived on shelves. Now, it becomes even more complicated - any workflow hints on how to associate my DR60 downloads with appropriate tapes, and the timecode therein?

With the basic tape acquisition still not clear, how can I be confident using the so much promoted "HD60 file based/tape archive" scenario?

Sony, you should describe the intricacies of Vegas project protection and time-proofing in some white-paper, if not in the Vegas manual or Help file!

I think this would be very difficult.
My best suggestion would be to look at simply backing up the files as data, not video.
LTO 3 tape seems to be one industry standard. Given the amount of film and audio being archived on it, it's a fair bet you'll be able to find a way to read it for decades to come. It's faster than realtime and you can backup everything using it.

Bob.

Would Gearshift allow me to create DV proxies that preserve my HDV timecodes?