Hello All,
This is my first post on this forum. My company (three Vegas workstations) has dealt with the same issues since switching from Premiere Pro to Vegas 7 three months ago. My background is in broadcast (ABC) where I learned all I could from the engineers on the how's and whys of video. Our experience has been that the red screen of death, black frames in clips that were good only a few minutes ago and building peaks, especially in long HDV footage seem to be interrelated. We are using two work arounds currently and if they are succesful, I will try to remember to get back on the post and share my findings. My first advice is set your preferences to only build peaks for visible items. Take each clip into the trimmer before putting it on the time line and trim at least two seconds off the end. Whether you take the clip as one long piece or a series of subclips, DO NOT USE THE LAST FEW SECONDS OF EVERY CLIP. Our shooters still have a hold over habit from our broadcast days of recording bars before and after every shoot, which has recently been very handy. This seems to have stopped the red screens of death, black frames and locking up the program. My second tip is when preparing a program for render, pre-render the m2t audio from the time line as a WAV, put the WAV on the timeline and resync (we use a sound "blip" before the program to do this, so it is really easy). Mute the audio track with the original m2t originated audio and use the WAV file to render out to DVD or for print to tape. We've only been doing this for a few days, but it seems to have cured our lip snyc issues. My theory is that near the end of the m2t file, if there is an open unfinished GOP that when the program is looking ahead to build peaks that it doesn't find the next I-frame that it locks up building peaks. My theory on the red screen of death is that once the program has "freaked out" a bit over the audio that it marks certain clips as "bad" or "corrupted", just not necessarily the same clip as caused the problem. It's just a theory, because many of the facts don't seem to fit, but it does seem to have a great deal to do with the audio portion. Like-wise our sync was never consistently off, two frames, twelve frames, eight frames - again, I theorize that the beginning of the m2t originated audio on the edited time line has an open or "broken" GOP and when the software goes to render the final output, instead of syncing to the audio or recreating a new GOP, it seems to "skip" to the first I-frame and begin rendering from there, which results in audio that is anywhere from zero to fourteen frames off the lip sync of the accompanying video.
I hope my "theories" and work arounds help - and if I'm wrong, maybe someone will post a new theory that will give me better ideas for work arounds.
Your Friend in the Business,
Robert Petersen,
Director, All Pro Media, LLC
robert@allpromedia.tv
This is my first post on this forum. My company (three Vegas workstations) has dealt with the same issues since switching from Premiere Pro to Vegas 7 three months ago. My background is in broadcast (ABC) where I learned all I could from the engineers on the how's and whys of video. Our experience has been that the red screen of death, black frames in clips that were good only a few minutes ago and building peaks, especially in long HDV footage seem to be interrelated. We are using two work arounds currently and if they are succesful, I will try to remember to get back on the post and share my findings. My first advice is set your preferences to only build peaks for visible items. Take each clip into the trimmer before putting it on the time line and trim at least two seconds off the end. Whether you take the clip as one long piece or a series of subclips, DO NOT USE THE LAST FEW SECONDS OF EVERY CLIP. Our shooters still have a hold over habit from our broadcast days of recording bars before and after every shoot, which has recently been very handy. This seems to have stopped the red screens of death, black frames and locking up the program. My second tip is when preparing a program for render, pre-render the m2t audio from the time line as a WAV, put the WAV on the timeline and resync (we use a sound "blip" before the program to do this, so it is really easy). Mute the audio track with the original m2t originated audio and use the WAV file to render out to DVD or for print to tape. We've only been doing this for a few days, but it seems to have cured our lip snyc issues. My theory is that near the end of the m2t file, if there is an open unfinished GOP that when the program is looking ahead to build peaks that it doesn't find the next I-frame that it locks up building peaks. My theory on the red screen of death is that once the program has "freaked out" a bit over the audio that it marks certain clips as "bad" or "corrupted", just not necessarily the same clip as caused the problem. It's just a theory, because many of the facts don't seem to fit, but it does seem to have a great deal to do with the audio portion. Like-wise our sync was never consistently off, two frames, twelve frames, eight frames - again, I theorize that the beginning of the m2t originated audio on the edited time line has an open or "broken" GOP and when the software goes to render the final output, instead of syncing to the audio or recreating a new GOP, it seems to "skip" to the first I-frame and begin rendering from there, which results in audio that is anywhere from zero to fourteen frames off the lip sync of the accompanying video.
I hope my "theories" and work arounds help - and if I'm wrong, maybe someone will post a new theory that will give me better ideas for work arounds.
Your Friend in the Business,
Robert Petersen,
Director, All Pro Media, LLC
robert@allpromedia.tv