do you have any other dv apps installed? MGI maybe? This sounds like a codec issue...

Yes, I have MGI - VideoWave IIIse installed, along with Premere 5.1LE, and DVgate 2.1 (Sony). These all were either pre-installed by Sony or installed when I loaded the TRV30 camera stuff. I have selected "Ignore 3rd party Codecs" but I did NOT select "Use Microsoft DV Codec". Hope this will help you help me. Thanks.

Bob

I'd look at two possible conflicting apps: DV Gate and MGI.

You can remove/restore the Sony stuff with this utility:

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/download/step2.asp?DID=223

MGI video software, especially the older stuff like III, can really mess up your DV system. I encourage you to uninstall everything (capital letters: EVERTHING) from MGI while troubleshooting Vegas. We don't break them, but they have been known to break us.

Once Sony and MGI are removed from the system, entirely, try capturing a new DV clip with SF Video capture and load it up in Vegas - that should work. If it doesn't, there's another system problem. Thousands of people are using Vegas 3 and are not having your specific problem, and my money is on MGI as the cause.

I already downloaded and ran your utility program for the Sony stuff. Besides the videowave III software, I also have PhotoSuite 8.1 from MGI. Should I uninstall that also? I will attempt the uninstall of the video program tonight. Let me be clear though, I do not have any problem capturing the clips. These avi's were already captured to my hard drive via DVgate prior to installing VV3. They are no longer available for capture, so I am stuck with trying to save and render what I already have. Thanks.

Bob

Okay, now I am in deep...trouble. I tried to uninstall the MGI VideoWave III junk and I got an error msg. "Uninstall failed due to an incorrect or corrupted date" (I'm paraphrasing here). I then tried to reinstall it (I had read somewhere that that will sometimes work) but I got a msg. stating something about the install log could not be initialized and that I may not be able to uninstall this program. At this point I aborted everything. I went into my program files folder on C: an deleted the program folder. I then went into regedit and searched on "MGI" and found a folder (or key) with videowave on it. I Right-clicked it and had the option of deleting it but didn't have the courage or know-how to do it. I realize that this uninstall is not your problem but if it will help me render these avi file properly...then I'm begging for help/advice. Do I go into the registry and click delete on that folder? I really do appreciate any help.

Bob

GG, Thanks for your suggestion. My system has NEVER had any problems before and to be quite honest with you, what you suggest is WAY beyond me. At this point I am extremely frustrated...NOT at Sonic Foundry, just upset that these clips are irreplaceable (once in a lifetime type of shots of the grandchildren). I am very pleased with VV3, I am just hoping they can talk me through this. I just don't understand how or why I am getting this blurry render when I selected to ignore other codecs. As I mentioned in the earlier post, the individual avi's play fine in any type of player, they just get blurry when they are rendered. I plan to use VV3's capture program in the future, but that's not helping me now.

Bob

GG,
You don't sound sarcastic...however, I appear to be stubborn and computer illiterate. To furnish more information on my problem, I checked on the properties of each of the clips that are in my .veg file. They are all the same:

Media Tab -
Frame Rate: 29.970 (NTSC)
Field Order: None (progressive scan)
Pixel Aspect ratio: 0.9091 (NTSC DV)
Alpha Channel: None

Video Event Tab -
Only the "Loop" and "Maintain Aspect Ratio" are checked.

Thanks,
Bob

Okay, last post for tonight. I just rendered the .veg file again. This time as a mpeg1 file using the Main Concept codec. It came out pretty good. I don't have the fuzziness or blurring with the moving children. On a full screen LCD computer, it looked a little grainy. Does that part sound normal? Think it will look better on a TV? I selected the template for VCD. Thanks again.

Bob

i'd like to re-emphasize the point that GG made about re-installing from scratch. i know it doesn't sound like a good solution to you, but time and time again us techies are faced with problems that would take longer to troubleshoot than to just re-install from scratch.

since you have a brand-name PC (Sony i'm assuming?) this could get pretty hairy. the disc that came with your system is probably a system restore disc, which you don't want to use since you will lose data on your hard drive.

the right way to do this is to get hold of a Win2k disc, and install it on a second partition on your hard drive, or onto a second hard drive. (you can re-partition your drives with Partition Magic if you don't have a second partition). be sure to first download all the drivers you'll need from Sony.

that way if something goes wrong, you can always boot up in your current OS. you don't lose anything.

don't try this yourself unless you are confident in what you are doing. it isn't difficult to install Win2k, but if you really have no clue, you could lose your precious footage.

as for your question about deleting stuff from the registry, you were on the right track, but i'm afraid it is a bit more complicated than that. if the key was in the Software/MGI (or something like that) section of the registry, then it is safe to delete. it is only configuration information used by the program in question. which means that it won't solve your problems. i'm not sure how to fix the codec problem in the registry... it's one of those things that i'd just re-install Win2k to fix.

it's a shame that some software is so invasive. it's common to get under-developed software that has no respect for the user's system pre-installed on 'brand name' pc's like Sony and all the rest. it's there more for marketing purposes than anything else. so they can add a bullet to the list of features on the system. they don't care so much about what happens if you try to actually USE your system for real. they just use that as an excuse to refuse to support you.

anyway... it may not be as bad as you think. you already know the clips are rendering fine since you can look at them on the Vegas timeline and they look sharp.

try re-compressing them to VCD and see what happens. my guess is they'll come out fine.

This is not an answer to your problem but a suggestion. You mentioned several times that your video is irreplacable. Make sure you burn the raw .avi files to CD NOW -- BEFORE messing with the registry or reinstalling the OS results in a total hard drive blow out. The advice you are getting suggests that you are headed to a slippery slope. Before even thinking about this advice, make sure that video is safely on a CD in its raw form!!!!!

good point. get this project finished and out of the way first, THEN rebuild the OS so you can do the next one without any headaches.

I am still here and I still need help. Thanks for everyones' suggestions. In addition to the above problem. I just captured video through VV3 from the camera and when I right-click on the new avi file in the properties, on the "preview" tab I get nothing but colored pixels. I thought that originally I had this problem after rendering a project but it exists on the captured footage. This is NOT the case on any video I captured BEFORE I installed VV3. The files from DVgate work as they should. I thought I might get some help from some techs at Sonic...

Thanks,

Bob

This last post sounds like capture problems related to codec issues if I am reading it correctly. I am not familiar with your Sony system so I can't offer help there. I am now convused as to what or how many issues you are fighting. I think you need to methodically define what is going wrong. Is it input, rendering, or playing the output?

Some questions with regard to this last capture problem
1. Do you know your capture card settings and are they RGB or YUV? Are the card settings the same when capturing with VV3 and your other capture utility?
2. Are you capturing to an uncompressed .AVI file in both cases? Is it a analog camera? Is it a DV camera connected to firewire? If it is a DV camera are you capturing with the MS DV codec or some other codec.
3. The captured file that looks bad: Does it look bad when played with windows media player or some other non-VV3 player or does it just look bad in VV3 preview window. If you look at properties (e.g., right click | properties | summary tab in WinXP) on the avi file, is clear that both capture utilities stored the .avi file with an uncompressed file.
4. Is the earlier raw material for you grandchildren project captured and encoded as uncompressed video?

I not sure which of these answers might be important, but the sound of things is that your .avi files are compressed with some "lossy compression scheme" or some compression scheme that is not being properly "identified" by vv3. You need to systematically go through the input video and be sure you know what you have as a start. This should involve evalutation of "clean" footage captured with each of your two capture programs for file properties and ability to be viewed an an external third party player like windows media player.

DrRob

I appreciate your attempt to fix my problems and I will try to answer your questions as best I can.

System: Win98se/128MB RAM/TRV 30 camera/F590 laptop (Everything by SONY)

What has happened: Prior to installing VV3, I noticed on the Sony board that if I upgraded to DirectX8.x then I would lose the capture/export functions in Dvgate 2.1 which was my main capture program. Not knowing what I was getting into with VV3, I captured all the clips off my tape that I needed via Dvgate (I assume using the Sony DV Codec). If I play ANY of these files in either MediaBar (Sony) or the MediaPlayer (Microsoft) they play fine. Also, if I right-click and check the properties, I can also see them on the “Preview” tab.

I installed VV3; then proceeded to select transitions and these various .avi files previously captured. When I finished my project, I selected ‘Render’ and the default NTSC template (720X480). The finished product plays fine in the preview window of VV3. However, it displays very fuzzy pictures when there is quick motion. (Such as one of the children waving…you see her hand almost as if it were very slow motion). I managed to re-capture only one of the clips through VV3’s capture program and when rendered it does the same.

Your questions:
1. I do not know anything about a capture card or its settings (this is a laptop and I have no idea how to find out…it is not listed in the device manager as a capture card)
2. It is a digital camera connected via a FireWire cable. I don’t know if the captured files are compressed or not…the properties do not list that. But one file is 190MB and the run time is 52.786 seconds if that is any help. The are using the DV CODEC.
3. (Covered in first paragraph)
4. As I mentioned I cannot tell if any of it is compressed or not. The rendered file from VV3 (NTSC DV – uncompressed template) also has the same properties as the files captured through Dvgate in that the DV CODEC (actually this is listed in ALL of my .avi files) was used.

Other questions: Why is the preview tab in the properties of the VV3 files not displaying correctly?

I uninstalled the VideoWave (MGI) program as instructed earlier and still no luck.

I just printed the rendered project to tape (instead of an avi file) and then played it through the camera on the TV and it was perfect. I then tried to re-capture it (since it appeared fine on TV) and it is all fuzzy again.

I have selected “Ignore 3rd party codecs” and the MS Codec is NOT selected. All of the rendering I have done has been with their default settings on the templates. I have downloaded/run their Sony fix. VV3 (Build 76).

Thanks,

Bob

OK, here is a new question/problem. Disregarding the rendering to avi problems, I selected the time line and decided to render to mpeg1 so that I could burn it onto a VCD. The finished mpeg1 file looked pretty good on the computer screen with none of the fuzziness/blurring that is very noticeable in the avi file. Since I have a firewire CDRW drive, I could not burn directly to CD so I burned it using CD Extreme (Sony's-who else?).

At the same time, so that I could compare my options, I took the .avi file (rendered via VV3) and converted to another mpeg1 file using TMPGEnc.

So now I have two mpeg1 files (different names) of the same footage-edited and saved by VV3. I burned them both to VCD and literally RAN to the DVD player to try them out....the first file (VV3's mpeg1) would not play. The screen stayed black, no sound but the counter on the DVD player moved as if it were playing the movie. The second mpeg1 (TMPGEnc) played fine. I wasn't too thrilled with the output but at least it played.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the mpeg1 from VV3 looked pretty good on the computer screen and I believe that if it had been recognized by the DVD player the quality would have been alot better than the TMPGEnc version.

Thanks,
Bob

How does the video look like in the camera? When you play the clips to a TV via the camera are the kids hands fuzzy then? You might have an intelacing problem, try changing the field order parameter for the clip once on the timeline. Right click on the clip and select properties from the context menu then go to the media tab and experiment with the field order setting. One of these might fix you fuzzy NTSC DV render.
As for the MPEG1, make sure you use the MainConcept MPEG1 VCD NTSC template to render your file. You might want to download VideoFactory 2.0c and install it until VegasVideo 3.0a update is released. Simply install it you do not need to even run it once. This will improve Vegas's MPEG renders as all the fixes for MCMPEG are included.
In order to play your VCD in a stand alone DVD player it must support VCD's. Almost all newer ones do but the older ones might not. Try using different media for the VCD also as many DVD players are picky with the type of CD's that they will play. The cheap stuff might or might not work on your DVD player.
good luck...

Thanks for your reply. The timeline project (this is always the same project discussed as I stopped when I noticed the problems) that was 'printed to video' played fine via the camera onto the TV - no fuzzy hands.

I will follow your suggestion on the field order setting and let you know the results.

I did use the MainConcept VCD template to render the file and as I mentioned it looked pretty good on the computer screen. When I burned it, however, it did not play on my DVD. I burned TWO files at the same time; one rendered through VV3 and one rendered through TMPGEnc. The ONLY one that played was the latter file. Both files were burned to the same disk.

Thanks again for following up on my questions.

Bob

SonicIMC,
Following your suggestion, I right-clicked on all 5 of the clips in the timeline. Curiously, 4 of the 5 clips had the field order listed as "NONE (progressive scan)". I changed them all to lower field first and will try to render that as an avi file. I don't understand I thought that that particular property was set during the rendering process as one of the options as I know I saw it then. Anyway I'll let you know how it works.

Bob