Reproducing the Sony Capture bug

SeaJohn wrote on 12/7/2004, 11:06 AM

There is a capture bug which has been reported off and on, but Sony hasn't been able to reproduce and fix it. The problem happens during a capture; it looks like your capture is going fine, but at the end Vegas decides that your NTSC DV footage is really 720x576 and 25 fps, so your clip is scrambled - really irritating when you capture an hour long tape. It seems to be related to dirty heads, or a timecode gap at the beginning of the capture.

I can reproduce it about 90% of the time by doing the following:
Start Sony Capture,
Click Play to start playing
Hit FF so you're playing the clip in fast speed
Hit Capture
After a few seconds stop; the clip is scrambled with the above weird settings.
This should be done on a section of the tape with some action on it.

Can others reproduce this, and more importantly can Sony reproduce and finally find a fix for this?

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 12/7/2004, 1:05 PM

It's basically if you don't start capturing when there is a clean timecode and clean video then you will end up with garbage, it's not really a bug. Just capture from a clean part of the tape and you should be fine. That is why it is always good to capture a minute or so of bars and tone at the begining of all your tapes.

SeaJohn wrote on 12/7/2004, 1:38 PM

I disagree; this certainly is a software bug, in that it produces undesired and unexpected output. It is specific to the Vegas Capture utility; neither Matrox Capture, Adobe Premiere, or Windows Movie Maker have this problem. There are circumstances in which it isn't practical to precapture and precondition the tape to Vegas' liking.

At the very least, Vegas should produce a warning at the beginning of the capture to inform you that the format of the video it's capturing doesn't match the project format.