There are various shareware and freeware tools -- mostly designed to help you find cut points for commercials -- that quickly scan a video file and look for places where the entire frame goes to black AND the audio is silent. Womble's MPEG Wizard has this; there are tools at Videohelp (Comskip) and at Doom9.org that have this feature as well.
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I will try those but there are no video dropouts when this occurs, only the audio flatlines for a fraction of a second sometimes. You can see them if you stretch out the timeline.
It's been pointed out over the years and as I said a recapture gets rid of them. It's just finding them without having to watch the whole thing that I would like to do. I'll check those out. Maybe they will find audio only dropouts. Thanks as always John

John

John: I've encountered these over the past years but always assumed they were caused by a tape or camera problem. I had no idea Vegas was responsible.

Can you point me to either a keyword or link that discusses this?

Thanks,

Jack

John: I've encountered these over the past years but always assumed they were caused by a tape or camera problem. I had no idea Vegas was responsible.
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Check you camera tape. The dropouts won't be on it. This problem has gone virtually unaddressed since Vegas 2.0, and has often been attributed to something irrelevant when it is obvious the software has been causing the problem.

SF/Sony barely addresses it.

However the probelm has been raised often enough in the past.

John

I cannot confirm (or not confirm) that Vegas is the cause. This it because I started using Scenalyzer to capture all tapes long before I ever started using Vegas. When I switched to Vegas, I briefly tried its built-in capture application, but was stunned by how pathetic and crude it was (and still is).

Therefore, a possible workaround would be to use Scenalyzer, although that does involve an expenditure of $$, albeit a fairly small one. I've posted many times before about my admiration for this product. Here's a link to one of those posts that describes its advantages:

Scenalyzer Features

My suspicion is that this is not a Vegas problem. I've raised this issue elsewhere and got a rather startling reply: Try recapturing using the VCRs analogue outputs, works for both video and audio dropouts.

Sounds implausible but it works.

This gem of wisdom comes not from other Vegas users either, everyone seems to have this issue from tape to tape and deck to deck.

One way you might be able to find them is with SF, it has a tool to find silence, I've never tried using ot for this however both the threshold and duration is configurable.
I've also used Wavebraker from Blaze Audio to split audio files at X seconds of silence, that also might help you.

Bob.

John,
I know you have posted about Scenalyzer many times and every time I say I am going to try it I end up not doing it. Probably just laziness. It probably would solve that particular problem. The rest of VidCap seems OK to me though. I have NEVER had a dropped frame. Just the audio flatlines right under a perfectly good video frame.

John

Try recapturing using the VCRs analogue outputs, works for both video and audio dropouts.
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Don't use the 1394 output Bob? What about the quality?

John

I have been looking into this a little more. Here's a link to a post over at doom9.org:

Locating dropped frames in DV captures

Here's the relevant quote from that post:

"Using the Sony Vegas Capture utility, dropped frames are in fact repeated, with the audio filled in by silence. In the AVI file, in the idx1 segment, though the video frame chunk is reported as normal length, the offset from the beginning of the file is the same as the previous one."

Thus, it may be possible that this issue is in some way related to a dropped frame, although I can't be sure.

I'll keep looking for a few more minutes ...

Actually, I forgot that SoundForge has a "Find" utility in the tools section that can be used to find audio that drops below a certain level. It woks very well when you need to find audio that is truly silent.

[Edit] I guess Bob posted the same thing while I was writing this.

Needless to say the quality would suffer, still better than no audio.
However the interesting question is how this can work. No one seems to have a definative answer, just speculation that more error correction is used on the analogue outputs than the 1394 ouputs.

Now take a look at Sony's own DSR-45 VCR, 1394, balanced audio and component video outputs, why such a beast, why do Avid claim you get better video into their systems using those outputs than firewire?

The video side I do have the answer to, the deck applies chroma smoothing to the component outputs, one can capture via firewire and achieve the same result with longer render times in Vegas.

Now the audio side I know nothing about, I guess as the only options are component video and audio then it makes sense, in other words you might do better capturing the audio digitally and the vision via component but no such system exists to do it one pass and Avid would win no brownie points suggesting you capture in two passes.

Just how and why you get less errors out the analogue ports probably doesn't matter all that much. It's just a good trick to have up your sleeve when all else has failed, it's certainly saved my bacon a few times.

Bob.

There *IS* one way this could be done via a script. However, it would require playing back the entire timeline first using the Blue Cat Digital Peak Meter tool and then the script could read where the automation envelope hits bottom - similar to how I use it in Excalibur's Voice Over tool.

There *IS* one way this could be done via a script. However, it would require playing back the entire timeline first using the Blue Cat Digital Peak Meter tool and then the script could read where the automation envelope hits bottom - similar to how I use it in Excalibur's Voice Over tool.
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That sounds really interesting Ed. It would sure beat having to sit there and play back an entire video to listen for them, then pause it and zero in on them.

Bob,
Most of the time I can edit around these since I am editing multiple performances into one video. I simply choose one of the other sound tracks if only for a few seconds to bypass the audio dropout. One time I cut and paste the peak next to it to reduce the noticeability of the blip. I heard it, but no one else noticed.
The problem is when you have a single tape to work from. I usually re-capture and it goes away, but there have been times when I didn't catch it until the final review of the finished DVD. That is really annoying and frustrating. And of course no matter how many times I have others tell me "just leave it", I can't.

John

John,

I remember one of my hesitations now in terms of Scenalyzer.

If I have a Vegas veg file and I want to recapture a clip it seems that can only be done with Vidcap not Scenalyzer.

How do you recapture a clip using Scenalyzer in Vegas?

John