Is it possible some of these "black frames" are actually in the media? (i..e you captured 1 frame farther than desired and the extra frame was black?)

Personally, I've never seen this happen.

The issue goes way back. I had it once, posted, and got nowhere with it either. Re-did it and it went away. If you do a search on it you can see referenced many times and there is no consistent pattern to it which is why SF could never figure it out.

John

I don't ever see this either, but as mentioned in many previous threads on the subject, I tend to use keyboard shortcuts. Black frames are often a field issue with any NLE, FCP 4 has some new tools similar to the Quantize to Frames tool in Vegas as this is a problem for many users. Do you have Quantize enabled? You may well be cutting on a half frame.
Editing avi, right? If you are editing MPEG, black frames are the rule, rather than the exception.

I've never had this happen but with captured media i can see how it could happen. As far as I know DV tapes don't necessarily contain neat packets of data. Its not one field of video then another and then the audio for that frame. The audio data packets can be written in bursts. I see much the same sort of thing happen on VHS although for totally different reasons, the audio starts to record many frames before the video and more often than not there's abit of audio in there that is needed so I have to replace several frames of noise with black to preserve the audio.

Now when you capture the DV and the process stops at frame 1000 it may well contain some audio for frame 1001, so presumably the audio track can be a bit longer than the video. Butt that up to another clip and without an audio crossfade you're going to get a frame of black.

Just a theory I might add, anyone care to shoot it down?

I've tried to duplicate this, and even even if I cut on the 1/2 frame, and put video on the next frame, I still get normal video (using the NTSC 29.97 template).

The only time I've been able toget a black frame is when rendering a clip next to black.

Actuatly, I can confirm this! I capture analog with a bt848 capture card at home. Get the same thing (audio 1/2 to 1 frame longer then video) and at work I use a Matrox RT 2500. Audo extends the same way. I have noticed though that Premiere 6 (at work) likes to ignore the extra audio beyond the frame. When I've imported video captured from the Matrox into Vegas it extends by about 1/2 frame per clip, and when I drop and drag 30 clips onto the timeline, they get more and more offf (the Matrox captured the audio/video to seperate files).

Your explanation might be correct, but either the capture program or vegas should trim the audio to fit the video.

When the audio is longer than the video, it is a bug in my opinion.

Udi

I just had the same thing happen to me all over again, but this time the audio part was shorter by a few ms than the video part. I captured via vegas from my Sony 8mm digital, the original was recorded in LP mode. As always I dragged all the clips from the media pool into the timeline (QTF on, autofade=off). Every single clip had this problem AND to make thing worse, I could not see a SINGLE blue triangle at the end of the clips, restarting Vegas didn't work only restarting the PC made the triangles show again.
Another interesting thing that I noticed was that the audio part was not autofaded, but when I trimmed one frame at each events end to make video and audio equal length, the audio fade curve "magically" appeared, is that normal when trimming?.

Allright, i just had this happen to me for the first time. Weird indeed.

I plonked two clips on the timeline, dragging the second so that it snapped up against the end of the first. Playback was flawless. I trimmed a few seconds from the beginning of the first clip. Auto-ripple automatically moved the second clip leftwards on the timeline as well, as should be expected. However, there was now a black flash between the clips. Scrubbing the cursor over the point between the clips with the arrow keys did show a black frame where the second clip should have started.

I zoomed in far enough to see each frame as an individual image on the timeline and all looked fine. When zooming in to the audio sample level i was able to see a gap of a couple milliseconds between the clips. The second clip was positioned on the timeline slightly after the frame boundry. The seems very strange since both clips matched the project frame rate of 29.97, both were DV files captured through an external A/V->DV converter by VidCap, quantize to frames was on, and auto-ripple moved the second clip. However, the gap was there and since the start of that frame contained no video clip, Vegas drew a blank.

I manually dragged the second clip left a couple of milliseconds and it resnapped to the end of the first clip. All was fine then.

I experienced something that sounds related... although not a black frame. I had two clips butted up to one-another... there was no way there was any frame hanging around in the join... but on playback I noticed a single frame flash from a track below. The rouge frame appeared during preview as well. I checked to see if it was related to composite levels... but I could find no reason for it.

In the end I had to do a disolve rather than a straight cut between the two events and that cured the problem.

Both events were the same standard NTSC DV AVI same frame rate etc.

Odd. It does make me very careful to check around every single event transition (I guess you should always do this anyway... but I would like to find out if I did anything to cause this or if it is a bug).