Yes... it always has. Pinnacle studio shares the same render engine as its big brother... Avid liquid. It als has hardware acceleration, and 3D rendering through the video card.

Back to topic.... I believe studio is have black frame issues for different reasons... but it sure is nice to know that we're not on our own with this!

Black frames were in Pinnacle as early as versions 5 and 6 - that was many years ago.

I came here then and haven't been back since. Any black frames I've had in Vegas were the result of event video frames not being butted and leaving a slight gap on the timeline when the captured audio track was just a hair longer than the video. Really easy fix for me, just crossfaded a teensy portion of the audio and butt the frames.

So this is a problem with the interleaving of video and audio?

Not so much with the interleave, but the synchronization of the audio capture at 48khz and the video at 29.970~fps (if you are NTSC). Each capture software uses different algorithms to chase the audio to the frames, but the result can be a few milliseconds off at the end of a clip, either long or short.

This was more of a problem for me when we were limited to 2GB vfw capture chunks which had to be butted individually. It also made it darn near impossible to sync an externally recorded audio track to the project. I had to break it every 9 minutes and line up the waveforms for each chunk manually. Very laborious!

Any black frames I've had in Vegas were the result of event video frames not being butted and leaving a slight gap on the timeline when the captured audio track was just a hair longer than the video. Really easy fix for me, just crossfaded a teensy portion of the audio and butt the frames. I have a script that find those gaps automatically:

Audit for short blank gaps

There is also a script I can send to you which will "Quantize" the events so they all end on frame boundaries. This can happen is you forget and leave the Quantize to Frame feature turned off, or if you mix different frame rates on the timeline.

Not so much with the interleave, but the synchronization of the audio capture at 48khz and the video at 29.970~fps (if you are NTSC). Each capture software uses different algorithms to chase the audio to the frames, but the result can be a few milliseconds off at the end of a clip, either long or short.

I thought that was the definition of an interleave problem.

I'm just trying to understand what is happening. Is it that some or all camcorders record audio and video separately with no internal synchronization of any kind, and possibly not even recording video and audio for the same length of time?

The DV spec relaxes the requirements of the original DVCAM spec.
DVCAM requires the audio clock to be an exact multiple of the vision clock. As way back then the PLL electronics was expensive to implement, DV was created for consummer cameras without such an expensive to implement requirement.
Vegas seems to be driven by the audio sample rate, even the way Vidcap captures has problems. Mix audio sample rates on a tape and Vidcap locks to the first thing it sees and doesn't change. This is a known bug that has never been fixed and it can easily bite you although most people don't see it and I guess don't care if their audio is captured at the wrong sample rate.

How this happens is a lot of cameras and VCR will send audio at 32KHz by default i.e. where the tape is blank. If you start capturing at that point on the tape then Vidcap will resample all audio from the tape at 32KHz. It does pay to check after capture what your audio sample rate is on the T/L.

Judging by past posts regarding this black frame issue I don't think it's quite as simple as a frame missing. Some users did report having Vegas drop in a frame from the wrong place altogether. From what I've seen there may well be multiple causes of black frames given that they can happen in the middle of a clip.

Bob.

** . . . I don't think it's quite as simple as a frame missing. Some users did report having Vegas drop in a frame from the wrong place altogether.**

It doesn't need even a whole frame to be missing, sometimes it's just part of a frame depending on the capture software and the length of the audio mismatch. And I've experienced the random frame quirk as part of the same problem. Seems like something in memory drops into the gap unannounced. But getting the video frames to butt exactly always cured the problem on my low-tech system.

I'm very interested in John's script and will be trying it out on my next big project coming up next month. Thanks!