That's the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe another possibility is that the audio is what was butted together and that didn't end on frame lines?

I think there's a toggle in the internal prefs that will mark unquantized heads and tails in red...might help you to spot these if this is what's happening.

Rob Mack

I to have noticed this inconsistent occurance...pretty frustrating at times....

I get this quite often. Especially when I am reviewing a project that was cut on a counterpart's system. I suspect it has to do with the quantize to frames. If you open a project that was cut with or without and yours is the oppsite it seems that these small overlaps and gaps will occur. They are less than a frame, but are noticeable, especially the gaps. I suspect a lot of users have this prob, but dont notice. Get Ultimate S2 and always run an audit with gaps less than 5 frames before your project goes to render to find these. Last night's render was a 2 hr 7 min project and audit found 300+ gaps or overlaps undetctable by the eye unless you are zoomed to frame level. I just got an 8th system with Vista and Q6600 quad and Vegas seems to run fine with it, but this issue, black frame, audi peaks and catastrophic crashes on HDV drops are consistent across all machines and those of local counterparts. It is a V7 issue and not system, tape specific. THIS NEEDS IMMEDIATE CORRECTION! My CS3 Master is on the way.... :-(

Thanks for the comments. Definitely none of those mentioned. Always have frames quantized and have checked through all that anyway. The final track is exactly the same length as the edited clips, so Vegas is extending some clips by 1 frame (and the adjacent) and setting at half intensity level. Where this occurs varies between renders of the same material.
John Meyer has a script I'm about to try; thanks John.

Is this a dissolve or a field order mixup at the cut, I know both are technically the same but I've had Vegas really loose the plot with field order right in the middle of something where there wasn't even a cut.
Either way what you're seeing, to state the obvious, is going to look much worse once it's encoded.
The worrying thing here is I've had a comment or two that left me scratching my head about some of my work looking like it was at times cut on field not frame boundaries and I'm always been paranoid about the QTF setting.

Bob.

Yes, agree, so I always have QTF switched on. I did wonder whether the effect was a field overlap and could go back and look at the "dissolves" more carefully. I'd stepped through the sequence (around cuts, anyway) frame by frame and was quite positive that there were no gaps or other problems. However when I ran John Meyer's scripts it found both gaps and QTF problems. Unless restarting the machine this morning had any influence, after running the scripts the problem has gone.

where is jm's script?

leslie

Leslie,
John emailed it to me. Actually 2, one to close gaps and the other to ensure QTF. Drop him an email.

S