Urgent school project -help

franc11s wrote on 12/16/2004, 7:35 PM
I use vegas 5.0 and do really simple stuff like capture and render as. I'm by no means an expert therefore !! But good enough to burn MPEG DVD's.

However, my son gave me a tape of a play recorded at school (on a good high end ($3k) sony I think). The AVI we captured plays great in Vegas and Windows etc., However, I open vegas, drop the AVI on the timeline, select a few mins of test and render. The MPEG 2 renders plays fine except ZERO sound. I've tried 3 times and stuck to get this done. I know little else about vegas (about to take a course) and really need to get this done.

If you know what's wrong, please help give me a clear list of what to do. IU'm pretty technical, just not with Vegas yet. I'm praying you guys can help - ugently !!!

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 12/16/2004, 8:01 PM
When you render, are you selecting the DVD Architect video stream template? If so, you aren't rendering audio with that particular render. This is due to DVDArchitect liking separate audio/video streams. If you render to the DVD NTSC or DVD PAL, you'll get audio.
that's my first guess as to why, next reason could be muted tracks, or that you're somehow rendering to AC3 but you don't have an AC3 decoder in your software DVD player. (which would be kinda weird)
franc11s wrote on 12/17/2004, 3:32 AM
thanks for replying. I'll try that when I get on the machine later today. Problem I don't understand is if I drop another AVI on the timeline and render, I get sound. I am not changing any defaults. The only differnces are :

1. The camera was a different one (a high spec sony at school)
2. the camera used the mic in (left and right)
3. the tape was put in a different camera to capture

but then the sound is IN the AVI because I can hear it when playing on the PC.
franc11s wrote on 12/17/2004, 11:48 AM
Help, I'm getting desperate. To elaborate further...

The AVI plays in windows and media player with video and sound.

In Vegas, it won't play the sound and thus doesn't render with sound.... Other AVI's I have are all fine, to play and render. What could be different with this Sony camera as opposed to my own Canon camera.... ????
ScottW wrote on 12/17/2004, 11:58 AM
An AVI file is just basically a wrapper, there could be many different things in the file - without knowing what's actually in the file it's hard to help.

Download a copy of gspot from: http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

And have gspot tell you what's actually in the file.

Also if you could tell us specifically what sort of Sony camera captured this, it would help - it's it's one of the Sony's that have a mini DVD in them, then your audio is probably in AC3 format, which Vegas does not have a decoder for and you'll need to use something like BeSweet or DVD2AVI to extract the AC3 audio as a WAV file.

--Scott
BillyBoy wrote on 12/17/2004, 7:23 PM
Have you tried to open the original file in VirtualDub? That's the first thing I try when someone sends me a file Vegas or some other application can't handle. If it opens in VD, then render out as a uncompressed AVI, which Vegas should be able to open.

You may also try to see if the file is "broken", by "fixing it" with something like Video Fixer which can "repair" many otherwise unplayable files. That too is a quick and easy process, taking a few minutes tops.
skibumm101 wrote on 12/17/2004, 8:22 PM
Billyboys advice is great, i dont know how many times VD has fixed little problems llike what you are dealing with. And random other problems .
franc11s wrote on 12/18/2004, 2:45 AM
Thanks for all the advice. In the end, I recaptured it and hey presto, the audio tracks were there when I plopped the AVI into the timeline. Go figure...

Thanks for the advice.