V7e crashes on HDV .m2t clip

john-beale wrote on 9/30/2007, 9:15 PM
I'm using Vegas 7.0e on WinXP. Normally it works ok. I have one HDV .m2t clip which crashes Vegas whenever I try to play it or even just zoom very far in on the timeline. The clip is actually short enough (15 MB, a few seconds long) that I can put it up for download. Can anyone confirm if this clip also crashes Vegas for you if you play it from the timeline?

http://www.bealecorner.com/D30/misc/C1T1-2007_07_14-15_50_43.m2t

The clip was originally captured with HDVSplit. I understand that the clip probably has an error in it, but I believe Vegas should not crash no matter what. Each of my other programs that can display HDV (that is VLC, Nero Showtime, WMP 10, Womble MVW, TMPGEnc) play this clip perfectly without error.

edit: I also submitted this to the Sony Customer Service page today.
Ref # 070930-000059

Comments

blink3times wrote on 9/30/2007, 9:50 PM
Yup... I just tried it. You have the EXACT same problem that I do.

I tried it in 7d, 7e, and 8

Works great in 7d
And crashes both 7e and 8

Sony is aware and is supposed to be fixing the problem (for 8 anyway... I don't know if they will clear the problem in 7e though)

See my thread on it here:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=548058
Xander wrote on 10/1/2007, 6:05 AM
I had a crashing issue in 7e on a couple of short duration HDV clips (captured using HDV Split). I just deleted them from the project though as i didn't have the patience to deal with the issue. Vegas crashed on playback of the offending clips in the timeline which is how I identifed them and removed them. Here's keeping my fingers crossed that Blink got the right fix!
riredale wrote on 10/1/2007, 8:14 AM
Works fine here on 7d. Pretty roses.
Laurence wrote on 10/1/2007, 10:11 AM
I don't know how many posts I've made and read on this exact subject. If you take your rose clip and resave it with MPEG VCR from womble.com, it will play perfectly in either Vegas 7e or 8. This resave happens without re-encoding the video by the way, so the error is somewhere else in the formatting. After resaving the video it will no longer crash but it will not preview as efficiently either.

Yes you can go back to Vegas 7d and avoid this problem altogether. The problem is that 7d doesn't preview native HDV a efficiently and with my older P4 3.06, I need the efficiency.

This is a pretty common problem for me. I get one or two of these clips per HDV tape. I have been using standard Sony brand DV tapes but I understand that the more expensive tape that is designed for this gives you less of these problems.

Anyway, the way I handle this is that every time I get a clip that crashes Vegas, I just load it into MPG VCR and resave it. The resaved clips work fine even if they don't preview efficiently.

Since my PC is just barely fast enough to preview native HDV, I use Gearshift to generate proxies. As it is generating the proxies, once or twice per tape Vegas will crash while the proxies are being generated. Each time it does I take the offending clip, resave it with MPEG VCR and continue generating proxies from where it left off.

This is extremely time consuming and I wish that it could be fixed somehow.

By the way, this isn't exclusively a Vegas issue. Your rose clip (and the offending clips I regularly get) will crash WMP as well, at least on my system. This may be because I have the Nvidia PureVideo accelerator software installed which (like Vegas 7e & 8) also accelerates the HDV playback.
UlfLaursen wrote on 10/1/2007, 11:36 AM
Hi

I tried to download the MPEG VCR trial from the womble site. I opened the downloaded rose clip and saved it as something else.

The strange thing is, that the filesize has decreased from 15.038 KB to 14.964 KB, so some kind of info is left out of there after a simple save.

/Ulf
Laurence wrote on 10/1/2007, 11:55 AM
It's just some data in the header, not anything related to the actual video data. I wouldn't worry about it.
blink3times wrote on 10/1/2007, 11:57 AM
The strange thing is, that the filesize has decreased from 15.038 KB to 14.964 KB, so some kind of info is left out of there after a simple save.

From what I have learned on this so far is that it is very much related to the way the clip is being split. This is true for both HDVsplit and vegas capture.If you take that entire clip that the rose scene came from, DON'T scene split... just capture the entire whole reel and throw it on the time line... then I promise you the rose scene will NOT crash the system. My theory is that the scenes somehow are not being split properly and unlike 7d.... 7e and 8 have been wound up too sensitive to these rather untidy splits. Maybe the GOP is being split in the wrong place and not properly closed... I don't know... but one thing is for sure... 7d does not have this issue.

At any rate, Sony claims to have found the problem... all we can do is wait for the first patch and see.

The work around you have Laurence albeit a good one, does seem a little long and tedious. First of all, you have to seek out the bad scenes by allowing them to crash the system. That in itself is a bit of a pain... because I can generate anywhere from 6 to 10 of these questionable scenes in a one hour capture..... easier just to re-install 7d.... takes maybe 10 minutes.
Laurence wrote on 10/1/2007, 12:16 PM
I came to the same conclusion a while back but after still experiencing crashes decided I was wrong. I was still getting crashes, but without the option of just resaving a small portion of the entire tape. Now I never save without using the scene split so that when I have the problem I can isolate it more easily.

I also thought that maybe there was a difference in quality between the built in Vegas HDV capture and that of the excellent HDVSplit utility. That turned out not to be the case. I get errors either way, so I just use HDVSplit since I prefer it.

I do feel like I get fewer errors when I turn off the preview window during capture though.

Some people like Spot have never even experienced this problem. Of course in other posts, Spot has said that he uses the more expensive master quality tape rather than regular DV tape. Maybe this is why he isn't getting these errors. I just hate spending that much money on blank tape.

Anyway, this problem arose at the same time that Sony improved native HDV previewing with the 7e release. I don't want to go back to the slower previewing so I'll just keep resaving the offending clips until the problem is fixed.

Also, some people use a free utility called Mpeg2Repair to fix these clips instead of the Womble program. I tried this and it works sometimes but not always. Every so often I get a clip that Mpeg2repair can't fix. Because of this I still use the Womble program.