Vegas crashes with corrupt clip?

jamesfrankham wrote on 8/13/2007, 2:19 PM
Hi All

I'm editing a longform doc from with hundreds of m2t media files in Vegas7d.

In the early stages of the assembly I discovered a clip that had clearly been corrupted because Vegas crashed every time it tried to draw the thumbnail in the Project Media window. Once that clip was deleted things ran fine for a while.

Now a few weeks on, five or six clips have become corrupted in this way, crashing the program, even though Vegas is the only program that is referencing the clips. Clips that were previously fine are showing with green lines through the thumbnail ... and that is all I get to see before the inevitable "... sorry for the inconvenience" notice. Sorry indeed.

It's always the same clips, and more are becoming corrupted. Im also afflicted with the two-black-frame gag and I'm getting tired of both.

I've posted a screen grab on my website - http://www.splice.cc/grab.jpg - you will see the corrupted file MORV01_093.m2t at the bottom left.

Suggestions? Anyone else having this issue? Would love some help.

J

Comments

jrazz wrote on 8/13/2007, 2:30 PM
Move your files to a different hard drive. I had one that was dealt a blow by lightening and files on that drive were being corrupted over time as I kept using the drive. Sometimes I could go a month before something would be corrupt, other times it only took one reboot of the pc.

After you switch your files (or copy them) to another drive, run some diagnostics on the hard drive to see if it is the culprit.

j razz
John_Cline wrote on 8/13/2007, 2:31 PM
Vegas is pretty touchy about the tiniest of errors in an .M2T file. I just run the file through a piece of freeware called "Mpeg2Repair" and the problem files load into Vegas just fine. You can get it here:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/MPEG2Repair

It can also create a log file to tell you exactly what it fixed and where. You can also just create the log file only and see if the file has problems that need to be fixed.

John
jamesfrankham wrote on 8/13/2007, 4:08 PM
Brilliant - thank you both.
Laurence wrote on 8/13/2007, 6:58 PM
Be aware that Mpeg2Repair will fix the file so that it doesn't crash, but in the process, it will no longer play back as efficiently from the Vegas timeline. For some reason, after a resave with Mpeg2Repair, the file is recognizes as having a different mpeg2 codec and uses a less efficient (but also less crash prone) codec to play the video back. The same thing happens when you use Womble MPEG VCR or MPEG Edit to fix the file. It works but you lose timeline efficiency. By the way, the repaired m2t clips don't play back as efficiently from media player either.

I have a "just barely fast eneough" P4, so this efficiency dip is quite obvious. It is possible that if you have a faster machine, this won't be so much of a problem.

Anyway, I'll take dropped preview frames over crashing any day.