vidcap60 crashes

JohnAsh wrote on 4/5/2011, 3:07 AM
Trying to capture some old DV material into Sony Vegas Pro 10 (have also tried v9 which I still have installed). Results is both cases are as follows:-

I click "video capture" then "DV", then get the message "Video Capture has detected that it was not shut down properly. Would you like to load the previous project?"

"Yes please"

I then get the box to start capturing and then when I start capture it crashes..
or
it crashes immediately it loads..
with ""Sony Video Capture has stopped working".

Rebooted to no avail.

Searched here and elsewhere to no avail excepting a suggestion to repair Windows Live Essentials, which I have done.

I get the same result with two different cameras, a Canon HDV and Panasonic DV. I can capture OK in Windows Movie Maker which was "Free", but not Sony Vegas Pro, which was not!

Any ideas, please?

Comments

rs170a wrote on 4/5/2011, 3:47 AM
When it asks you if you want to load the previous project, say NO and start fresh.

Mike
JohnAsh wrote on 4/5/2011, 3:56 AM
Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

I got a bit further after saying "no". It started the cam and THEN still crashed out. But I think I had got that far on other occasions anyway.

PS. I now say "no" and it crashes immediately, as before.
rs170a wrote on 4/5/2011, 4:00 AM
John, are you hooking the camera up and then powering it up before you start Vegas?

Mike
JohnAsh wrote on 4/5/2011, 4:03 AM
Mike

Yes.

Tks
John

PS Could it be anything to do with having vidcap installed twice (once in Vegas v9 and one in V10)?
rs170a wrote on 4/5/2011, 4:09 AM
John, your issue has me puzzled as I have Vegas 7 though 10 installed on my machine with no issues whatsoever.

Mike
JohnAsh wrote on 4/5/2011, 4:16 AM
Mike

I read somewhere that a guy was having an issue with a Logitech cordless mouse driver preventing vidcap from working. I don't have such a mouse but was wondering if some other driver was doing this. Wonder how I could see if it was something like this without wasting loads of time doing it!

John
Steve Mann wrote on 4/5/2011, 7:26 AM
Try scenalyzer. It's free and all it does is capture DV.
farss wrote on 4/5/2011, 7:30 AM
Have you tried running Vidcap60.exe standalone?
Just locate the executable and double click it. I have a shortcut to it on my desktop and very, very rarely call it from Vegas.

One other thing, you're not trying to capture HDV with it are you, it doesn't work.

Bob.
JohnAsh wrote on 4/5/2011, 7:53 AM
Yes, have tried running it alone and no, this is DV. No problem capturing HDV, thankfully, which is now my normal medium.

Will try Scenalyzer, thanks, but it should not be necessary to go through these hoops with a well established and costly piece of software!
kplo wrote on 4/5/2011, 9:21 AM
John,
I had a problem with vidcap once and fixed it by re-installing the MS DirectX 9.0c.
Might be worth a try.
Ken
JohnAsh wrote on 4/5/2011, 9:36 AM
Thanks Ken.

Am downloading it now and will try it later.

John
Steve Mann wrote on 4/5/2011, 4:18 PM
If you suspect Direct-X problems, go to 'start' 'run' then type: dxdiag.
JohnAsh wrote on 4/5/2011, 11:47 PM
Thanks.

dxdiag reports "no problems found".

I tried capturing with Windows movie capture (if that's what it's called). The resulting avi file seems to be the wrong aspect and, when imported into Vegas, there is no sound track.

I thought this little job was going to take me an hour or so!!

John
LoTN wrote on 4/6/2011, 1:27 AM
If you are running Seven I suggest to change the actual FW driver to Legacy.

Another hint: any time I got problems with vidcap was when I forgot to attach the camcorder before boot.

Hope this helps...
JohnAsh wrote on 4/6/2011, 5:27 AM
Well, I'm not sure what did the trick (will investigate this later) but at the moment, all things hunky-dory and tape being captured.

I did change FW driver to Legacy as suggested but also I'd deleted some old bins within vidcap and also turned off preview.

I'll put on my deerstalker when I find where I put it and try and determine what it was causing the problem. I had not had any FW problems up to now but it may well have been that.

Just to say how much I appreciate all the help on this marvellous forum. If the software is not always wonderful the forum here certainly is!

Thank you all.
John
JohnAsh wrote on 4/7/2011, 4:21 AM
OK. I turned Video Preview off (amongst other things) and vidcap worked. Now, if I go into Options and turn preview back on, vidcap crashes, instantly. I can live without preview so I am happy with that. But it does look as if Preview was causing the crashes.

I have dug out my old Sony DHR-1000 to play back the tapes. I had edited them on this machine (pre PC editing!) and dubbed a mixed music and original audio sound track onto ST2 channel (PCM 12-bit mode).

From reading the manual, it implies both channels should be played back through the FW link but I am only able to capture ST1 channel. Of course, the ST1/ST2 switch on the DHR-1000 has no effect on the output to FW. I think I need to be able to select which audio channel to use on the inward, PC, side but have found no option to do this.

Unless you good people know a way of doing this, I think I will have to resort to recording the audio output to my PC sound card then trying to match the lip sync within Vegas. There is not too much lip sync within this programme, so this should not be to much of a problem. It just means I have another two hours of capture to do on top of the 2 hours to capture the video, then the work of matching the audio and video tracks.

Thanks for any advice you may be able to give.
rs170a wrote on 4/7/2011, 4:44 AM
VidCap will only capture a single stereo channel.
For two of these, your only option is Scenalyzer.
It's less than $40 and may be worth it.

Mike
JohnAsh wrote on 4/7/2011, 5:12 AM
Thanks. I will try Scenalyzer. I bought it ages ago and had forgotten about it since I moved to Vegas and HDV (though someone had suggested it earlier, above). I have downloaded the new version and my authorisation code still works. Will give it whirl now.

Thanks again!
JohnAsh wrote on 4/7/2011, 10:55 AM
Yes it works. Tucked away, Scenalyzer has an option to chose which stereo channel to capture. I'd never have found it if you hadn't told me about it.

Thank you so much.

A cheap piece of shareware software outperforms a major player yet again.
ChristoC wrote on 11/7/2011, 6:42 PM
Regarding JohnAsh's original post, I found I had exactly the same symptoms:

- VidCap used to work fine....
- suddenly found VidCap crashed (WinXPPro/SP3) badly requiring Reset/Restart whenever I attempted to change any setting, or select "Advanced Capture" tab.
- Vegas 8/9/10 crashed as well.
- VidCap listed the Camera as an available device but crashed when I selected it, but still 'Windows Movie Maker' functioned normally, so I knew FireWire connection was still good.
- Print To Tape from within Vegas still worked (as long as I didn't invoke VidCap of course!).

Ultimately I found the solution -

I noticed whenever VidCap started it declared that "Matrox Video Capture" is the current capture device, although I never used that, and refused to let me select "Microsoft DV Camera and VCR" as the capture device - it just crashed, always requiring a reboot.

So, after a restart, I jumped into the Windows Registry, backed it up, and navigated to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sony Creative Software\Video Capture\6.0\Metrics

and deleted the key: S10077 .... REG_SZ .... Matrox Video Capture

then starting VidCap either directly, or within Vegas, I was able to select "Microsoft DV Camera and VCR" as the capture device and VidCap works normally again.