Video card bad?

jimjontz wrote on 6/13/2006, 6:56 AM
Hey all, I have a Dell comp with an ATI Radeon X600SE 128MB video card. Its been able to capture fine for the past few months, but now when I go to capture any video, vegas doesnt actually capture anything. It shows a black box where the video should be. The camera itself starts up fine once you hit capture in vegas, and you see the video playing on the camera, but you just dont see it in the computer and nothing gets captured. I narrowed it down to it being the computer or program itself. I am running Vegas 5 by the way. Thanks!

Comments

riredale wrote on 6/13/2006, 10:18 AM
First off, how do you capture video? A PC's "Video Card" is used to interface the display device (CRT, LCD screen) with the computer motherboard. It should have nothing to do with video capture. Instead, the preferred method of video capture is to go into the PC via a Firewire port, usually on a separate card plugged into the motherboard.

If this is how you usually capture video, and now it's suddenly stopped working, then I would suspect an intermittent Firewire cable first. But the fact that the PC can control the camera casts doubt on this theory.

Are you saying that no avi file is created in your PC? Or that an avi file is created but the image is black?

I wouldn't hurt to try another cable first. It could be a problem inside the camera--try capturing video on a friend's PC.
jimjontz wrote on 6/13/2006, 10:53 AM
Its not the cable, ive already tried another cable. Im assuming its something with the firewire card? Not too sure. Its not the camera either...so it is the computer itself...either the card of the mobo? Not even sure how to test this or how to solve it. I just get black in vegas, no timecode but it says its capturing. It acts as if its supposed to, everything looks right before the capture, and even once you stop the capture everything is fine. it just shows no picture and no timecode DURING the capture...and doesnt output anything. The camera plays fine as if its feeding into the computer though. Strange problem...
Jayster wrote on 6/13/2006, 10:57 AM
riredale - a lot of the newer video cards, especially ones that say "VIVO", have a din plug where you can connect an s-video cable and capture video. It does A/D conversions right off of the analog signal. Audio too. I don't know what level of quality you get (never done this myself because I have an ADVC converter to FW that I use).

I didn't think Vegas can interface with this kind of connection. I thought it only worked with the video card vendor's software.
Jayster wrote on 6/13/2006, 11:00 AM
JimJontz - It's happened to me before. I don't know what kind of video camera you have, but it's possible the camera settings changed since the last time you used it. For example, if it's set for HDV output and your footage on tape is SD, or something like this.