video is intermittently black

Beate wrote on 10/30/2004, 3:26 PM
Hi everybody:
I just spent about 20 hours just putting movie clips together that I had previously captured using Pixela Image Mixer which came with my digital camcorder. I had previously used this software to generate movies, and it worked great, but it was very slow, and it also lacked some of the nicer features.

In any case, I used these clips and put this one-hour movie together, then wanted to generate the output file, and now my video turns intermittently black, comes back again for a few seconds, then turns black again for a few seconds, etc.

I had noticed problems already while I was designing the movie. Often when I tried to preview a scene, I would get the same effect. I just blamed a lack of system resources, but I really do think, my system has the resources to handle this (way more than the system requirements!).Well, to test this hypothesis, I installed the software on a Win 2000 system that is SCSI based, very fast, very well equipped. I am getting the same problem there.

Now my thinking is that somehow the captured mpg files are corrupt. When I look at them just in media player they are fine, they do not turn black intermittently. But this is the only idea I have left. Have any of you experienced this problem? Have any of you used mpg files that were captured outside of Movie Studio? Is there any "clean-up" software that I could use to clean up the mpg files, in case these are the problem?

Sorry about the long message, it does not even come close to the level of frustration I have, ideas are much appreciated.

Beate

Comments

gogiants wrote on 10/30/2004, 5:44 PM
MPEG files, given how they handle relationships between frames, tend not to edit perfectly. How long are each of the "intermittent black" parts? A couple frames, or a few seconds? Any correlation at all between the points where you edited the original MPEG files and the black segments?
Beate wrote on 10/30/2004, 5:53 PM
The video is black for quite a while as long as 20 seconds. I have tried to find an association between these blackouts and the video. It seems that when I paused the camcorder while recording to select a different scene, it's more likely to end up black. I noticed with Windows Movie Maker that it will automatically split these recordings into several sub-scenes (something that the pixela image mixer v1.0 could not yet do when I did the original capture).

Beate
Chienworks wrote on 10/30/2004, 8:40 PM
I almost hate to tell you this, but you'll save yourself a ton of headaches and problems if you recapture all the clips through firewire using the VidCap program that comes with Movie Studio. You'll end up with DV .avi files instead of .mpg files and you'll have a much faster and easier time of it. The image quality of the videos will also be much higher.

Capturing .mpg files with Pixela is just about the worst way to get the video into your computer. :(
Beate wrote on 11/2/2004, 12:08 PM
I came to this conclusion myself after I fired off my message. And that was a very pleasant surprise since capturing is so EASY with this software. With Image Mixer, it took forever to get those clips since I had to manually set capture in and out points, etc. I just had the software capture the three tapes, and then picked the clips I needed. The video is done and looking great!

Thanks for trying to help out!

Beate