Good point, and good eye brighterside, but I believe that gap would only be equal to a second or less, and I hope Zaner isn't that impatient ;O I can't see more than one track in use from the screen shot, so masking it is the kiss of death. If he is using more than one track and masks it and then solos it....again, the kiss of death as far as seeing black. I hope you are right, and he didn't give up. If people only knew the hundreds and thousands of hours we have all devoted to this program..........(well worth it though). Take care. Cin

Folks...

You folks have helped me several times to figure out where problems were. You figured this one out, too. Great job. You are right about the thousands of hours spent on this program. It's a great piece of software, but every piece of great software has its limits. I sure hope Zaner doesn't give up, he's just getting started!

mike_in_nc

thanks for the assistance, especially Kelly. I just don't understand why the index would not have a troubleshooter to help with these issues.
I now have banished the black box from the video preview.
I must have turned all of the photographs red in the process. I remember moving a lever across three horizonal bars somewhere in my struggle to get rid of the black box. I will now try and figure out why the photographs are red and how to get them back to normalcy. Maybe the photographs are mirroring my blood pressure.
zaner

Zaner, you have a video effect of some sort applied to the track with the pictures on it. See the little icon that is a green rectangle with "ears" sticking out on the sides? Click on that to open up the effects dialog box. You've probably added something like HSL adjust or Colorize or Color corrector. You can probably delete or bypass whatever you've added there and the photos will return to normal.

You also still have track 2 soloed. You might want to turn that off if you plan on putting anything on other tracks.

No, you missed it. Look at the part Kelly circled (he got it right, as usual).

Well .. I've been editing for years but don't have any experience with compositing tracks ... maybe a better answer than just a photo would have been in order. He sent an e-Mail to the original poster with the answer .. but that didn't help the rest of us ;-)

But ... while I haven't had this particular problem .. I *have* accidentally pushed one button or another and could not figure out what was going on ... at least right away. It's that ole' "learning curve"

The chief answer to the problem was the compositing mode, which was set to multiply (mask). What this does is mathematically combine the track with the one below it, masking it by having the lower track show through wherever the current track is white or bright, and hiding the lower track wherever it is black or dark and allowing the next track below to show through in those areas.

When a track is set to mask, any image on that track itself will never appear in the output since it's merely used to modify the track below.

The track below was black, so no matter what the mask was, only black would be seen. This was potentially exacerbated by the solo function. Any track that isn't soloed is effectively black, even if there are images on it.

brighterside,
In the interest of the collective "learning curve,"
An "alpha" symbol on the composite box says it is in alpha mode,
A "+" says it is in additive mode,
A "-" says it is subtractive mode,
A "x" says it is in multiply or one of the mask modes.
There are others, but these are the common compositing modes.

A mask composite mode, especially with a soloed track, often means a black screen, because there is nothing below but black to mask.
Perhaps Kelly can explain it better, but I took his photo as a challenge for the rest of us to figure it out and to learn from it.
HTH

Edit: Kelly just beat me to it, but I'll leave this post up in the interest of "constructive redundancy."

zaner,
The sage advice, "Save early, Save often" was never better meant than for video editing.

Every time I make a set of changes to a project, I save it under a new name, even if it is just incremental. I often have thirty projects saved by the time I get to a final print, and I can revert to any of them (even the first) if I am not thrilled with the results (or some gremlin has found its way in).

Projects are cheap (small file size) and you can save as many of them as you want, and your whims or experiments will not be lost, nor will they become unrecoverable. That is the big advantage to saving your project under a new name every time, especially while you are learning the basics.

Also discussed on Knowledgebase:

http://www.custcenter.com/cgi-bin/sonypictures.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=544&

Hope that helps to others who might come across similar situations.