Once a week, I do media conversions\standardizations for a website that accepts user-submitted work. Vegas has been the perfect tool to make the process wonderfully simple, easy, and fun, thanks to its ability to open and encode virtually every single format on the net. However, I recently had two clips sent to me that absolutely refused to work properly, both encoded as Windows Media Video 7. On the timeline, their playback was extremely choppy. The explorer in Vegas also reported their framerates as being 2 FPS. "No problem," though I, "It'll look fine when I re-render everything." Not so. Even when converting the videos to a different format, the data was still at 2 FPS. I even zoomed into frame-level (for the WMV's) and noticed that it appears that data's actually missing. Only 2 frames every second are present in the files. I would normally attribute this to corruption, but when playing the files in Media Player, they're perfectly OK. No botched framerates, no corruption, no problems.

To me, this says that the WMV reader in Vegas is having the problem. When I work on files encoded as WMV8, they look and encode fine, but WMV7 just plain won't work. A clean install of Windows Media Technologies didn't alleviate the problem.

I'm wondering if this is somehow related to the WMV8 framerate bug in which Vegas explorer reports frame rates in the millions. Additionally, Preview shows the clips playing ridiculously fast, while the audio remains normal. It will happen in the timeline too, if I click search through the project. WMV8 encodes just fine, but it can be hostile in the timeline.

So has anyone else experienced this? Are the two problems related? Is there a fix, workaround, or perhaps a free piece of software that I can use temporarily to convert WMV7 files until a solution is found? Any help would b greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Nick LaMartina