Zero Length Events

johnmeyer wrote on 8/11/2004, 3:09 PM
I had several hundred events on five timelines. Each event on each timeline was the identical duration to the ones above and below. I needed to delete about two-thirds of the events. To do this, I double-clicked, on the event in the first track, for each event I wanted to keep. I then pressed "R" to creat a region.

After doing this for all the events I wanted to keep, I selected all events. I then double-clicked, on the timeline, between each region and then pressed the delete key. I repeated this between each remaining non-adjacent set of regions until I was done.

I had Ripple Edit enabled, and set to "All Tracks, Markers, and Regions."

When I was finished, I noticed that I had little "slivers" of events on each track. I went to the "Edit Details" viewer, selected "Show Events," and sorted the events based on duration. I found that I had created dozens of zero length events.

I had quantize to frames, enable snapping, and snap to markers all enabled. Snap to grid was disabled.

Perhaps this is related to the frame flash and the blank frames that are reported so often in these forums?

I am using Vegas 5.0b on WinXP Pro (SP1).

Comments

pfeiferp wrote on 8/11/2004, 4:20 PM
I get them all the time also. Little black vertical lines. I tend to go back and delete them all...but i've never done a project as big as yours.

If there's a way to prevent them, I'd love to know how.
johnmeyer wrote on 8/11/2004, 4:34 PM
pfeiferp,

I don't know how to prevent them, but there is a very easy way to delete them all quickly. Go to View -> Edit Details. In the Edit Details dialog box, Select "Show: Events." Then, click on the "Length" heading. Scroll to the top and you will see all the zero-length eventts. If you click on the first row heading (e.g., "1"), you will select the entire row. Scroll down to the last zero-length event, press AND HOLD the shift key, and then click on that last row number. This should select all the zero-length rows. Release the shift key, and then press the Delete key.

This can be useful in many other circumstances when you need to delete a lot of events, if they happen to share some common attribute, such as length, starting point, etc.
johnmeyer wrote on 8/16/2004, 11:15 AM
I may have figured out the bug in Vegas that is causing this problem, and which may be responsible for so many other reported problems!!

I just went back and re-did everything described in my first post, but this time, when creating the regions, I double-clicked on the video event, rather than on the text event. Each video event has a text event immediately above it (the text events are on the first track), and both are cut to the same length. Even if you zoom ALL the way in, the video and text events appear at the identical position on the timeline.

However, if you create the regions by double-clicking on the text event then, when you finish going through the steps above, you end up with the zero length events. By contrast, if you double-click on the video event, and follow the same steps, there are no zero length events when you get to the last step.

Thus, the video event and the text event appear to be identical in length, even when zoomed all the way in, but they obviously are not.

Thus, it appears that there is a subtle round-off error in how generated media is stored and how video information is stored, and that even though the selections and locations appear identical on the timeline -- even when zoomed all the way in -- they are in fact different, and you definitely will end up with zero length events all over the place. I also strongly suspect that this same problem could also result in gaps that would show up as one blank frame, and could also result in "flash frames," as has been so often reported.

I have submitted this to Sony as a bug report, along with various VEG files that exhibit the exact nature of the problem.
busterkeaton wrote on 8/16/2004, 11:31 AM
wow, nice work.
stormstereo wrote on 8/16/2004, 1:16 PM
Wow, you're lika a tech detective johnmeyer. Good work.

Best/Tommy
HPV wrote on 8/16/2004, 3:39 PM
John, what was the length of the video and tilte events on the timeline vs. the length value showen in the title interface? Wondering if a looped title event might be causing you grief.
Craig H.
johnmeyer wrote on 8/16/2004, 7:50 PM
John, what was the length of the video and tilte events on the timeline vs. the length value showen in the title interface? Wondering if a looped title event might be causing you grief.

Not sure I follow you. Each title event is on a track directly above each video event. They are the same length. I base this statement on the fact that when I zoom in all the way, I can see the endpoints of the events line up above each other. Also, if I look at the events in the Edit Details view, the title event and the video event both show exactly the same duration.

When I wrote one of my little scripts about a year ago, I found out about how Vegas stores timeline information, and there is all sorts of potential for this kind of problem, given how roundoff is done. I suspect that there are lots of gremlins like this. I see it all the time. A typical example -- and I can come up with many -- is where you have two events that are butted together, but one event refuses to let you apply a fade to black, or to fade the audio on the audio event. If you then trim that event by one frame, and "re-butt" the events, everything works fine. You can sometimes then lengthen the event by one frame (supposedly back to its original length), move the adjacent event back to its original location, and it will work correctly.

I have many other examples.