NeoHDV & Vista Premium (issues)

[Nathan Shane]

I was wondering if anyone else here is running Windows Vista Home Premium w/ NeoHDV and having any difficulties? I downloaded the 15-day trial version and consistently run into NeoHDV losing connection with the HV20 during the middle of a capture when it is the ONLY app running.

When it works, it works great. But once it stops working, the app will no longer connect with the HV20 and it requires having to disconnect the firewire cable from the camera, then reconnecting it (for the drivers to unload and load again). Restarting the app after doing that re-establishes connection and capture, but then it's just a matter of time before NeoHDV will stop responding again. This issue happens on both the motherboard firewire and a dedicated firewire PCI card.

In addition, I noticed that after I first installed NeoHDV in Vista, Vegas 7e no longer worked and would stop working before it could fully load. I thought perhaps that NeoHDV might have installed some files that Vegas didn't like, so I uninstalled/reinstalled Vegas and that took care of that issue.

Anyway...is there anyone else having similar issues with NeoHDV under Vista or other versions of Windows.

[Tony Parenti]

Yup. I couldn't get it to work at all.

[Victor Woo]

That's exactly what I experienced several days ago. Now I started to try capturing video using Windows Media Player (Vista Edition). It works fine for me except the odd file format--dvr-ms. I really don't know how to edit it in vegas 7.

[Nathan Shane]

Originally Posted by Victor Woo

That's exactly what I experienced several days ago. Now I started to try capturing video using Windows Media Player (Vista Edition). It works fine for me except the odd file format--dvr-ms. I really don't know how to edit it in vegas 7.

Interesting you should bring up using Vista's Media Player for doing captures. Last night when I was surfing the internet, I stumbled upon a post that talked about doing that. In fact, I thought the post even said the Media Player could capture 24p from the camera...but I may be mistaken on that and probably am. I'm going to look into this and experiment.

I like the idea behind NeoHDV, not just for capturing the HV20's 24p but also the idea of working with an intermediate file. It makes for an option to have available and they do seem to put less stress on Vegas to work with them. Not that we can't already create intermediate files from within Vegas after-the-fact, but being able to create those intermediates files at capture (while extracting the 24p) is just a much more efficient work flow overall.

[David Newman]

Are you losing connection with the camera if you just capture to M2T? While this is not the preferred workflow, it will help narrow down the problem. The camera connection is using Microsoft system components, it would be odd if that was broken on Vista.

[Nathan Shane]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Are you losing connection with the camera if you just capture to M2T? While this is not the preferred workflow, it will help narrow down the problem. The camera connection is using Microsoft system components, it would be odd if that was broken on Vista.

Hey David. I'll look into this more closely. I haven't tried to capture to M2T yet, but was capturing only to the intermediate format, 24p, optimized for Vegas. I'll go look into that now.

And here is something worth taking note of. Under Vista, there is a continuous "COM Surrogate Has Stopped Responding" error message that happens when Windows Explorer is viewing video/media files or when trying to pull the cineform intermediates (that were able to be successfully captured) into Vegas.

I wasn't certain what that error message meant and looked it up online and found a thread that shows how to disable the COM Surrogate from erroring out that way. However, I think in doing that, it also kept NeoHDV from working at all afterwards, so I had to undo what I had done to get NeoHDV working again.

[Mike Dulay]

COM Surrogate error results when the explorer is trying to build thumbnails of your video files but fail. It happens to m2t and divx files from what I've seen.

[David Newman]

Yes, thumbnails are the issue under Vista. We looking how to address that.

[Nathan Shane]

Well, here's my latest assessment of NeoHDV under Vista:

Sometimes the app works as expected, other times it shuts down. There is no repeatable formula that will cause it to shut down, it happens when it happens.

Scene detection DOES NOT WORK for the capture only M2T, nor does it work for the CineForm+KeepM2T.

Scene detection works as expected for CineForm intermediate capture.

In the very first attempt of capturing CineForm+KeepM2T, the app appeared to be capturing (though no scene detection) as expected, but upon hitting STOP and waiting for the program to finish what it does...it never finished. The app locked up completely and was still showing on the desktop. It took using the Task Manager to shut the app down. Interesting to note: I was still able to run a second instance of the app and capture successfully while the previous instance remained locked-up...then I shut it down.

In the second attempt at capturing CineForm+KeepM2T, the app worked correctly though with still no scene detection...though this capture was for a much shorter duration of tape, seeing that I was more interested in seeing if the feature even worked to begin with under Vista.

[David Newman]

Scene detection is not enabled for M2T capture, not really a bug. Your tests don't address the question whether you have an issue with your Firewire port. If you capture M2T without converting to an AVI, you can test the interface between the camera and PC without loading the CPU will MPEG to CineForm conversions. This will tell is your PC/camera is working at a basic level. You can then test converting the capture M2T to an AVI, to test the compression stages. If all works we need to see why doing both at the same test causes issues for your PC.

While Vista is a pain, we don't believe there are inherent capture issue with Vista. So there might be something with your setting we can address.

[Nathan Shane]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Scene detection is not enabled for M2T capture, not really a bug. Your tests don't address the question whether you have an issue with your Firewire port. If you capture M2T without converting to an AVI, you can test the interface between the camera and PC without loading the CPU will MPEG to CineForm conversions. This will tell is your PC/camera is working at a basic level. You can then test converting the capture M2T to an AVI, to test the compression stages. If all works we need to see why doing both at the same test causes issues for your PC.

While Vista is a pain, we don't believe there are inherent capture issue with Vista. So there might be something with your setting we can address.

David, okay you've pointed out that scene detection is not implemented for M2T captures. Capturing with the "M2T only" preference doesn't appear to be an issue under Vista, the program seems to work well for that selection.

Something else is at work here though, because the app will often stop working after just clicking on its icon to start it. No sooner do I start the app then it will immediately give me the error message that HDLink.exe has stopped working. Then sometimes after clicking close and restarting the app, it will appear to open successfully and detect the HV20, but then none of the transport controls will work. At that point, I have to shut the app down again, remove the firewire cable from the camera, reconnect, then restart the app. Then it will run.

It seems to me that capturing to the CineForm intermediate is where the hit and miss issue occurs under Vista. I'm wondering if the scene detection could have anything to do with this?

I think this is definitely more of a Vista issue than NeoHDV. Vista is just so new and works so differently than XP in many areas. Do you know if Vista keeps a log of these error reports that I could grab and pass along to you for investigation?

And to update...scene detection did work successfully for two captures under CineForm+KeepM2T.

[Nathan Shane]

Just to keep passing along information. I just started the app, it detected the HV20, the preferences were set for CineForm intermediate, I pressed play on the apps transport button to make certain the camera responded (which it did), then pressed stop...then pressed start to capture...and instantly get HDLink.exe has stopped working. Successful app+camera connectivity is random under Vista, but as I said, I think this has everything to do with Vista and hardware, rather than NeoHDV.

So the issue here would be to determine what is happening underneath Vista's hood to cause the app to sometimes fail during the middle of a successful intermediate capture, and also why the app will stop responding when first started, or stop responding after it starts, but before capture occurs.

[Nathan Shane]

Using the app to convert the captured M2T files appears to work without any issues under Vista (at least not yet)...however, I noticed the converted files were placed back into the folder of origin (alongside the M2T files) rather than be placed into the destination folder I had selected. I assume that the Folders tab button under Convert is for choosing a destination folder for the converted files, but nothing was written to that folder at all.

Addendum: Is it possible that the HV20 needs to be the "only" firewire device connected at the time of capture? I ask, because I also have a MOTU Traveler firewire audio interface connected to the same firewire card as the HV20. I tried an experiment by turning the MOTU Traveler off during an NeoHDV capture and is caused the app to stop working (HDLink.exe has stopped working error). So I'll have to experiment doing more captures with only the HV20 connected to the firewire card.

[David Newman]

Firewire bus will be the likely source of problems. Like we don' recommend capturing to a Firewire drive from a firewide camera, whereas a USB2 drive would be fine. Try with HV20 camera only.

[Victor Woo]

Originally Posted by Nathan Shane

Interesting you should bring up using Vista's Media Player for doing captures. Last night when I was surfing the internet, I stumbled upon a post that talked about doing that. In fact, I thought the post even said the Media Player could capture 24p from the camera...but I may be mistaken on that and probably am. I'm going to look into this and experiment.

I like the idea behind NeoHDV, not just for capturing the HV20's 24p but also the idea of working with an intermediate file. It makes for an option to have available and they do seem to put less stress on Vegas to work with them. Not that we can't already create intermediate files from within Vegas after-the-fact, but being able to create those intermediates files at capture (while extracting the 24p) is just a much more efficient work flow overall.

Sorry, It was not Media Player; It's Windows Movie Maker(Vista Version). And as far as I know, the dvr-ms file it produced can only be edit using Windows Movie Maker either.
You have mentioned intermediate file. While, it's a great idea, but my system simply didn't work with NeoHD, and I was skeptical that the intermediate file was much more larger than original m2t or dvr-ms file. So if you succeded in capturing intermediate file using Neo, let me know the file size please.