random errors
 

This is my first posting so I will start with a positive - I love the pictures that come out my A1 when I get it right and I know it is going to serve me well for a long time!

Now the problem: I am using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8 and an external (via USB) Seagate Freeagent 500gb disk to store captured footage. Footage gets from the camera to the disk without any problems and I can play the captured footage back in VLC (this is HDV 25f footage mostly). Vegas can process the footage and render without any problems and 99.99% of the footage is error free - BUT 0.01% errors will appear within the captured footage (where there was no corruption when first captured). These are not drooped frames I think because it will just be corrupted parts of a frame and the error might appear for only one or two frames and half a dozen at the most (I will post some examples later). The corruption looks like blocked out squares and sometimes looks as if part of an earlier frame is making its way into the another frame. The strangest part is that the corruption is not static - it changes! The same corrupt frame will exhbibit different errors if I go to another frame and then come back to it or if I make a copy of the clip.

My thoughts are this: the hard drive is bad in some way and is corrupting data in a degenerative way - as in the data is good for a while when first written to the disk and the corruption is not consisitent because Veags is interpreting the errors slightly differently each time OR Vegas is responsible for the corruption of the data in the first place not when it is capturing footage but when it is accessing it in the editing process - although I have read anywhere of other people having such problems.

Is this simply a problem with the use of an innapropraite disk and data transfer method (USB) for editing (it does similiar things with SD footage so not just an HDV issue)?

Sorry for the lengthy post and thanks for any thoughts.

Try capturing to an internal drive. While USB specs say it can easily keep up with 25Mb/s that HDV requires, there is a lot of overhead with USB operation. That overhead is the reason why firewire has stuck around even after USB 2.0 came out.

If you feel so inclined (and like to void warranties), I'll bet you could pop open that Freeagent housing and pull out a nice SATA drive. I've done this before with Western Digital USB drives.

I think that's probably right, the problem is the USB drive.

Thanks
 

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I could take the disk out of its enclosure and put it inside a firewire enclosure.

Hi Jamie............
 

before you go all Gung Ho and start dismantling stuff, can you confirm that your system has no other app's running in the background, is not connected to the internet or a network, has all virus software disabled and otherwise is totally clean to run video editing apps?

If not, do so before doing anything rash.

One rampant background app can create mayhem with rendering.

Oh, and before disabling your virus stuff, do a full system scan and defrag all your drives.

See if that helps.


CS

disk problems
 

I have turned off as much as I can and one thing I am tempted to do is a complete re-install of XP etc and to keep it off-line. I am though still of the opinion that the external disk itself is the problem because I can capture HDV to the disk and play footage back in VLC player 100% no stutter etc. The problem is that over time small errors appear within footage - never enough to ruin a whole shot but at the most 6 or so frames with random blocks of noise which were not there when I captured and Vegas will deisplay those errors slightly differently each time!

I'd go with what Chris says.

If your computer has been on the internet it could now have all sorts of little apps that could cause random problems.

I'd do the re-install (XP is pretty straight forward), reload the absolute minimum apps and try again.