Vegas is driving me nuts
 

I'm virtually tearing my hair out after having spent now, nearly 2 days, yes, two days, - (now I'M in a daize), trying to capture 4 HDV tapes down-converted in-camera - (Sony A1P), to DV for easy editing. Up to an hour or so back, I only had one to go. Thinking I had a faulty new HDD, I had swapped it over from an internal drive in my PC to an external enclosure so I can use it with my new Laptop, (via USB as an ext. drive), which is a later & faster machine. (Viao 2.7g. 6g ram. Vista 64b/ Vegas 64). Things at last seemed to be working.

NOW, - Why Oh Why, is it that on this last tape when I have the thing paused 6 or 8 seconds before the capture in-point (Like always), at 00:14:21:00, but when I press the "Capture In/Out" button, the cam starts for a few secs and goes into pause mode BEFORE it gets to the capture in-point and the dreaded "No files Were Captured " window pops up ? I have repeated this capture operation 3 times and then shut down everything while I had lunch and then fired it up but it still does this.

I have a dedicated "Capture" folder on this new HDD which is only 6% full so it isn't the drive surely, or is there a limit to what one folder will hold ? It already has about 12g. in it.

I am absolutely dumbfounded as my procedure for capture is the same as I used on the other tapes.

At this rate I'll be bald before nightfall !

Ron C.

Try capturing the entire tape instead of just a portion of it and see if that helps.

Thanks Jeff.

The plot thickens. I have now discovered that Vegas doesn't like capturing to my external drive as after even more attempts, I decided to try & capture to the nearly full, C drive. This worked, but I still found there was another tape to go and likewise this would not capture to the Ext. drive either, so I put it to the C drive and it stopped 9 mins short as the C drive was full.

So now you would think well that's easy, just transfer the files across in Windows to the near-empty ext. drive. - NO WAY, - (Mr. Murphy lives here), I tried just that with a 12g captured file and it started OK but now it just sits there at about 10% showing 4 mins 45 seconds remaining and has been stationary for about 20 minutes.

My thought now is, I wonder if the ext. drive IS faulty but it shows up OK in Windows explorer. - Any thoughts anyone ?

Ron C.

Is your drive firewire? If so switch to USB if possible. Your drive is probably fine.

Whether your drive is firewire or USB, the issue most likely revolves around the USB/firewire connection/controller card OR it COULD be the external drive itself is the issue, not because it is bad, but because it is quirky. I find some older Fantom drives particularly weird. I no longer use USB/firewire drives for this reason. I've gone to all esata.

Anyhow, in Vista, make sure to check your power management settings so that hard drives will not go to sleep after X number of minutes, as for some apps they will not wake up. I had issues editing in Vista with my USB drives because the drives kept going to sleep after 20 minutes and when Vegas needed to access a file on the external it would freeze until I turned the setting off.

A last thing you can try if your drives are USB is to move the drive plug to the highest, topmost, lefthand plug in the rear of the desktop. That should be the highest priority USB socket, and this simple moving around can fix some issues. It has helped me with some strange issues also.

Agreeing with Jeff here - if your drive is firewire and on the same bus as your camcorder, this isn't a Vegas issue, it's a known firewire protocol issue.

If on firewire... The short story is that a fw HD and an FW camcorder use different protocols that run on top of the firewire channel.

So, for most users, USB HD is the choice for ext HD. USB has been proven plenty fast enough to keep up with DV or HDV ingest.

If you're in this pickle and you don't have a USB-capable HD ready, there are some FW tricks to try:
If you have a separate firewire bus, that seems to always work, eg. firewire on the motherboard and a firewire card.
Try using different ports, if available. Looping your cam through the HD seems to be the worst.
Try powering up in a different sequence - HD first, then the camcorder. Or, the opposite.

Thanks guys for your input. I try to include as much detail as possible in my queries but some things still get overlooked.

The drive connection from my laptop to the Ext. drive IS USB and the drive itself is a new Samsung 1TB. 7200 RPM.

On the Viao laptop I don't think it would make much difference which USB port I use, - it only has two. However, I will check the settings re the drive going to sleep but I don't think that is happening when it is being virtually constantly written to.

Ron C.

is it possible that there is a problem with that particular tape? Perhaps dirt or a dropout or something that is keeping that tape from being captured.

I would place the tape back in the camera it was shot in, FF it a bit the rewind it back to the beginning. PLAY it thru in the camera it was shot in just to make sure it plays then if it does, rewind and capture. If not, then it's more than likely a tape problem.

Thanks Don, but it doesn't matter what tape I use as I tried other tapes which gave the same result. However, I have found since that they will capture to the C drive, very wierd, but not much help as this drive is now full !

I am still trying to figure out if I do in fact have a (partly) faulty (new) drive. I have never come across this sort of problem before as usually a drive either works or it doesn't.

RonC.

Maybe it is your drive....

one last thought. Well 2 actually. First I would never capture to the C or system drive, the reasons are too many to mention but 2ndly, could it be a cable? Perhaps a different USB cable? It's always possible that it could be a bad cable or connection to the drive. Cables and connections have a nasty habit of going wonky at the wrong time.

There have been MANY cases where people have had issue capturing to an external drive while the internal drive works fine. There have also been many cases where people have NOT had issues. I believe this is very much computer related issue - some have the problem, some don't. One workaround is to capture to your c: drive and then move the file to the external drive. Then capture the next tape and move it, etc...

Terry, you're correct, I just re-read his post and it does sound like his drive or connection is faulty.

Edward,
I believe he said somewhere back there that he tried that but that he then had trouble just transferring the file to the external drive. Sounds like a problem with the port, cable or external drive.

Well at last it looks as if it was the HDD after all, even though most files showed up in Win Explorer. - Most frustrating as I have waisted nearly 3 days removing, swapping, fitting to ext. enclosures, double checking etc, but it has yet to be confirmed by Samsung. - (I have sent it back.) I was eventually able to fully confirm myself by substitution with another drive that has worked.

However, I am still having problems with Vegas not recognising AVCHD files from A Sony Camcorder which says that .mts is an unsupported format. I thought that Vegas was supposed to support AVCHD as that's what the blurb says.

RonC.

Vegas does support AVCHD files as I just imported some footage from a Panasonic camcorder the other day (using Pro 8, BTW).
Which version of Vegas are you using and is it Pro or Movie Studio?