stray artifact in preview window won't go away

[Paul Fierlinger]

I made a screen print of a portion of Vegas using Windows own Snipping Tool and it left behind a small white hole about 10 x 10 pixels which I cannot get rid of. This hole shows up only in the preview window or the external video preview monitor and it's there whether I have a project loaded or not. It stays with the preview window when I undock it and move to another position. It doesn't appear in the trimmer, but if I create a snapshot of the preview window the hole is there. Fortunately, the hole doesn't appear on rendered videos exported from the timeline.

I am on Vegas 12 build 770. OS W 7 Pro. I tried:
rebooting,
powering off,
reinstalling Vegas
reinstalling my nVidia card

I am out of ideas and at a loss. Has anyone come across this grand nuisance, or does anyone have any other ideas worth trying?

[Paul Fierlinger]

I noticed that when I hover my cursor over the preview window it changes from the standard arrow into a plus sign, or small cross hair symbol which I figured out I can use to cut the hole away -- so problem solved, yet... could someone please tell me if this cut symbol belongs to Vegas? I can't remember now if it's always there once the cursor is dragged over the preview window. I suspect that it belongs to the Snipping Tool, and might be a bug in that utility that I should report to MS. If so, how would I go about doing that?.

[Edward Troxel]

Paul, do you have "split screen" view turned on? If yes, turn it off.

The "Split Screen" button is the circle that's half dark/half light above the preview screen.

Then look up the feature in the help file. It really is a powerful feature when used correctly.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Ah, so that's where the crop cursor came from. I don't believe I had the split screen turned on because it was once causing me to lose sight of my time code readout and I had learned to keep it off. But now that I've played withsplit scene a wee bit I see it came on at one point, most likely when I was trying to find a way to rid myself of the hole. Otherwise i don't think I can make use of this feature, the way I use Vegas. All my cuts have been decided in the storyboard and animatic stages in TVPaint. In other words I don't have to deal with having to make a decision to pick one event from a collection of all sorts of optional takes; it's always just one event butted on to the next, but thank you for pointing this out to me.

[Edward Troxel]

It doesn't matter if you have cuts or dissolves. The feature is very useful. For example, you can see a before/after effects side by side. In your case, it sounds like you have it set to show the clipboard in the selected area. That can also be very useful especially if you're doing color correction and trying to match the color of a different clip, for example.

[Paul Fierlinger]

I will check it out next time I might run into some of these cases but with my workflow it happens rarely. Color correction I have needed for instance just once in four or five years. Most of my events are already pre-cut and color corrected to a single frame accuracy before they get lined up in Vegas. My most critical edit decisions are made in TVP's own edit space. What Vegas does best for me is the building of sound tracks and tweaking those to image events -- and of course the ability to do this on lengthy timelines and rendering and exporting works in progress and completed projects.