Disappearing video on timeline
 

I've set up a quad split with various timecode overlays for client review of a 4-camera shoot, with Ultimate-S2. (This doesn't appear to be a US2 problem.)

Scrubbing through the timeline, everything has looked fine. When I render, I lose a camera for a few minutes, seems random.

I just stopped my 4th render because I looked over at the preview window and noticed that I was missing a camera again.

This time, when I went to that point of the timeline, my event thumbnails were showing solid red frames, and that clip was still showing black in the quad split. As I expanded the timeline (zoomed in on a smaller time selection), the red frames went back to video, and, the clip showed its video in the quad split.

Vegas 7.0d, project is 720/30p, footage is all 720/30p. Original M2Ts on the timeline. Attempting to render to MPEG2 DVD Widescreen for the client review...

Any ideas on these red frames and what they represent? And why they appear consistently in renders, and inconsistently on the timeline?

I had a similar problem also with Vegas 7d, though not with multi cam, just the one timeline.

I would scrub through and all would seem fine, do a bit more work and then going back would notice some clips are just 'red frames'. The audio would play but no vision. The asset was present in media bin, but with no thumbnail, and the clip played just fine in windows media player so was not corrupt.

I saved and rebooted Vegas and they all came back ok, but seems to be a bit of a bug.

I new to vegas so can't offer any ideas.

Cheers,
Robert

Robert, thanks for your reply.

How many clips did you have up on that project, and what was the total length of clips?

I called a buddy who referred me to several threads on the Sony forums, regarding M2T on the timeline. Apparently, we're not alone - people who have hundreds of clips, and/or more than 4 hours of M2T on the timeline are experiencing this. His feeling was that it was a memory usage issue, but I don't understand how this could be so, as my expectation is that in the case of RAM issues there is merely a slowdown of rendering as windows makes up the RAM by using the pagefile. (2GB RAM on my machine)

The project I have up right now is a quad split of about 1.5 hours, meaning 6 hours total M2T on the timeline.

I am in the middle of rendering half of the clips to Cineform. This will bring me down to 3 hours of M2T on the timeline. A quick test has been promising.

It's very frustrating, however, as this would be an ideal project to cut in M2T, but here I am jumping through hoops to get out a timecode window dub.

I have a support ticket in at Sony, and will report back anything interesting.

***edit***
Trying to come up with some good search terms, I found this http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...hlight=m2t+red

Hi Seth, As I say I am just in tryout mode with Vegas 7. This problem has occured on two seperate edits, after I have rebooted Vegas it seems to go away for each of the two projects. The current project has only about 75 clips to a total timeline of 17mins. Half of the clips were captured with AspectHD through PP2 as .avi, the other half captured through Vegas as .m2t. Not certain on this but I think the red frame problem was with the .avi files.
But as I said, if I save and reboot Vegas then all appears ok, and renders ok, and when reloading project days later .. again ok.

I'm running AMD64X2 4200, 2 gig RAM, 4 sata drives, GT7950 card.

Seth,
You might be running into RAM buffer problems if you have lots of files, even in 7D. This is "fixed" but I did run into this today with a DVCProHD project. Too many files making the timeline too "big." Usually, rebooting clears the buffer.

As far as the multicam, I've seen some occasion where frames show red during editing, but they correct themselves during render or master track. Again, I think it's a buffer issue. I've got a large project on the timeline right now (7 tracks of DVCProHD) and multicam using infinitiCAM, and occasionally see the red "missing frame" markers. Short renders show me that those frames are actually there.
Dunno if that helps...

In this case only about 8 clips, plus another 8 in muted tracks. But it is a lot of footage - 6 hours, plus the muted tracks.

Everything I've read and been advised of points to RAM buffer. Aside from rebooting, are there any ways to optimize rendering usage of available RAM? Reducing/increasing RAM for preview, render threads (presently at 4, the max), increasing priority that windows gives vegas?

In the meantime I'll clean up the muted tracks and media pool, reboot, and give it another shot.

Strange that Vegas can run low on system resources in this situation, seems like renders should just slow down to available resources.