Vegas adds black frames between HDV clips
 

Recently I have been experimenting with how to get good SD downconverts from edited HD movies. I am still struggling with this issue in Premiere. Since I had a copy of Vegas Platinum I thought I'd see how well that does the job of downconverting; I would expect it to be an indicator of how well the full Vegas would do.

I had already captured some 55 short clips using HDVsplit. I opened a new Vegas project with properties derived from one of these clips, i.e., project settings for HDV. I imported all the clips and then placed them on the timeline in the desired order by double-clicking.

I find extra, blank (black) frames between each pair of clips on the timeline. In most cases there are two such frames. Sometimes there is a single blank frame followed by a repeat of the last frame in the preceding clip. This creates a noticeable black "flash" between clips rather than the usual jump. I would like to know what I may have done wrong to obtain this result.

Thanks,

R.L. Vaughan

You haven't done anything wrong.
Do a search of the Sony Vegas forum and you'll find a LOT of very upset users experiencing the exact same problem - with no real solution to be found :-(

Mike, the problem most of us have been having is with black frames in the MIDDLE of clips, not at the beginning or end.

It's a very strange situation, because although the black frames (always two of them) appear in Preview, the "missing" frames are clearly visible on the timeline thumbnails if you zoom in, and for many people it can be "cured" by setting dynamic ram to zero. I can also get rid of them by rendering those "black" frames to a new track, and they reappear.

This problem Richard has may or may not have a similar cause, but it sounds much more predictable being at the beginning and end of each clip, rather than maybe once or twice an hour at random points.

Richard, in case it makes a difference, you could try capturing a short sequence in Vegas instead of HDV Split.

Vegas capture seems okay
 

Today I captured the whole 6 1/2 minutes of tape from which the 55 clips had come, using Vegas instead of HDVsplit. Then I imported these into a Vegas HDV project and isolated and moved some of them by splitting the timeline. Of course there were no black frames added between the clips that I did not rearrange -- as they were now all part of one big clip -- and I do not think there were any black frames added between the pieces that I moved around or anywhere in the middle, though I have not checked this in detail.

It would be nice to be able to use HDVsplit in the same manner as I have been using Scenalyzer -- to subdivide my video automatically into many small clips so I can locate cuts and add transitions if needed and so that I can make any color corrections or other adjustments which are usually associated with individual clips. But it seems there is something about clips from HDVsplit that causes Vegas to insert the black frames.

By the way, is there any mouse or keyboard trick in Vegas to move the cursor on the timeline to the beginning of the next clip?

Thanks

Richard Vaughan

CTRL+ALT+Left/Right Arrow

Vegas HDV capture now includes the ability to split captures whenever the canmera was stopped/restarted. Look for "Scene Detection" in capture preferences.

Vegas often gives choices on how to do things - as well as the method Edward described, the [ and ] keys will take you backwards and forwards from clip to clip on a given track.

You can try my FS-4 solution to combine the clips so that there will not be a gap between the events.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=85791

Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com
www.vidmus.com/scolvs