I just purchased a MPG video from the link below. When I drop it into the Vegas 8.0c timeline it appears red and the preview window shows nothing. There is also a blue line above the timeline for the duration of the clip. I can play the clips fine in WMP WMM. When I convert it to MOV and then bring it in it is ok. I thought Vegas supported the MPG format? Does anyone know what is happening?

Stock Footage of Cloudless earth on a white background. Seamlessly loops. (http://footage.shutterstock.com/clip-400090-cloudless-earth-on-a-white-background-seamlessly-loops.html)

Thank you.

The blue line is normal. If you do a manual ripple, that's how far things will ripple.

The red typically indicates a problem reading the file. Getting a black preview would seem to confirm that. You might try running it through a program like mpeg2repair or use some other program to convert it to a format that Vegas likes better.

this is one reason why you may find people less likely to purchase stock footage if it is only available as a MPEG. THe other reason is MPEG is a lossy compressed version of the MJPEG/MOV format. Since most people will be taking their footage and further compressing it, using footage that starts out heavily compressed is less desirable from a quality point of view.

My recent experience with red clips is that the files were too large. I fixed one red clip problem by increasing the "Dynamic Ram Preview" in the preferences menu / video tab. This apparently allocates more RAM for use in Vegas.

The file is just under 6MB and the only one on the timeline.

As it turned out, the file was an MPEG-1, not MPEG-2. I guess Vegas doesn't support the MPEG-1 format?

I got the provider to send me the file in MOV format at no extra charge, which of course worked.