Last summer I was editing HDV footage in Vegas Pro 8c that was captured with HDVSplit. I had major problems with Vegas crashing when I tried to render and found out it was because Vegas supposedly didn't always like footage captured with HDVSplit. I'm running Vegas 10 now and about to start on something I captured with HDVSplit. Does version 10 have this issue?

interesting - i usually use vegas's capture, but for simplicity i have my students use hdsplit. have never had a problem with hdsplit captures in vegas...

The only computer I have to capture HD on right now crashed when I tried to capture with Vegas but not with HDVSplit. That's the only reason I used it.

which camera?

Canon HV40. My wife has a Dell laptop and there is some type of conflict. It will capture SD video with no problem but any flavor of HD comes in garbled and drops frames.

She brought home another Dell laptop that is a school issue from where she teaches so it's loaded with their programs and accessories and I can't alter too much except install the few programs I need to get video off the cameras. I installed Vegas on it but every time I tried to capture the laptop crashes and comes up with a blue screen of death. If I capture with HDVSplit it works fine.

wish i could offer some help, but i'm stumped (and don't know the camera either). however, if hdsplit's working what's the problem with using it rather than sony's capture?

my only thought (for what it's worth) is if you're not capturing to a separate hd sony's capture, launched through vegas might be taking up to many / much resources.

you might try launching sony capture direct.....

I don't mind use HDVSplit. I just want to make sure I'm not going to run into the problems I did before. The frustrating part was I didn't know about the issue until I was done editing that project and trying to render it to be able to show the next day.

The problem is that HDVsplit is rather tolerant of framing errors - much more tolerant than Vegas. I use HDVsplit with an HV20. Some captures work fine but others need to be run through another application which will correct the framing problems. There are plenty of applications which will likely serve to restore mpeg files but I use the freebie Avidemux. Just load it in and save under a different name - works for me.

Wow.. didn't know there was any such problem. I have been capturing for years off the HV20 for footage from it and my FX1, using HDVSplit, and editing in Vegas ( 7,8, 9 and 10). Never knew there was an issue, nor have I had an issue in my case.

Ken, what do you mean by tolerant of framing errors?

Thanks for the advice Ken. How will I know if I have framing problems before I edit the raw video?

Right now I'm working with the video I captured with HDVSplit in Vegas 10 and it seems fine. I've rendered a couple segments in different formats and haven't had troubles so far.

As you know, mpeg compression relies upon 'frames' - i-frames, p-frames and so on. I'm not an expert on this but the objective is to use redundant information to re-create image frames from previous information thereby requiring less media storage space - another way of expressing compression.

Those frames can become corrupted and a series of image frames end up not getting re-created properly. A codec, apparently, can be coded to require tight adherence to the mpeg spec or can be coded to intelligently (hopefully) reinsert missing information, hence a 'loose' or tolerant codec.

By loading a damaged mpeg into a tolerant editor and saving it out to a new file you can sometimes recover the file if the damage is not too severe. Sometimes though you have to use the more tolerant editor to cut out the hopeless sequence of frames and move on.

I had this problem last June doing a wedding for my granddaughter. Two HDV tapes and the second one kept crashing VMS 10. I used Avidemux to cut out the offending 60 frames (noticeable glitch on the original tape) and imported the two good portions back into Vegas.