3 minute HDV clip captures as 150 files
 

HDV (m2t) from tape ends up as hundreds of tiny unusable m2t and sfk files. So far I've tried it with scene detection on and off, and in Vegas 6d, 9c, and HDV split.

Any theories on why this happens? It also usually crashes Vegas 6 and 9. I'd NEVER been able to crash Vegas 6, this knocks it out real fast.

Gonna try the Mac next and also different tapes.

The same footage captured and played flawlessly with Firestore.

Check out these possiblities:

1, Connectivity: Try a different firewire cable, or try a different capture camera

2. If you are attempting to capture to a disk with insufficient speed to write the data as it flows. I have had problems with some USB drives in past.

3. Defragment capture disk.

Oh the humiliaton...
 

Tried changing the cabling and connector, same issue. Tried a different tape, it captures perfectly.

Then, took the bad tape that captures in micro files over to a little macbook, there, in Macland, on lowly iMovie, it captured perfectly. I'd never even opened iMovie until today. Only thing on iMovie is that it captures in fast motion -- presumably there's some setting in iMovie to slow it down. But no micro files.

Anyone have an idea?

I have run into that problem and it was always due to the hard drive speed - such as trying to capture to an external drive.

Are you trying to capture to an external drive?

Your suggestion has helped. I was trying to catch to a usb/esata and tried to switch to a Firewire drive and it's doing alot better.

For some reason 60p works now but still same issue with 24p :/

Can you capture to the internal drive, then manually move the files? That's what I ended up doing.

You captured to the same drive that your programs are on? Or do you have two internal HDD's?

Personally, I have two internal drives. However, if capturing to the system drive works and capturing to the external doesn't, I'd definitely capture to the system drive and then move it to the external drive.

I have three internal drives, but I have captured onto my program drive with no difficulties. When I capture on my laptop, I capture onto the program drive.

One interesting thing is that these issues only seemed to happen on that one particular tape. Other tapes capture normally. Though I have noticed 9c frequently crashes with files from captured tape. Vegas 6 is more stable. Supposedly Vegas 5 is the most stable version ever, I know audio editors that do their mixing on Verson 5 for that reason.

Been a long time since I've captured tapes, but I seem to remember that timecode breaks in the tape could cause this...