Captured using Windows Moviemaker..no audio?
 

Hey all,

While waiting for my copy of Vegas 6 to arrive I spent the time capturing video from a number of recitals I'm editing. The capture was to an external FW/USB2.0 hard drive and I used Windows MovieMaker.

The clips play fine in Windows Media Player but when I bring the clips into Vegas 6 there's no audio.

Any ideas what, if anything, I've done incorrectly?

Thanks for the help.

sincerely,


ian

How did you capture?

Hey Ed,

I used Windows Moviemaker to capture the video from my old Canon ZR80. It was shot on a Panny DVX100b.

FW from cam to external HDD, FW and USB2.0 from external HDD to laptop via FW and USB2.0 connection.

What's interesting is Windows Media Player plays the video with audio but when I pull the clip into Vegas 6...no audio.

Strange.

Any ideas?

ian

Just for clarification: when you drag a clip into the timeline, is it just a video track alone, or is there an audio track embedded in the stream that won't play back?

Also: right-click on one of the file icons (for your video clips) in windows explorer, and then go over to the 'summary' tab. How are the audio/video properties listed there?

Hi Jarrod,

When I pull a clip onto the V6 timeline there's only a video track. No audio comes with it. Yet there's audio when I play the clip in Windows Media Player.

Under the "summary" tab of the properties for the video clip it says, "audio"
and below that "duration" and the time listed but that's all. Nothing else is listed under the "summary" tab for the video clip.

I'm thinking I'm going to have to re-capture all of this video...10 hours worth through Vegas 6 instead.

Good Lord, I hope not.

Any ideas?


ian

Ok, how did MovieMaker save the file? Obviously it wasn't DV-AVI. You need to figure out how the audio was saved so that you can get the proper codec installed. You might try something like GSpot.

That's the funny thing, Ed.

I made sure it saved as dv-avi, 25 Mbps, 30 fps, 720x480, ntsc (as the program indicates)

So very odd.

I'll try that GSpot program and post again in a couple of minutes.


ian

Hi,

GSpot doesn't seem to be working all that well with certain video files. When I open an .avi file I get no information. No codec, no stat, no nothing. Just the file path, the size of the file and the "container" info but nothing else. And ONLY on the files I captured using Windows MovieMaker. Hmmm. I'm thinking there's a lesson here.

Anyway, I opened V6 and checked out the "properties" of the various video files.

The files with no audio show only a video stream when "properties" is accessed in V6 for those files. I checked files that DO work in V6 and they show a video AND audio stream in the properties. Otherwise the information is identical.

So, all of the video I captured using Windows MovieMaker seem to have no audio component, but only in V6 and they don't show any information using GSpot apart from path, size and container.

How odd.

So, I'm thinking it's another 10 hours to re-capture these recitals....yay.

Unless one of you can help me.



ian

There's definitely something very strange going on.
I just used Gspot to check an avi (DV-AVI) and got all kinds of details.
I'm wondering if there was something wrong with the original captures?
The only thing that comes to mind at this late hour is to go into the Vegas prefs (General tab) and deselect "Ignore third party DV codecs".
Good luck with it.

I second Mike's suggestion. Sounds like some crappy MS codec issue to me.

But I'd keep playing around. If WMP recognizes the audio, then something's definitely there. You just have to figure out how to make Vegas see it.

Do you have sound forge? You could try opening your AVI's in SF to see if there's an audio track there. If so, you could then try saving them again from SF. It seems like that worked for me in a similar situation once. You might even be able to save them right back to AVI's--if not, there's always WAV. In that case, you could sync to video by the length of the clips. A slight pain, I know, but better than 10 hours of recapturing by a long shot.

EDIT: The strangest part of all this is that gspot doesn't see the audio. Gspot is usually extremely good at stuff like this.

You might want to read this information. To save recapturing all that video, try DVDate. It is freeware.

Thanks for the link Guy. It confirms various suspicions that MovieMaker is probably doing something to the original files. Hope it works for Ian.

Hi gang,

Thanks for the link, Guy.

For some reason all it did was give me video (coverted to type 2) with no audio, not even in DVDate

I basically gave up and am now attempting recapture using V6, now that I have it.

Thanks for everything and I learned a lesson here.

NEVER TRUST MICROSOFT! j/k

Just don't use Movie Maker for capture.

sincerely,


ian

If you are using USB, don't bother with Vegas. It will not capture the audio over USB. Your best bet is to stick with Firewire all the way. The funny thing with Vegas is that you can capture to Type 1 over Firewire and Vegas will import the video and make the proxy audio file so it can edit it. However, it just doesn't work with USB.

Hey Guy,

Yeah. That's probably it. The USB thing.

I'm using an external drive that has 1 USB2.0 and 2 FW connections.

When I ran just cam/deck>FW>Ext HDD>FW>Laptop and then turned on the Canon ZR80, the cam and the HDD would disappear from Windows and V6.

So I now have the same setup above AND run the USB from HDD to laptop and it seems OK now, except for one minor thing.

Over a 45 minute capture V6 no frames were dropped but I noted the average framerate was listed around 28.9 frames/second.

Is this part normal? Shouldn't it be 29.97 or whatever the standard is?

Apart from that little bit of info everything is now good in V6.

sincerely,


ian