All Media is Offline ?

[Mike Kujbida]

“This will probably sound stupid, but I’ll ask anyway.

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers and we try not to do that here 🙂

My dignity is out the door right now.”

Take a deep breath and relax.
You just got your software and are in the learning phase right now.

Let’s start with the basics.
Am I correct in assuming that you successfully captured some footage from the camera and it’s currently sitting on your hard drive somewhere?

[Catherine Filteau]

You are indeed right. The footage has been recorded using the ‘capture’ fonction in Vegas while the camera was on playback. The footage was recorded in HDV and is in .m2t format.

[Mike Kujbida]

Is the footage on an internal drive or an external one?
Please describe (in as much detail as possible) the process you use when trying to import footage into a new project.

[Catherine Filteau]

Thanks for replying.

The media is on an external drive.

I plugged the camera into my computer with an iLink cable, then opened up Vegas. I went in File>>Capture and selected ‘HDV’ in the popup box that appeared. I selected the camera in the ‘device’ section and Vegas detected it successfully (meaning I was able to play the footage and ‘see’ through the lens in the PC.) I started at the very beginning of the footage (which was recorded on a mini HD1080p tape) and pressed the ‘record’ button. The footage started playing and recording in a folder I had chosen on the external drive (because it’s 1TB and a lot faster than my other drives). When I was done, I pressed the ‘stop’ button and got the footage in the media library in .m2t format.

I can’t drag it onto the timeline at all. Nothing moves. At the bottom of the ‘media library’ window I have ‘media offline’ written.

I tried to look around the program, but since I’ve never used Vegas before and it’s my first time working with HD footage, I’m kind of lost. Hope you can help! Thanks

[Mike Kujbida]

It looks like you’re doing everything correctly.
One term puzzles me though and that is “media library”.
By that, do you mean the folder the captured media is in or something else?

I vaguely recall other users having issues similar to yours and their solution was to copy the footage from the external drive to an internal one.

Are you using a desktop or a laptop?
If it’s a desktop, how many internal drives do you have?
Is this an older machine?
Can you give me specs such as operating system, CPU type, amount of RAM, etc.
The more details, the better.

[Catherine Filteau]

Yes, I did mean the place where the footage is kept in within the program.

I run a desktop, Alienware Aurora with 2-3 intern drives (3TB total)

The footage is actually on an internal drive, I was mistaken earlier.

[Mike Kujbida]

Catherine, you have me stumped on this.
I’ve searched other Vegas forums and can’t find any reason why you should be having this problem.
My only suggestion at this point is to post this question in the other Cow Vegas forum in the hopes that someone there (a lot more users than this forum) have run into your problem before.
Refer to this thread to save yourself some typing.

[Catherine Filteau]

It’s okay, thanks for trying to help ! 🙂 I’ll do that right away.

[Walker Angell]

I assume you’ve checked this, but I’ll mention it anyway. When I’ve seen this it always had to do with some mismatch in the file path/name. The one that stumped me the most (years ago) was when Vegas thought a drive was E:, but that same drive in Windows Explorer was G:. I could see the file, all looked well, but after much searching I realized the problem. I’ve also seen this when it couldn’t find a file and I auto brained a check mark to leave it offline – so even when the file was there I’d told Vegas to keep it offline.

Have you tried to manually re-import to make sure all is matched?