BCC Match Move Unit in Sony Vegas Pro 12. Error: “Look Ahead Exceeded”?

[Jon Kozenko]

Dale,

Is the clip that you’re adding to the Vegas timeline a complete clip, or is there material in the master clip that’s ahead of the start of the clip in the timeline? If you’re only putting a portion of the clip onto the timeline, try placing the entire master clip onto the Vegas timeline, or at least a portion of the clip that contains the first frame of the master.

If this doesn’t work, try closing Vegas and refreshing the Vegas cache, which can be found here –
C:Users[username]AppDataLocalSonyVegas Pro

The folder you’ll be looking for is 12.0 – just move this folder out of this directory and re-launch.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Jon

[Dale Mcclelland]

Jon, thanks for the reply. The clips I have tried are the full master clip in the timeline.

I moved the 12.0 folder out of the parent folder while Vegas was closed as you suggested (to a different hard drive in fact), but still get the error part way into the tracking on the fly. With the Look Ahead slider at the maximum of 100 frames, I can typically get 175 to 250 frames into the clip before the error message pops up.
I can do what the error message suggests and rewind to the xxx frame, clear render cache, at start tracking again from that point. Usually that completes the tracking with out error on a 6-8 second clip.

That’s not too bad a process when rewinding only once, but I am concerned about trying to track a longer clip. It could become time-consuming to do several iterations of the “rewind to frame xxx and track from there” process. I don’t think I will buy the product if I can’t resolve this problem.

Unless you have some other suggestions, I will contact Boris tech support about the problem. Hopefully they will try to help even though I am using the trial version.

I appreciate your suggestions.

Dale

[Jon Kozenko]

Dale,

Generally this error would mean that the CTI/Playhead is further along the clip than the Motion Tracker has been able to analyze. The most direct way to cause this would be to quickly scrub forward after you’ve enabled ‘Track on the Fly’ – try stepping through or playing the timeline. If this does not help, try lowering the preview resolution and playing again.

When the error comes up, you should just need to move the CTI/Playhead back to a point that does not show this error, and Play again.

If this does not work, you can send an email to my attention to support@borisfx.com.

Thanks,

Jon

[Dale Mcclelland]

Thanks again Jon (didn’t realize that you work for Boris.) Your scrubbing suggestion definitely helped because I could scrub slowly enough to keep the video from advancing faster than the FX could track.

But then I discovered the real problem. I was invoking Vegas’s “Build RAM Preview” incorrectly. I was using CNTL-B, then clicking Play, which played the video at full real-time speed (and wasn’t really building a RAM preview because SHIFT-B is the correct command is SHIFT-B, not CNTL-B). Tracking at real-time speed caused the playback to get too far ahead of the tracking and resulted in the error message.

Once I discovered how to invoke “Build RAM Preview” correctly, I found that the RAM preview proceeds much slower than real-time, and is slow enough for the tracking to keep up. I no longer get the error.

So it turns out that it was my lack of understanding of how to use a Vegas feature that was the problem. The key to my being able to figure it out was your explanation that the error occurs when playback advances faster than the tracking can keep up with was. Thanks for explaining that. Understanding what was happening was a big help.

I now plan to purchase a license for the Match Move Unit (or maybe the entire BCC Complete).

[Jon Kozenko]

Dale,

That is outstanding news and thanks for letting me know that you have resolved the situation. If anything comes up, you can contact me, and if you’d like, I can have someone from Sales contact you about purchase.

Thanks,

Jon