Black Preview Screen – iPhone Videos

[Andrew Lenczycki]

How many individual “clips” or events do you have in your project? John Rofrano helped me to figure out that having many “.mov” clips that require QuickTime to display will cause this problem. I was using many (30 or more) short events that were in the “.mov” format. QuickTime attempts to open an “instance” for each event on your timeline, and with many clips, it gets overwhelmed and causes the “black screen” preview. How John helped me around this was to “render” the “.mov” files to an intermediary format of “MXF”, then put the MXF clips on the timeline. I don’t know for sure whether that is your problem or not, but you could try to render some of your clips as MXF then replace them on your timeline with the original QuickTime event.

Andrew Lenczycki

[Charles Draycott]

Andrew, your response sounds like it could help me also. I’m having similar issues where projects filled with .mov files are becoming a pain to edit and causing multiple crashes.

Would you be able to elaborate on how one would “render the .mov files to an intermediary format of MXF”?

Hopefully this will provide some assistance to Danielle also.

Thanks in advance!

Charles \”Chaz\” Draycott
Motorsport and Aviation Enthusiast

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Charles,

I went back into the forum and did a search for my name, which I found multiple times. If you want to read the whole thread (which is quite long) you can start here: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/962269#962298

If you skip down the thread to John Rofrano’s March 11, 2013 6:44:52 am response, I believe this explains the real PROBLEM.

Here is another part of a different thread where I’m referencing the use of the Sony MXF file:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/985931#986048

I can’t find the specific spot where John Rofrano was recommending that I use the Sony MXF format, but it’s essentially a “lossless” format that is used as an intermediate in your project. What I had were all these 30 second nested Vegas files that were created by another software (Digital Juice Vegas Templates), which used QuickTime file format in each. So each time an instance of QuickTime was encountered, it would open a new instance of QuickTime to try and display the 30 second event. By rendering each of these segments to Sony MXF, it was “hard coding” the video which was then no longer relying on QuickTime.

To render something to the MXF format, (I am using Vegas Pro 13.0 right now) select File|Render As, then in the dialog box that comes up, in the Output Format section, select Sony MXF (*.mxf), then the particular template for the type of output you want. At the time I was doing this, I was outputting for DVD, so I selected the “NTSC DV Widescreen” format. Recommend that you render the MXF files to a subfolder in your project folder, maybe called “MXF Intermediates”. Then you would just select the MXF file you just created (rendered) and place it on your finish project timeline. This causes you to do an extra step, but for me it completely cured the problem I was having.

Hope this helps you.

[Charles Draycott]

Thank you for taking the time to reply to me in such detail with references Andrew – you’re a life saver!

Charles \”Chaz\” Draycott
Motorsport and Aviation Enthusiast

[Danielle Lee]

Wow! Thank you so much Andrew for the detailed response. I appreciate your help. 🙂

[Charles Draycott]

The man’s a hero! ????

Charles \”Chaz\” Draycott
Motorsport and Aviation Enthusiast

[John Norton]

I notice Andrew mentions using nested videos. I have a very similar problem to Danielle but with quite different source material, no quicktime in use, all PAL mpeg, 720×576 25fps.
Basically very simple to edit material, and the nested projects are also similar in type.

The problem only starts when I add a piece of nested material. Example, load up project, find one complete video track, (of 6 tracks) is black, close down, reopen and maybe ok to work on all day.

Because the material type is different I picked up on the nesting reference by Andrew.

I’ve never had any issue like this before using nesting.

This is my post on it a few days ago.

They may also be two completely unrelated issues also i.e. one caused by Quicktime limits, and mine by nesting?

Using VP14.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/sections-of-tl-black-using-nested-project–107279/

[Andrew Lenczycki]

I have used Vegas Pro since version 6 Pro. I have, but never installed V11 Pro. I have but haven’t used V14 Pro – I currently use V13 Pro. All I can say on the nesting of Vegas project files is that the only time I’ve had a problem was when I had a high number of QuickTime file imbedded. I think I’ve had projects with about 30 nested Vegas files without any issues (as long as they didn’t contain the QuickTime format segments within). Don’t know that this proves anything one way or the other, just thought I would let everyone know it hasn’t been an issue for me, and getting the QuickTime format segments out (by rending them as MXF) has worked for me.

Andrew Lenczycki

[Bart Francis]

Hi Andrew
Thanks for the info
I know this is pretty old but I’m trying to use your advice and having issues.

I used another program to create the mxf files from my iphone .mov files

Now in Vegas 14, they won’t open??

Seems weird since you went through all this trouble to tell us about this and obviously it works for you.
Any idea why I’m having this issue?

Thanks

[Francois Pénzes]

Hi Bart

MXF is a “container” or “wrapper” format which supports a number of different streams of coded “essence”, encoded in any of a variety of video and audio compression formats. Just like QuikTime.

More simply put, it’s like a box where you can put different things in it.

”I used another program to create the mxf files from my iphone .mov files”

Now let’s get a little technical:

Sony’s XDCAM MXF is supported by Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro X, Autodesk Smoke, Avid, Capella systems, Dalet, EVS, Imagine Communications Corp., Omneon, Quantel, Rhozet, Sony Vegas Pro, Sorenson Squeeze, Telestream FlipFactory, GrassValley EDIUS, Grass Valley K2, and Merging Technologies VCube.

Panasonic’s P2 MXF is supported by Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro X, Autodesk Smoke, Avid, Dalet, EVS, GrassValley EDIUS,[3] and Grass Valley K2.

Ikegami offers camcorders capable of recording in MXF wrapper using Avid DNxHD video encoding at 145 Mbit/s, as well as MPEG-2 video encoding at 50 Mbit/s 4:2:2 long-GOP and 100 Mbit/s I-frame.

In 2010 Canon released its new lineup of professional file-based camcorders. The recording format used in these camcorders incorporates MPEG-2 video with bitrates up to 50 Mbit/s and 16-bit linear PCM audio in what Canon has called XF codec. Canon claims that its flavor of MXF is fully supported by major NLE systems including Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer, and Grass Valley EDIUS.[4]

Basically, you have save your file in a format not recognized by Vegas, in a ”container” (MXF)

Convert your file to a format recognized by Vegas (you can use handbrake to convert) Follow link below for recognized formats. (bottom of page)

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/us/vegas-pro/specifications/?utm_source=sonycreativesoftware&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=redirect&lang=us&prdt=vegaspro

Cheers !

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\’\’When the cutting stops, the editing begins…\’\’