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Dropping frames
I apologize if this has been answered elsewhare or there’s a really stupidly silly answer to this but I am very new to Vegas. Only here really because everything else I tried couldn’t import the video files or needed 33+ hours to render the preview! But now I’m here I’m liking it.
So anyway, back to the problem. I have a series of video files that I am importing to Vegas. They play perfectly in Windows Media Player, but in the timeline there are quite a few places where the frames are coloured red and I simply get a blank screen in the preview (and I assume the rendered version as well). Any ideas as to what is going on. This is not a slow machine I’m working on (Core i7) and some of the clips with this problem are very small. It’s not just a couple of frames I’ve got a clip that’s 45 seconds long and it’s dropped frames in 3 places for over 5 seconds a piece. These are 720p files at 29.5 FPS, encoded as an avi file under divX. I could do it as a cinepak (old, huge files and 25 times slower to convert) but why does Vegas do this?
Any help would be appreciated, thanks -
2 Replies
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Divx is primarily a delivery codec, not an editing one. In order to save space, it throws away information and expects the playback device (in this case, Vegas) to reconstruct some frames based on other frames. Sometimes Vegas doesn’t do so well with such codecs.
You’re best off using either DV or a not-so-lossy codec like Lagarith or Huffyuv. Another option is to install ffdshow which may or may not allow Vegas to read your Divx files better.
For the record, they’re not “dropped frames” — that’s a totally different situation which happens when video is captured. In your case, the information is there — Vegas is just having trouble reading it.
Rob
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Thanks for the answer. I tried ffdshow but the quality was awful. It’s interesting but some movies have the same gap when imported into Vegas no matter how I encode them. Yet they still play perfectly elsewhere.
I’ve never heard of Lagarith or Huffyuv but I gave them a whirl. Nice fast encoding, especially with Lagarith, but I still have the same problem. Which video converion software do you recommend? I’ve tried several and RiverPast Video Cleaner Pro seems the best I’ve come accross though it can be a little temperamental at times. Since the problem appears atthe same point in the movie every time I thinking it may be some sort of peculiar reaction between RiverPast encoded movies and Vegas.Thanks for the pointers, I really appreciate it!
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