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Big issue with Vegas 5.0 - please help!

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Please help!

Hi- I’m the editor of the “Shroud of the Dark Side”, an extensive edit of Ep. II that would have been coming out in the very near future had I not ran into a variety of creative problems with my computer. It ended by removing the HD and installing alternate hardware as well.

In the meantime, I’m editing on a Compaq PC (Nvidia card), hoping to get some work done while waiting for some things to arrive. However, I have a big problem. After opening up one of the project files in Vegas 5.0, I realized that in every shot I had spliced together is two frames off. So every shot or set of shots in the film is now…two frames off.

This is a major problem for obvious reasons- I’ve cropped and color-timed each shot differently from the ones surrounding it, and I’ve done a lot of resequencing. Many times, when there’s a splice, I get two frames of a shot I never intended to be there. This is BAD.

Long story short, has anyone experienced this issue, and if so, is there any way to get around it, short of redoing all of the source files and padding them with 2 extra frames at the beginning to avoid this painstaking work? (which still wouldn’t work for the various AVI inserts)

I’d be so grateful if any of you have any ideas on how to fix this or helpful comments. Thanks so much for your help.

-TM

P.S. It’s not this particular PC that’s the problem, by the way. The same thing happened on my other PC, the editing PC, some time ago last year. When it happened this first time, I just relented and changed every shot in the project to eliminate the problem. But now that it’s happened a second time, I’m really not looking forward to trying to do it again (especially since I had pretty much the whole thing cut perfectly just the way I wanted it before this happened).

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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Which version of 5.0 are you using? I had similar problems when using using Vegas 5.0c. There was an update to 5.0d available freely on the Vegas site that fixed a few bugs like this. I'm using 7.0 now because even with the updates 5.0 had too many problems (and so did the first few versions of 6). v7 is a lot more stable and you can still import the project files from 5.0.

Also what codec are you using for the basis of your edit? I know it plays up sometimes with a few of the lossless codecs and doesn't like Mpeg2 much either.

ANH:REVISITED
ESB:REVISITED

DONATIONS TOWARDS MATERIALS FOR THE REVISITED SAGA

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You guessed it. This is Vegas 5.0c and I am editing directly off of the MPEG-2 DVD files. I hope Version D fixes these problems.

Thanks for the info, Adywan!

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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It's never happened to me, and I'm using 5.0a. I've edited a lot of MPEGs as well. That being said, if I'm doing extensive editing with MPEGs (such as VOB files), I usually render them out to AVI so that editing and previewing are quicker.

One possible quick-fix: Group all the files that are off, so that if this happens again, you can move them all together. Barring that, update as soon as possible.

You also might try loading the back-up file, and see if that has the same problem.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Adywan, does Vegas have a problem with the Lagarith codec? That's the one I use (since Huffy crashes my computer no matter what I do about it). I was going to be starting a major edit later in the year and I don't want to have this kind of problem. I believe I'm using one of the version 6's.

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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Originally posted by: klokwerk
Adywan, does Vegas have a problem with the Lagarith codec? That's the one I use (since Huffy crashes my computer no matter what I do about it). I was going to be starting a major edit later in the year and I don't want to have this kind of problem. I believe I'm using one of the version 6's.

I was using Vegas 6 when i began my edit and i use the lagarith codec without any problems.
Originally posted by: Trooperman
You guessed it. This is Vegas 5.0c and I am editing directly off of the MPEG-2 DVD files. I hope Version D fixes these problems.

Yeh, i thought you might be working with MPEG2. Vegas is ok when you are working with just a couple of edits using mpeg2 but i had hell if i tried to do anything extensive then it really started playing up, the same way you mentioned. I can't remember is 5d fixed this problem though. I think you mentioned that you are working from the NTSC DVD. The problem with Vegas that it sometimes fails to remove the 2:3 pulldown correctly and can cause loads of problems. There is a way around this but you do need a lot of hard drive space. Open up the dvd files in DVD2AVI. in the "Video" tab select the field operation as "forced film", then the colour space to "RGB24", then "clip & resize"
- set the filter type to " precise bicubic" and the "video aspect" to "free" and slide the resize slider to max to show 720 x 480. now you can export your video. using something like picvideo mjpeg codec the file size will be about 30gb but could be smaller for ntsc. Now you have your 24fps film but it is split into 2gb chunks. Its a pain that this program does this. Now you can load your first chunk into Virtualdub. once you ahve done that select "append segment", select all the other chunks and import them. now you can export. just select "no audio" in the audio tab and "direct stream copy" in the video tab and export. now your video is joined so you can delete all the split chunk files.

Now open vegas and import your project. once this has done go to the project media manager. right click on your main video file in the media manager and select "replace" and swap it for you avi footage. now save the project under a different name so you still have a back up of the original mpeg2 version incase somethings gone wrong.
Now there is one thing that vegas does that is annoying. with some avi and other files it adds them as field based footage even if it is progressive. so right click on the footage in your timeline and select properties. change the field order to "progressive". check each section of video on your timeline to see if it has changed them all to progressive.

hopefully 5d will fix the problem for you so you don't have to go through all that. But to be safe for any future edits convert the mpeg2 to lossless avi first

ANH:REVISITED
ESB:REVISITED

DONATIONS TOWARDS MATERIALS FOR THE REVISITED SAGA

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Thanks for the help, everyone! I'm very happy because after installing Vegas 5.0d and opening a few of my files, I discovered everything the way I originally had it. Thanks so much.


Originally posted by: adywan
Originally posted by: klokwerk
Adywan, does Vegas have a problem with the Lagarith codec? That's the one I use (since Huffy crashes my computer no matter what I do about it). I was going to be starting a major edit later in the year and I don't want to have this kind of problem. I believe I'm using one of the version 6's.

I was using Vegas 6 when i began my edit and i use the lagarith codec without any problems.
Originally posted by: Trooperman
You guessed it. This is Vegas 5.0c and I am editing directly off of the MPEG-2 DVD files. I hope Version D fixes these problems.

Yeh, i thought you might be working with MPEG2. Vegas is ok when you are working with just a couple of edits using mpeg2 but i had hell if i tried to do anything extensive then it really started playing up, the same way you mentioned. I can't remember is 5d fixed this problem though. I think you mentioned that you are working from the NTSC DVD. The problem with Vegas that it sometimes fails to remove the 2:3 pulldown correctly and can cause loads of problems. There is a way around this but you do need a lot of hard drive space. Open up the dvd files in DVD2AVI. in the "Video" tab select the field operation as "forced film", then the colour space to "RGB24", then "clip & resize"
- set the filter type to " precise bicubic" and the "video aspect" to "free" and slide the resize slider to max to show 720 x 480. now you can export your video. using something like picvideo mjpeg codec the file size will be about 30gb but could be smaller for ntsc. Now you have your 24fps film but it is split into 2gb chunks. Its a pain that this program does this. Now you can load your first chunk into Virtualdub. once you ahve done that select "append segment", select all the other chunks and import them. now you can export. just select "no audio" in the audio tab and "direct stream copy" in the video tab and export. now your video is joined so you can delete all the split chunk files.

Now open vegas and import your project. once this has done go to the project media manager. right click on your main video file in the media manager and select "replace" and swap it for you avi footage. now save the project under a different name so you still have a back up of the original mpeg2 version incase somethings gone wrong.
Now there is one thing that vegas does that is annoying. with some avi and other files it adds them as field based footage even if it is progressive. so right click on the footage in your timeline and select properties. change the field order to "progressive". check each section of video on your timeline to see if it has changed them all to progressive.

hopefully 5d will fix the problem for you so you don't have to go through all that. But to be safe for any future edits convert the mpeg2 to lossless avi first



Thanks for all that advice, Adywan. The issue was hard drive space. I thought, "Why use all that HD space for AVI files when I can edit right off of the MPEG files?" Silly me. I wasted a huge amount of time getting Vegas to work correctly with MPEG-2 editing to the frame. Looking back, I should have just converted to AVI and saved myself the headache.

However, 5.0d seems much more reliable already. Not only are all the cuts where they should be, but version D recognized the AVI files as widescreen, unlike version C, where I had to specifically tell each AVI shot that it was in widescreen.

Let this be a warning to all who use Vegas 5.0C on MPEG-2 files. Don't do it!

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition