Why is Vegas 8.0 rendering complete black screens only?

[VideoMan]

All this while I've been using Vegas, I've run into the "render black screen" problem almost 99% of the time when my source is an avi. I also encounter the problem that the audio track never gets imported and I have to manually extract it as a separate audio file and import it as a separate audio track.

Can anyone explain to me how to overcome this, or provide me with a better suggestion for another alternative tool I can use for the same purpose I do with Vegas? I basically use Vegas to improve the gamma/contrast of videos whilst also improving the sharpness and/or saturation at the same time when necessary. If the audio is a little faint or distorted, I add some fx equalizer adjustments to it. Once all settings are in, I render the video to the desired size I want.

If anyone can suggest a better alternative because Vegas sucks up tons of resources on my 1GB P4 and works like a snail. If not, then I would also like to know how to overcome the audio and black screen problem so that I don't have to do 3 encodings per avi video:- extract an audio-only file, then re-encode the avi to something else "Vegas compatible/friendly", and finally do the long video rendering.

Thanks in advance.

[guns1inger]

Stop using crap source in a pro-sumer editor is the short answer.

AVI is a container format. It holds video and audio. How that video is held is down to the compression, or codec, used. The symptoms you describe sound like Xvid/Divx video is being used. Xvid/Divx is not a format designed for editing, and is not used by the type of people an editor like Vegas is aimed at.

That said, some have been able to get Vegas to work with Xvid/Divx files by installing FFDShow and by using FourCC changer to change the FourCC code to Dx50 (or Xvid - experiment). However if the audio has been encoded with VBR MP3, Vegas won't work with it. And you may still get sync issues and other problems.

Bottom line, wrong tool for the job.

Most of what you are trying to do can be done better in AVIDemux or Virtualdub.