Sony Vegas "Black Screen" Issue

[Ruro Jiruries]

Heya folks,

Having a little trouble with outputting a finished piece composed in Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum (v10).

My source video is PC Screen Captured footage, encoded with standard PCM Wave Audio and Lagarith Lossless Video into AVI files. I use VirtualDub for the capture, and it splits the AVI's every ~1.9Gb to keep within the AVI spec and hopefully avoid Production issues (And despite my efforts, I'm not succeeding).

Once I have done all the work on the Video clips that have been compiled into Vegas, I proceed to encode the final piece with x264 (Rate Factor 16), and keep the PCM Wave audio (Direct stream per say) to convert it seperately, there is a reason for that which is irrelevant here.

So I ultimately end up with a nicely encoded Video, but for some reason a couple of select clips don't come through. They play back fine in Vegas, but once produced it's just a black screen, with the audio delivering through just fine. So, the synch of the audio/video is actually maintained.

I'm currently in the process of Encoding the whole thing again, just to see if it's a hit and miss error. I did replace the Video Clips on the timeline as well, and re-cut them down just incase it was a "splicing/cropping" issue or whatever. Until it finishes encoding though, I won't know for sure.

Any thoughts on why this could be happening though?

One of the "Black" clips view perfectly fine in another part of the video where it's in its original state; not cropped or tampered with.

I'm not actioning anything specific on these timeline elements that I'm aware of, and the Opacity is 100% so I haven't accidentally moved the horizontal slider O_o

Baffling, and this issue crops up a lot, but after reading a few threads, the QuickTime rollback solution *surely* can't effect me in this instance (Not even installed as it is). I can't imagine it's a Source File Codec issue either, since it's all identical Lagarith settings.

So I'm just basically, "Derp".


Addition:
The video encoded before I could post. Different result this time, the original Black area's are fixed, now I have the Black screen problem randomly spawning somewhere else in the video. An area I didn't even tamper with.

It's just before the beginning of a Video Event that's stacked in front of another.

I'm now thinking it's a Software glitch, seriously, I guess it's not entirely happy with Lagarith thus random glitches are occuring.

Anyone else thinking similarly? :/ If this confusing problem can't be solved directly, is there any suggested work-arounds?

[guns1inger]

I would do a couple more tests before pushing for workarounds.

1. Render just the affected section to lagarith and see if the problem repeats itself.
2. Render just the affected region to a different codec, even WMV, and see if you get the same result.

I am still using Vegas 8 Pro, so I cannot speak to any issues Vegas 10 might have, however when I have seen supposedly random black screen events it has usually proven to be either codec or effect related.

[budwzr]

Did you update to 10.d?

[Ruro Jiruries]

I would do a couple more tests before pushing for workarounds.

1. Render just the affected section to lagarith and see if the problem repeats itself.
2. Render just the affected region to a different codec, even WMV, and see if you get the same result.

I am still using Vegas 8 Pro, so I cannot speak to any issues Vegas 10 might have, however when I have seen supposedly random black screen events it has usually proven to be either codec or effect related.

1) Edit: I must be misunderstanding, you must actually mean: render just that segment from the Project timeline, rather then the whole thing or deleting any video events to shorten the project (i.e. I need to keep the conditions the same to prevent different calculations thus driving the encoding to produce black screens differently). I will read the Help File to learn how to do this. Because rendering 17 Minutes of 720p to Lagarith is beast File Size! I'll get back to you if I can't figure it out ^^;;

2) Ugh, I hope it takes a similar time to process into WMV ('Spose I can try DivX in AVI too)... like 20-25 minutes a time to process the Project. It takes time, but I'll process it again, exactly as it is, to see if the result is duplicated. If it's a Black screen in the same places, then I'll try a WMV encoding. I'm dealing with 720p, I presume WMV won't mind that.

Did you update to 10.d?

That only seems to apply to Sony Vegas Pro, which is on the same Version Number. I'm using Movie Studio HD Platinum, which is trapped on v10.0 (Ignoring the Build number, heh). Thanks though

Thank you both in fact, I'll trial and error this over the next hour or so, see what results I get ~_~

Sorry I took ages to reply, gotta Sleep and Work and all -_- (Yeah, work even on a weekend, isn't life grand!)

[Ruro Jiruries]

Okay, bizarre.

I actually got kinda sidetracked (Juggling a bunch of things, derp) and just Processed the whole thing again as x264, same settings. I modified a section of the Video Timeline though, because I wanted to tweak a fade and stuff, and as a result the final piece contains no Black Screens.

For whatever magical reason, modifying one unrelated segment to that of the Black Screen segment, has fixed it.

Go figure. But doesn't really help in the long run, I still need to run the tests and determine what's causing it, and to see if it's duplicated over and over without changing anything.

Still, felt it's worth mentioning >_> It all seems so random though.

[guns1inger]

Look up Region or Render Region in the help files

[Ruro Jiruries]

Look up Region or Render Region in the help files

Erm, sorry to mess you around. But I took the approach of removing and re-placing the Video's surrounding or subject to the blackout spots.

By doing so, and reprocessing again with the same encoding settings, I successfully produced video's without Blackouts.

I don't understand why though. Some of these video's I merely imported into the project all at the same time, and dragged them onto the Timeline ALL at the same time, and they stacked themselves.

I didn't re-import the Video's, I merely took the video's from the Project Assets panel, and placed them again on the timeline and redid the little work I had applied to them.

So in the end, I got the video's sorted just by a little "shuffling" of Video Events, basically.

Next time this happens though, rather then making the video's potentially over and over again, I will "Render Region" as you suggest and see if it occurs in an isolated & saved state.

To summarize, my instance of this problem is just some freaky quirk that can (apparently) be worked around by toying with the Video Events around the area they are appearing. Just magical.

Appreciate all your help guns1inger & budwzr, if this problem happens next time I produce something (Chances are it will), and I happen to nail the culprit of this issue, I'll post back here!

Personal Opinion: If a fair portion of users of Sony Vegas are bumping into this problem (Google Search results suggest as such), then it's not Lagarith exclusive. My audio is *bog standard* Windows PCM Wave audio as well. Vegas does a great job of producing what I want, extremely stable software, but something quirky is going on in the "translation" from initial files to Filters implemented and finally encoded complete. I can accept it's something else maybe on the PC causing it to occur (Codec Packs, other Processes running & somehow conflicting, whatever), but it's quite sensitive and not restricted to just one cause. So basically, Sony, run Vegas in Debug mode some more XD

[budwzr]

I had this issue intermittently in Pro 10.0a 64 bit. The file I was working on was a two hour recording from DTV, an mpeg 2 format. I wasn't using any "filters", simply cutting out commercials.

Pro 10.0a also had a problem with the AVC encoder, that they fixed in 10.0b.

You might try the Sony forum for more help.