Help! Building Peaks never happens. VMS latest version

whoaaanelly

whoaaanelly

Member
Hi,

I'm running into an issue hopefully someone can enlighten me on. I've got a rather odd video project I'm involved with. As a back-ground I've got a video guy who's taking HDV on a Canon XH A1 and he's a Mac guy, so he's using Final Cut Pro and "deshaking" the video and doing minor edits. I then get a master DV tape from him. I'm then using a Linux machine with a Sony HDV tape machine and DVgrab to capture the video into an M2T file and then moving them onto my computer (dual core Pentium, XP Pro, pretty high-end everything). When I drop the M2T file into Vegas Movie Studio (latest version 8 build 136, I think) it immediately begins the "Building Peaks" process and never goes anywhere. I've left work and returned the next day and the furthest I've seen it go is 1%. I have been successful 2 times with this process, but I've got 20-something similar videos to go and am wasting a lot of time and there's just nothing on the web to explain why this is happening.

From what I understand the building of peaks has to do with audio, but interestingly enough this video project requires NO AUDIO (it's for a computer video game-like application), and I can't find a way to tell Vegas to ignore any audio in the file and just let me render it out (to xVid).

I've hypothesized it having to do with audio, but I don't know. Maybe the video guy in FCP is doing something? DVgrab maybe? I've tried to capture the video in VMS, but it doesn't handle the HD correctly as I recall (it's been a couple months since I tried).

I've read I can turn off this process, but that it takes the video thumbnails away as well, which is sort of worthless to me. I need the video -- not the audio.

Any ideas? Im desperate. Help!
 
Try grabbing the tape with HDVSplit or Vegas itself, not DVGrab. Tell us what you find exactly.

If it works with either, it's dvgrab's fault. If it doesn't work with neither, then it's FCP's fault and the way it re-encodes HDV.
 
Thanks for the reply Eugenia, as always. I've used Vegas to capture in the past, as I recall, and I think the problem I had there was that the peak building sort of stopped at some 80% range. As I said, it's been a couple months since I was there. That was with a particular tape. I now have about 5 tapes available to me, and so far only two of those 5 have worked when I drop them into VMS. I've played the m2t files in VLC and there is clearly no audio (lots of static is all I hear), but the video works fine. I've downloaded HDsplit and will give it try and see if that works or now. Hopefully it will read from the Sony deck OK. I won't know for another 24 hours or so.... I'm waiting to hear from the video guy about what he's doing in FCP.

Thanks again...
 
I was having a similar problem with some footage I shot over Christmas -- on a new HV20 and a new tape. After some playing and experimenting I found it was a particular clip that Vegas was getting hung up upon.

I did some digging around and found a reference to this utility:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/MPEG2Repair

I downloaded it (it's free) and ran it against the clip. It's designed to read a clip, log any errors, and fix them if possible. It found 2 bad frames out of 533 and the new clip it created worked in Vegas beautifully. The app does nothing to the original clip, but instead makes a copy of it.

Hopefully it will work for you too.
 
Thanks for the tip Stacy!

I ran into this with Vegas 7 (7.0d if I recall, not at home at the moment) and I just got around it by hitting the 'Cancel' button so I didn't have peaks. Then I just used HDV2MPG to make an .MPG out of it. Used the video from one and audio from the other.

Silly workaround but I didn't have time to spend investigating. It's possible HDV2MPEG was doing similar fixing as it converted, but a tool like you found should be kept around to save your neck once in a blue moon!

Happy shooting
Dip
 
Hey all. I 've tried the MPEG2 repair tool from a previous search I did, and it creates a different sized file, but that file still does not work.

After just finishing a test using HDVsplit as was suggested by Eugenia, I find the same problem occurs; namely, no progress on building peaks. 0% all day long. I can't cancel -- nothing ever happens. It's like the application is hung, but isn't at the same time (Windows does not say it isn't responding). So I had a chat with the video guy who providing me with the tape and he IS turning off the audio in FCP (somehow). So my question of the day is: Is there a way to tell Vegas to ignore audio? We are not using the audio track and will not be using audio (that's attached to the AVI) in this computer application. The video loads fine in all applications, including VegasMS, except in Vegas I can't render until it builds the peaks.

The video guy is going to bring me over a tape with an audio track intact (sometime in the next 48 hours), but I still hope to use the 5 tapes I have, if possible, to get some work done.

Thanks in advance!
 
Bummer it (mpeg2repair) didn't work for you. This whole situation certainly makes your avatar oddly appropriate. :)

When my system gets stuck building peaks it 'stops responding'. The cpu isn't even pegged or anything. It just sits there, and hitting 'cancel' does nothing. I eventually have to kill Vegas through task manager.

You may be on to something about vegas not being able to build peaks for audio that isn't there -- I would also be interested to see if someone else knows how to tell Vegas to ignore the audio when rendering. I guess you could delete the audio track entirely (click 'ignore event grouping' on the toolbar or ctrl+shift+U, then highlight the audio track and delete it) -- then it won't have anything to build peaks for when it renders.

But if you cannot even drag the thing to the timeline then I guess, well, I don't know what you could do next. :(
 
I use that avatar for our company forum as well. I'm both technical service manager and software development manager, so I get it from both sides. Trust me, I've done a LOT of head banging (and I'm not talking heavy metal music here) having to deal with both customers and programmers.

Anyway, I just did a short capture using HDVsplit -- like 20 seconds -- and when I drop that into Vegas it built the peaks immediately! So, it would seem from this, that it might be the duration of the capture as opposed to it's content.

These videos are 112 mile long bike races, which are at minimum 2-3 hours long, or longer. The one time I left work and came back 24 hours later to only have 1% peaks built would have factored out to be a 100-day peak building session. On two of the videos that did work, they took about 3 hours to build peaks instead. So, does anyone know whether VegasMS just has an issue with the duration of a clip?

Stacy, I will try to delete the audio as you suggested, but I think I tried this once. I've tried so many things I'm loosing track.
 
OK, I just tried what Stacy suggested (deleting tracks), but deleting the track does not stop the peak building process. And if I begin render the progress bar on the lower left (under the project media tab) now says "0% (1 of 2)", which I've seen before when I tried to render without peaks being built yet. So, clearly, it needs to build peaks regardless of whether there is a track that says "bulding peaks" as well. Sigh...
 
I just tried a 10 minute capture and it's working as well -- i.e., building peaks just fine.

I did note on this tape I've been testing with that I had a couple of dropped frames in the report from HDVsplit and there is an option to stop the capture on dropped frames (which is unchecked). So the question this begs as to what Vegas do if the video it is working with has something like this "in it"? This may be even a stupider question: What is a dropped frame exactly and how can I determine what is causing this or how one recognizes this in a final video? Hey - I'm a newbie, so please forgive my ignorance of what may be a very obvious thing.
 
More info

More info

More info:

I ran a capture until I saw HDVsplit indicate I have one dropped frame and then stopped the capture. That file (2 hours 38 minutes at 30Gig) loaded into Vegas and built the peaks in about 4 minutes. So, nothing here is being logical or indicative of the root of the problem.

New question:

I have 2 Gig of memory -- would going to 4 Gig show me anything, like less potential for dropping frames/packets? This is my everyday work station P4 Duo-core Pentium XP-Pro, and I'm still needing to do other things while renders and such are happening. Typically it's like a slug doing other things while I render, but if I can boost the performance, or salvage capture/render attempts, the 2 extra Gigs of memory would be a no-brainer.

Thanks again in advance.
 
I am having the exact same issue. I just got my XHA1 last week. I have Vegas 7, and it siezes up when loading the .m2t file. It is always in the same place on different files 7% on one file and 97% on another. They load in Premier Pro just fine, but were captured in Vegas. The capture did randomly start a new file at different places. I can't find a file management tab to set the capture duration in GB's. It is there when I set preferences on DV capture, but I can't find anything for HDV.

Anyway, I'll post if I figure out what is going on.

Bennett
 
I tried at first to capture, not directly from the Canon, but from a master the video guy sent, on Vegas. It would build to about 82% on that original tape. I have not tried it since in Vegas. I've been using HDVsplit on my Windows machine since Eugenia suggested it -- though that hasn't helped. It seems I have no problems with short captures of any tape, but all that I let go to the point that the capture application ends the process -- they don't work. I'm now watching a capture and will end it myself by hitting the stop button. If that works I may be onto something.
 
stacyodell said:
I was having a similar problem with some footage I shot over Christmas -- on a new HV20 and a new tape. After some playing and experimenting I found it was a particular clip that Vegas was getting hung up upon.

I did some digging around and found a reference to this utility:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/MPEG2Repair

I downloaded it (it's free) and ran it against the clip. It's designed to read a clip, log any errors, and fix them if possible. It found 2 bad frames out of 533 and the new clip it created worked in Vegas beautifully. The app does nothing to the original clip, but instead makes a copy of it.

Hopefully it will work for you too.
Click to expand...


It looks like this program solved my problem. Ran the file throught this program and it loaded right up in Vegas.

Thanks,
Bennett
 
As an update...

I've been using HDVsplit and have had the option "Stop capture on dropped frames\packets" un-checked... and have been getting some errors as it plowed on. I've now been checking this option and capturing this particular 4 + hour video in sections as HDVsplit allows between dropped frames -- giving each segment a video1; video2; video3 name as I go. Essentially, for whatever reason, this master tape has two areas that always drop frames -- for whatever reason that is -- that if are left part of the final capture will not work in Vegas. Now I capture until it stops, drag that section into Vegas, it'll build the peaks. I then restart the capture from there and do that with the next segment, and so on, and each individual segment builds fine. And I'm now rendering my first low-res video draft.

Yea :thumbsup:

So, thanks for any input you may have had. You know who you are. I "seem" to be good to go for now.
 
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