NTSC DV file garbled, now says 720x576x24? (PAL?)

prairiedogpics wrote on 6/3/2004, 6:18 AM
I used the Vegas 5 Capture utility to capture some footage from my friend's Sony digital camcorder the other day. No frames were dropped during the capture and I thought all went well (althougth I didn't review the clips at the time). Last night I loaded all the clips on the timeline. Every clip played fine except the first one. The video was so pixelated as to be unwatchable, and the pitch of the audio was low (the speed seemed okay, but the voices sounded like they'd be altered to a low pitch. I looked at the the properties of the clip, and it said 720x576x24 and 25fps. What the?!!!! Isn't that a PAL designation? All the other clips are at 720x480x24 and 29.97i fps and play fine.
It's as if the clip got corrupted somehow. Anybody else seen this? Anyway to change the properties of the clip to 720x480x24 29.97i fps

Thanks,
Dan

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/3/2004, 7:51 AM
Never seen that...
What happens if you create a PAL project in Vegas, load this clip to the PAL project, and render as NTSC? You'll lose some quality if the clip was originally NTSC, but unless you can recap it, you might not have a choice.
Never seen a clip corrupt to where it reports as PAL.
prairiedogpics wrote on 6/3/2004, 8:21 AM
Yeah, I tried that already, Spot. (set project settings to PAL settings and loading the clip.) No go. I'll have my friend look at the original source footage.

Thanks,
Dan
SonyEPM wrote on 6/3/2004, 10:33 AM
If you start capture in a spot on the tape that has hash/garbage, vidcap could get confused. Try recapturing that first clip a few secs into stable video and it should come out just fine.
ssalazar wrote on 6/9/2004, 10:42 AM
I had the same problem last night...I'll try your suggestion and see what happens (I was attempting to capture the tape, although I had the same results capturing video without this option). What I don't understand is why my camera always hangs for several seconds before I attempt to use it (it hangs the interface of Video Capture during this process). Everything is O.K. configuration and resource-wise (IRQ's not shared / camera is not chained via IEEE-1394). The camera is a Hitachi VM-D865LA.
prairiedogpics wrote on 6/9/2004, 10:56 AM
Just to let you know, I was able to get my hands on the camera and tape again. I recaptured the clip again, THIS TIME from a point a few frames in where the video is good. No problems this time. (The clip was the very first one on this tape, so there WAS garbage/hash at the beginning that I had to get past.)

Dan
Rogueone wrote on 6/9/2004, 11:37 AM
I've had that happen to me on 2 separate occasions. I didn't bother to see what the specs on the captured footage was (like FPS, frame size). All I did was go back and recapture. Annoying, though when it happens. You capture all this tape and then you realize that some is bad!
DavidNJ wrote on 6/15/2004, 7:19 AM
Same problem here. I started capturing a few seconds in, and I got a small sample ok (may 20 seconds).

Then I restarted at the same point for the whole piece (actually multiple clips that should have automatically divided), and back to PAL.

Now, the Capture Preview window looks fine DURING capture. However the captured clip has PAL properties and shows as garbled. Also, the PAL properties are not editable.

David
farss wrote on 6/15/2004, 7:33 AM
just a thought here, how close to the physical start of tape did the clip start?
Old hands were a bit obsessed about this kind of thing and used to 'stripe' the start of the tape with say a few minutes of bars and then play the tape until the 0:01:00:00 mark (roughly) and start recording from there. I thought they were just being a**l, but maybe there was something to it.
smhontz wrote on 6/15/2004, 8:11 AM
This happens fairly consistently with my Sony Digital 8 camera, and would happen no matter where in the tape I started. I think it had more to do with the camera ramping up to speed than anything else. I solved the problem by not letting video capture start the tape - I started it playing manually (using the buttons in the GUI) then hit the capture button after it had been playing for a few seconds.
DavidNJ wrote on 6/15/2004, 2:14 PM
There is No Problem with Adobe Premier Pro...

Same camera, same tape, same, computer, same everything...

Except using Premier Pro.

This is a Vegas problem!!!
jetdv wrote on 6/15/2004, 2:21 PM
What is your "Pre-roll" set to? (On the Advanced Capture tab in the preferences)
DavidNJ wrote on 6/15/2004, 7:50 PM
5 seconds
jkyoung wrote on 6/15/2004, 8:25 PM
I've had this happen several times. For a short period of time it was happening to me on about 1 out of 2 captures. I would capture a tape, everything looked like it was going fine, no dropped frames, and then the clip would show up with PAL settings, although it wouldn't play back as PAL. (I'm using an NTSC miniDV Sony TRV17). You can see a picture at www.kaybracon.com/bad.jpg (This is a shot of 4 rows of kids on risers standing at the front of a room )

I could recapture the same section of tape, and it would sometimes capture fine. I was desparate to get a project finished, so I reverted to using Windows Movie Maker (!) to capture my clips, and then used Vegas to edit them. Windows MM captured ALL of my clips with NO problem. After the project was finished I again tried Vegas and was still having problems at a 50% failure rate.

Someone suggested I try cleaning my camera heads, and that fixed the problem. Even though the camera was playing back fine, NO dropped frames were reported by Vegas or Windows MM. Vegas was seeing something it didn't like and scrambling the capture.

This is a Vegas capture problem.
bakerja wrote on 7/16/2004, 7:20 AM
I never saw this problem until Vidcap 5. Now I see it about 1 out of every 6 or 7 captures using "capture tape". I have just adopted a new capture routine of using manual capture and no device control and ALWAYS check the file immediately after capture before going on to the next one.

JAB