thanks diverG for confirming my findings. Can anyone else confirm this problem?

Have rechecked my work. It seems that VP11 can print a m2t file rendered out in VP10 but cannot print a file rendered by VP11.
Likewise VP10 cannot print a file rendered in VP11.

I note you were able to render a m2t file in VP11 and use VP10 to print it to tape. I was not so lucky.

Have notified Tech Support but don't hold your breath. I must admit I'm surprised this hasn't been reported earlier by others as VP11 has been around for a few weeks now.

On a long shot I tried both the standard 1394 driver and the legacy version but to no avail.

Looks like I'm staying with VP10 until this is resolved

[b]"I must admit I'm surprised this hasn't been reported earlier by others as VP11 has been around for a few weeks now. "[/v]

What's tape?

Realistically, I think that many of us are shooting tapeless, and few ever use PTT any more. What's the point? Tape only holds what? 13Gb

Kinda depends on whose sand box you're playing in, Steve. Roughly 90% of the work we do comes to us on tape and, quite often, goes back to the client on tape as well, at their request.

Tapeless shooting is great and I imagine will eventually replace tape entirely, but not for a few years. We still deal with legacy formats -- VHS, VHS-C, etc. -- and it's amazing to us how many folks are still cranking out material on PD-170s and the like.

Jack

Steve: 'What's tape?'

Surely if SCS intended it not to print to tape the feature would have been flagged in the release notes and should certainly not be available under Tools.

If the official beta testers were not using tape it's easy to see how it was missed.

I've tried again on a different pc using a second camera. Still no print to tape.

Geoff

haven't tested it, but to those who think tape is history....

i still HAVE to shoot tape for a national broadcaster and two major clients, and in the case of the clients, even though they use hd mp4's for everything, they still require sd 16:9 on tape as their back up / archive.

so, no tape might be fine for my own projects (even though i always shoot with a tape backing up my cf card recorder), it's still a VERY important part of the production process in other cases.

i hope this is sorted in .a....

I just hit this same problem today with Vegas 11 Build 521. Anyone have a solution to this other than printing to tape in Vegas 10?

Realistically, I think that many of us are shooting tapeless, and few ever use PTT any more. What's the point? Tape only holds what? 13GbI find that comment rather pointless and certainly unhelpful. I won't argue that solid state storage for video cameras has been the trend for many years and doubtless represents a large percentage of the market for new cameras sold.

Having said that, there is an enormous installed base of tape-based cameras, and they are likely to be around for a long time.

Also, as a professional archivist, I most definitely favor tape over almost any other medium I can think of, other than optical, as something I can trust to reliably hold my data for the longest period of time possible. We've had this discussion before. Based on extensive research, I most definitely would not want to store my video, long-term, on any solid state memory. By contrast, I have captured and restored audio from magnetic tape recorded in 1949, just after the format was released for consumer use.

If the current version of Vegas cannot print HDV back to tape, I consider that to be a major bug, and one that most definitely needs to be fixed. I still use HDV on a regular basis, and given what I am seeing from my 60p AVCHD Sony camcorder, I plan to continue to use HDV for a long time because the AVCHD from that camera simply doesn't hold up as well, when viewed critically, as does the HDV from my Sony FX1.

I have found that playing to a projecter directly from my Z1 camera gives far better quality than anything I can feed out of my laptop. So for that reason I still need print-to-tape to work too.

From Tech Support: To be fixed, keep updating.
Workround: Starting in VP11, render to m2t to prepare 'tape file', now open VP10 and put 'tape file' on timeline. Use VP10 to print to tape.

BTW it is possible to take the VP11 m2t file and doctor the header with a hex editor so that it can be printed to tape using VP11. Hope this doesn't count as reverse engineering?

Rather tough for new entrants who may not have VP10.

Rather careless of SCS for releasing VP11 with such a basic failing.


Geoff

I would have thought that merely patching a header according to a set of rules that had already been formulated would not constitute reverse engineering. Debugging the header to find out what was wrong and what had to be done to fix it could be, though.

Reverse engineering to learn commercial secrets is one thing, but fixing a bug is quite another. But the practitioners of the law don't always use common sense...

i am a vegas fanboi, but i have to say that this bug is pretty appalling - and just goes to show that scs's beta testing is pretty flawed if such a basic operation slips through.

and yes, i'm prompted to write because i NEED print to tape for a number of clients the first of whom asked for a copy today, thankfully i'd been following this thread!

@Peter.

There was a big clue. On rendering the VP11 m2t file via VP10 m2t no rendering was required which suggested the two files would be very similar. Let's face it they should be identical so it was a simple process of spotting the difference using a hex editor. Personally I believe writing the 'correcting file' and publishing would constitute RE.

I just hope SCS fix this before VP12 is released

I submitted the bug to Sony today. Hopefully there's still enough of us out here that needs print to tape and will also report the bug. The Vegas Pro 11 release notes does mention a problem with print to tape. Here's what it shows:

"If you are printing a rendered file to HDV tape, the file must precisely conform to the target HDV device and file type requirements, or the print-to-tape operation will fail. Rendering using the provided HDV MPEG-2 render templates—unmodified in any way—is required to successfully print to HDV tape."

I tried printing with an unmodified template and it didn't make any difference.

For now, I put the Vegas 11 .m2t file on a Vegas 10 timeline and printed from the timeline and it worked as it should. Just printing the existing file in Vegas 10 did not work giving the same "The File Type is Unknown" error message.

Do you think printing the .m2t file from the timeline results in some image quality degradation? Just wondering if I should print this project to tape again once Sony fixed the problem.

It should be OK. VP10 rewrites the file out in the correct format so that it can be dropped back on tape. Once the rendering started you should see a black preview window and a message showing that no rendering is required.

If you look at the 2 files in a hex editor you will see that only a few bytes in the header are changed. The 2 files should be the same length.

When I reported the bug way back in November I submitted sample m2t files prepared by VP10 & VP11. The files comprised 1, 2 and 4 frames of media generated material. Eventually a fault was acknowledged together with my owm workround as a solution. I think even SCS had difficulty in believing the screw up. Just how difficult is it to correct? Maybe Steve is right and tape support is being dropped.

In view of the fact that VP11 was released while there are still failings in VP10 we need to keep pushing this.

Thanks diverG. While rendering out the .m2t on the timeline I was expecting to see the black screen with the no rendering is required message but it never appeared. So that's what got me to thinking about re-compression and quality.

It's not encouraging to hear that you reported this bug way back in November and it still exists. I have to believe Sony will eventually fix this basic core operation but apparently it's not a high priority.,

I wonder if there are any free or low price third party print to tape tools available.

You could render out of VP11 using the free GoPro codec or maybe avi (lagarith) and then render out for tape in VP10. Others have more experience than I in these matters.

I've stopped using VP11 until problems fixed..

Edit: Just dropped a fairly complex project into VP11 & rendered out (17min)
dropped file into VP10 and rendered again. (4min) but preview screen suggested some rendering taking place. File lenghts identical. My sample test pieces for SCS were through in a flash but the generated test media is black.

When I found the note in the v11 release notes about Print to Tape being a know problem, I was encouraged that at least Sony documented the bug. However, after checking old release notes, that exact paragraph has been in every Vegas release note since Vegas 6.

I can also confirm this problem on multiple systems, clean install or reinstall makes no diff. This also affects smart rendering for any m2t file created by v11.

Interesting thing is I have discovered a work around for the smart rendering part and can now produce working m2t's that smart render. (tested and verified they work in Vegas 9 also) I'll post the work around tomorrow. It might or might not help the print to tape issue, but it definitely solved our smart render with m2t issues.

The HDV template is creating a m2t file header that does not meet HDV specs. This needs serious attention. Lots of us still use HDV in our work flows! Please fix this ASAP!

I spent some time on this, and the problem is not print to tape. It still works just fine.

Instead, the problem is actually worse: Vegas 11 does not create standard HDV files. You can see this if you capture some HDV (which still works fine in Vegas 11 64-bit), put this on the timeline, add a title, and then render out the result, using the HDV template that matches the footage (so you get the "=" sign next to the template).

If you put this rendered footage into Mediainfo and compare it to the original footage, you will see that the Vegas footage is missing all of the standard header information. If you do this same exact test in Vegas 10.0e (64-bit), the rendered file, when put in MediaInfo, looks normal.

Thus, Vegas 11.0 Build 521 (64-bit) is creating non-standard HDV files, and these files "break" print to tape, smart rendering, and goodness knows what else.

If you take any "good" m2t file (such as the one you captured, that hasn't been altered by Vegas) and ask Vegas to print it to tape, it prints to tape just fine, and it smart renders without any problem.

But, if you take any file that has been rendered to HDV by Vegas 11.0 and then attempt to "smart render" it, Vegas will not smart render it because it sees it as being non-standard. Thus, second generation files (files rendered by Vegas 11) cannot be smart rendered. However, smart rendering is not broken either.

So, in conclusion, both this problem and the smart rendering problem are not caused by either of these features being broken: they are both working perfectly fine. Unfortunately, the problem is even bigger and even worse, namely that all HDV rendered by Vegas 11 is bogus (non-standard) and potentially is going to cause other problems down the road.

This is a priority one bug of the highest magnitude because it means that Vegas 11 is completely broken for use with any HDV workflow.

I have submitted a bug report.

Thanks for digging into this John. This also explains why Smart Rendering didn't work for me when I rendered the Vegas 11 .m2t from the Vegas 10 timeline. I didn't think t of trying to print to tape in Vegas 11 a rendered file from a previous version of Vegas. I just thought print to tape was broken in Vegas 11. As you said, this is now much more serious.

I wonder why DVD Architect doesn't object to the non-standard .m2t file. I'm trying to remember now, but when I made my final DVDA project render I believe I saw the black screen several times with the compression is not necessary message. And this was with the non-standard .m2t from Vegas 11.

With your discovery and bug reporting hopefully Sony will address this matter very quickly.

Unfortunately, the problem is even bigger and even worse, namely that all HDV rendered by Vegas 11 is bogus (non-standard) and potentially is going to cause other problems down the road.As I need to render to 1440x1080i, for long-form for multicam, I use the SONY HDV Template. Alerted by this I made some simple BEFORE and AFTER render tests and MediaInfo results screengrabs, which I've posted in the "other" thread John started.

Cheers

G