# Capturing video in sony vegas



## superollie (Dec 10, 2010)

Hey, wasn't sure where to put this, thought it was kinda relevant to hardware as I'm capturing tapes from a camera..

So I capture a tape via my camera into sony vegas pro 10 and it captures fine. But when I watch the captured footage back within vegas and also in other apps like VLC it has these annoying sort of pixelated lines popping up briefly all over the screen. The footage is completely unusable with something as noticeable as these lines on it.

Its not the tape as I have watched in through the camera on a TV and it was fine, so something must be going wrong in the capture process.

Would seriously appreciate any help on this one as I really just want to get this film project finished.

cheers!
:grin:


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## zuluclayman (Dec 16, 2005)

Any chance of posting a screenshot? I think I know what you mean but would be clearer if I see it.
How did you link the camera and computer? By USB or Firewire?

If by USB you can have problems with file transfer of tape footage - USB doesn't have as much capacity as Firewire often resulting in dropped frames, sometimes audio distortion or loss, file corruption which often does manifest itself as green, red or black jagged "noise" patterns randomly across the screen, sometimes just one or two bits sometimes much more.

When doing any capture by USB make sure connections are well secured, cables are good and try not to move the camera about.
Ideally use a Firewire port - most cameras come with the cabling for both - Firewire is much more suited to video transfer.


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## superollie (Dec 10, 2010)

yeah I'm using fire wire.

I attatched a screenshot to this post. As you can see the lines are mainly around the man in the shot which is strange but in other places in the footage they also occur just randomly over larger parts of the image.

any ideas?:grin:


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## zuluclayman (Dec 16, 2005)

ah sorry I misunderstood your description - this is an interlacing problem: your camera is outputing interlaced footage which when played on a computer shows those horizontal striping patterns. For an explanation of what interlacing is and its opposite (progressive scan) see here.

You need to: 
* ensure your initial project settings are correct for this - they should reflect the source footage's specs in terms of pixel resolution, frame rate and whether interlaced or progressive in the to part of the dialogue box - you can do this automatically by selecting "Match media" - then where it says "Deinterlace method" select "Interpolate fields"

* when exporting choose a preset that allows you to check whether the resulting video is progressive scan or interlaced - you will choose progressive, sometimes seen in drop down for "field order"

Some NLE's don't do a fantastic job at de-interlacing video and there are specific plug-ins that can be used to get a better result.

hope this helps


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## superollie (Dec 10, 2010)

thanks for the help but unfortunately none of those things made a difference. 

I've attatched another screenshot - I previously mentioned that larger lines also appeared in the footage. If you look in the top left corner of this screen shot you can see an example of this. It runs across the top of the screen from the very left of the shot to almost the middle, ending in a black bit over the door.

It looks like a different thing to the smaller lines but I'm guessing both are caused by the same problem? I just thought it might help for you to see this aswell, might shed some more light on the cause.

You can also see loads more of the smaller lines in this screenshot - look at the guys hand holding the knife and the side of the fridge and the wall panels on the left side of the shot.

Again any help is much appreciated:grin:


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## zuluclayman (Dec 16, 2005)

The amount of lines seen depends on the amount of movement usually - when something is making lots of movement either as actuial objects/people moving or camera movements such as zooms or pans you will see lots of the horizontal striping - in this case if he is chopping food then the hands will be affected badly by interlacing - also when you take a screenshot it is a frozen moment, often with ghosting from the position of moving objects as they change position which makes it appear worse. I understand that you are still getting this when playing the video too, just saying it looks worse in a screenshot :grin:

I don't have Vegas installed here (I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS4) so can't say if there are other tools within Vegas to help with better deinterlacing (in Adobe you can get the clip properties up and select "always deinterlace" or go File Interpret Footage and select deinterlace) - when you drop down that "Deinterlace methods" in the project settings what are the other options - you could try some of those to see which gives the best effect as different types of movement are affected differently and the method that works for most may not be the best for that particular footage.

The larger line at the top looks more like an artifact from some file corruption but could be still related to the interlacing - just a bit big for that.

Many pro video editors transcode the footage using specialist software before editing and deinterlace it in this step - this way you can keep the settings consistent through your workflow - have your initial project settings as progressive and your output/export settings the same.

I have read on other forums (Vimeo, DVuser, Creative Cow) that Vegas doesn't do a particularly good job of deinterlacing (nor does Premiere Pro at times :laugh: )

There are a number deinterlacing in Vegas video tutorials up on Youtube, you could try some of the methods used there and see if it improves your footage.

Other than that if it is merely corruption during capture, if you have the footage still you can try re-capturing it - try doing it with nothing else running as it is pretty resource intensive and if resources are diverted elsewhere during the capture errors may occur.


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