Video flickering between two different videos in sony vegas pro 10

[guyalexander]

hey guys, i'm new to this forum and the sony vegas, but hopefully you's can help me out with a problem i'm having.

basically, i've started making covers videos on youtube, and on the current one i've been working on, there are two guitar parts, and the vocals.
so i filmed all the parts seperately on my kodak zi8, at 720p with 60fps.
once i imported all the files into sony vegas i was having trouble with one of the videos (at the bottem right), it would flicker between the guitar video and vocal video, as you'll see in the examples.
it was flicking even in the preview of the video, but i hoped it would go away once rendered, but it didn't.
so here's the link for what it turned out like the first time:


so once that happened, and i couldn't find a way to solve it, i thought, the easiest thing to do for now would be to render the two videos that were fine together,
then add the last video to that already rendered video (this was because i thought it was due to there being more than two videos).
but that one turned out exactly the same, but now flickering between the main video, and the extra guitar video, i've uploaded that one for you to see too:



i'd really appricate some help, cus it's making no sense to me why it's doing this.

and here's the print screen of the settings i've been using, but i have tried other ones with the same results.
http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/4...osettingsg.jpg

and i only rendered them in lower quality so it plays smoother on my computer, when i upload the finished product to youtube it'll be in 720p.


but yeah, any suggestions would really be appricaited, thanks (:


oh and while i'm here, thought i might as well ask too, would it be hard to color correct the vocal video?
because that one was filmed at night with the lights on, so looks orange, whereas the others were filmed during the day.
would i be able to get the color similar to the videos recorded in the day light?

thanks again.

[TimStannard]

Flickering:
This looks quite similar to problems I experienced from time to time - just like you I'd get them both in the preview and the render. I'm pretty certain it's to do with lack of grunt somewhere in the PC. (I was experiencing it on a 2.66GHz Core2 Duo/4GB RAM/separatate hard drives for program and video with the video being on a striped set - and this was for standard def so certainly not "underpowered"). But I also think it might have been a bit to do with "Windows rot".
Invariably closing down Vegas and restarting would cure the problem. If it didn't closing down and doing a quick defragment would cure it.
Since moving to a new PC (significantly more powerful) I haven't experienced it.

Basically, clean up your PC, shut down everything you don't need, defrag all the usual video editing rules.

Colour correction.
If you have Vegas Pro 10 there's a White Balance FX which makes this a doddle (or at least gives a good starting point.

If not, play with the primary colour corrector. Click on the button for "Highlights select complementary colour" - then click on a bit which should be white.
Now do the same for "mids" and click on an area which should be a mid grey.
Ditto lows - and look for a near black.
That should give you a good starting point.

[viruselworm]

Hello,

This is my very first post on this forum. I am sorry for posting on an old thread, but the reason why I am writing here is that I am experiencing the exact same problem as the initiator of this topic, so I thought it would be better not to open yet another thread: whenever I have 2 videos playing simultaneously, they are flickering between each other. This happens absolutely randomly, and ONLY when I split the screen using the track motion option. However, when I have only one video in my overall video window (even when there are transitions between 2 or more videos), everything is just fine, no flickering occurs. So the problem appears only when there is split screen. I assume that using 3 or more videos simultaneously would make it even worse .

I am running Sony Vegas Pro 11 on a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 @ 2.0GHz, 3.00 GB RAM and an nVidia GeForce 7300 GT video card (yeah, I know my rig is pretty old, but I have no money for an upgrade at the moment, and so far I haven't experienced such problems with it). My OS is Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit.

One thing to mention: I am shooting my videos (guitar covers, by the way, just like the initiator :P) with an A4Tech PK-910H webcam. It's probably not the best camera out there, but I've been pretty happy about it so far. I shoot my videos at 1280x720, and 30 fps. The video format is .avi, and the sound format is PCM, or something like that.

Until 2 months ago, I had been my videos with this webcam, and even though it was set to shoot at 30 fps, the luminosity and exposure settings were set at a little too high a value in the webcam's software (which I didn't know), and consequently the camera would drop frames while shooting. Therefore, at the end, the uncompressed videos straight from the camera had an average of like 20... something fps due to those frame drops.

The idea is that WITH those settings (which generated frame drops), everything went fine in Sony Vegas, there was no flickering whatsoever.

Now, 2 months ago I discovered that I could change the exposure and brightness settings of the webcam to a lower value, so that it would finally get to shoot at a constant framerate of exactly 30 fps (and the difference was really noticeable for me, the motion in the videos is much smoother now).

The idea is that as soon as I switched to these new webcam settings, I've started experiencing this flickering problem the initiator was talking about (by the way, if I play the videos straight out from the webcam separately in my media player, there is no flickering, so the source videos appear to be fine...).

I'm using mainly the same project settings as the initiator, except that I've set 29.970 fps as framerate, and I disabled the "adjust source media to better match project or render settings" option. I've even tried enabling it, but to no avail - the flickering was still there.

So far, I've tried a number of things that were recommended in similar threads, all of which did NOT work for me :(:
- restarted Vegas, defragmented the HDD partitions, even restarting Windows;
- disabled resampling for all the videos in the project;
- updating my codecs (I am using K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, which I saw a lot of people dislike...), then completely uninstalling the codecs (I am using K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, which I saw a lot of people dislike...), cleaning the registry and leaving only the codecs that Vegas Pro itself installs.

As I've mentioned above, none of these possible solutions worked for me. The one and only way I've been able to get rid of the flickers is checking each video frame by frame, and whenever there is flickering, I would delete the frame where there is flickering (the flickering occurs during only one frame - in Vegas that particular frame appears to be missing or something - in the video timeline it's displayed as dark green, and it is replaced with the same frame from the other video), and then copy/paste the immediately following frame of that video. So far this has been the only thing that worked for me.

However, this is an extremely tiring task to perform (especially when I have videos with like 7-800 frames or so), and I hope you will agree with me that it's really frustrating to manually check and copy and paste frames to compensate for those apparently missing frames... moreover, there are times when those frames I manually copied and pasted are pretty noticeable in the rendered video, like there is no continuity in the motion and stuff... or maybe I am just too pretentious about it...

So my question is: does anybody have any idea what the cause of this problem could be? Could there something wrong with my PC (as in, is it incapable of properly handling 30 fps videos), or with my source videos? Or is there a problem with Sony Vegas itself, are there any more settings I could try?...

Any kind of help would be appreciated. I apologize for this huge post, but I thought a detailed description of my problem would be of help...

[viruselworm]

Hello,

This is my very first post on this forum. I am sorry for posting on an old thread, but the reason why I am writing here is that I am experiencing the exact same problem as the initiator of this topic, so I thought it would be better not to open yet another thread: whenever I have 2 videos playing simultaneously, they are flickering between each other. This happens absolutely randomly, and ONLY when I split the screen using the track motion option. However, when I have only one video in my overall video window (even when there are transitions between 2 or more videos), everything is just fine, no flickering occurs. So the problem appears only when there is split screen. I assume that using 3 or more videos simultaneously would make it even worse .

I am running Sony Vegas Pro 11 on a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 @ 2.0GHz, 3.00 GB RAM and an nVidia GeForce 7300 GT video card (yeah, I know my rig is pretty old, but I have no money for an upgrade at the moment, and so far I haven't experienced such problems with it). My OS is Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit.

One thing to mention: I am shooting my videos (guitar covers, by the way, just like the initiator :P) with an A4Tech PK-910H webcam. It's probably not the best camera out there, but I've been pretty happy about it so far. I shoot my videos at 1280x720, and 30 fps. The video format is .avi, and the sound format is PCM, or something like that.

Until 2 months ago, I had been my videos with this webcam, and even though it was set to shoot at 30 fps, the luminosity and exposure settings were set at a little too high a value in the webcam's software (which I didn't know), and consequently the camera would drop frames while shooting. Therefore, at the end, the uncompressed videos straight from the camera had an average of like 20... something fps due to those frame drops.

The idea is that WITH those settings (which generated frame drops), everything went fine in Sony Vegas, there was no flickering whatsoever.

Now, 2 months ago I discovered that I could change the exposure and brightness settings of the webcam to a lower value, so that it would finally get to shoot at a constant framerate of exactly 30 fps (and the difference was really noticeable for me, the motion in the videos is much smoother now).

The idea is that as soon as I switched to these new webcam settings, I've started experiencing this flickering problem the initiator was talking about (by the way, if I play the videos straight out from the webcam separately in my media player, there is no flickering, so the source videos appear to be fine...).

I'm using mainly the same project settings as the initiator, except that I've set 29.970 fps as framerate, and I disabled the "adjust source media to better match project or render settings" option. I've even tried enabling it, but to no avail - the flickering was still there.

So far, I've tried a number of things that were recommended in similar threads, all of which did NOT work for me :(:
- restarted Vegas, defragmented the HDD partitions, even restarting Windows;
- disabled resampling for all the videos in the project;
- updating my codecs (I am using K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, which I saw a lot of people dislike...), then completely uninstalling the codecs (I am using K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, which I saw a lot of people dislike...), cleaning the registry and leaving only the codecs that Vegas Pro itself installs.

As I've mentioned above, none of these possible solutions worked for me. The one and only way I've been able to get rid of the flickers is checking each video frame by frame, and whenever there is flickering, I would delete the frame where there is flickering (the flickering occurs during only one frame - in Vegas that particular frame appears to be missing or something - in the video timeline it's displayed as dark green, and it is replaced with the same frame from the other video), and then copy/paste the immediately following frame of that video. So far this has been the only thing that worked for me.

However, this is an extremely tiring task to perform (especially when I have videos with like 7-800 frames or so), and I hope you will agree with me that it's really frustrating to manually check and copy and paste frames to compensate for those apparently missing frames... moreover, there are times when those frames I manually copied and pasted are pretty noticeable in the rendered video, like there is no continuity in the motion and stuff... or maybe I am just too pretentious about it...

So my question is: does anybody have any idea what the cause of this problem could be? Could there something wrong with my PC (as in, is it incapable of properly handling 30 fps videos), or with my source videos? Or is there a problem with Sony Vegas itself, are there any more settings I could try?...

Any kind of help would be appreciated. I apologize for this huge post, but I thought a detailed description of my problem would be of help...

Any ideas :(...?

[viruselworm]

Any ideas :(...?

Well, nevermind, looks like I've found a workaround for this problem. Apparently converting the source videos to .mp4 with the H.264 codec and importing them into the Sony Vegas project solves the flickering problem. So I guess it's probably something related to the codecs...

Anyway, I've posted my conclusions here, perhaps they will be of help if anyone else ever comes across the same problem in the future.

[TimStannard]

Well, nevermind, looks like I've found a workaround for this problem. Apparently converting the source videos to .mp4 with the H.264 codec and importing them into the Sony Vegas project solves the flickering problem. So I guess it's probably something related to the codecs...

Anyway, I've posted my conclusions here, perhaps they will be of help if anyone else ever comes across the same problem in the future.

Thanks for doing so. that's the spirit of forums Sorry no-one here could ffer suggestions.

[viruselworm]

Thanks for doing so. that's the spirit of forums Sorry no-one here could ffer suggestions.

No problem, I'm glad I solved the issue after all .