A few weeks ago I filmed a wedding with three cameras, two of them capturing through laptops to external hard drives. I've just started assembling/sync'ing all the various files on the vegas timeline.

I have discovered that the capture to HD's has been split into a number of files, in one case 8, and in the other 3. When the files are joined together it looks like a few frames are missing as there is a bit of a jump at the transition.

I haven't come across this before. Does anyone have any idea what may have caused this?

All these different files will have to be individually sync'd though I haven't got to that point yet. Thus far I have only sync'd a point at the start and haven't checked further down the timeline to see if the different cameras and audio devices all recorded at the same speed.

How are the external drives formatted? If they're formatted FAT32 then the maximum file size is 4Gig so it must create a new file at that point. However, there should be ZERO dropped frames as it does that.

If they're not 4Gig, then there's something else going on. Perhaps you DID have a dropped frame which could cause new files to start.

Both HD's are NTFS. I'm not aware before of having 'dropped frames', so know nothing about them.

Think "tape dropout". This is much more visible in HDV (due to the long-GOP structure) than we were used to with DV.

Vegas HDV capture will rather opaquely cut up you capture as it runs into dropouts/dropped frames.

You may well find that a head cleaning and recapture fixes it up. Or maybe not, you won't know until you try. Sometimes, a recapture will just work without a cleaning, or may find dropouts in other areas, not the original ones.

Frustrating. If you have missing frames that are important, you might just try a recapture of that section.

Thanks Seth, but in this case I was not using tape at all but capturing directly as I filmed, thru a laptop to a HDD.

Maybe I should be reading more closely...

Still, think "dropout", and what could be creating it. I'd sure run some tests with a little cable-wiggling and lots of cable testing.

Windows has the ability to use firewire as a networking port - is this disabled in the network connections control panel?

Have these laptops been gone through to turn off uneccessary processes, giving all possible resources to capture?

Are the laptops capturing to system drives? This can be enough by itself to cause some hits. Even with this, terminating unneeded processes shouls help.

One thing I've discovered that could have done it is that I had full size preview going on both of them...

offhand sounds like you dropped frames in capture - perhaps the computer couldn't keep up, and read it at a split scene?

You might check the size of the files involved - there was a thread (Canon HG10 - AVCHD threads here) where the issue with the 2G break with AVCHD files was resulting in small frame drops at the transition was fixed with a command prompt join of the files. If you actually dropped frames during capture, you're out of luck, but if it has something to do with the format of the recording, maybe this would help you?

Thanks Dave. The file sizes have no relation to 2gb - they are of varying length.

Another thing that may have caused it was that I did not turn off my virus checker. I use Avast and have found that I can pause all its activity - and probably should have!

Well...that was a mission! I've just finished syncing the wedding I captured to HDD's - 10 audio sources in total - and they all line up beautifully...once stretched etc!

But the thing of interest to note in regard to this thread is that it wasn't just a dropped frame or two, but the breaks between files were between about 18 and 30 frames long!

It looks like the computer was doing something that stopped capture.