I'm capturing video from a Sony Z1 (mini DV) through Vegas 11 onto an NTFS drive and it splits a one hour continious shot into two or three clips. I could understand it if it was a FAT32 drive....anyway, when I drop these clips on the timeline in Vegas, there is about a 2 second gap between the clips, so two seconds of empty space. This is synced up to another track with AC160 footage of the same scene so I can tell the Z1 is missing data. This happens everytime.
Hope someone can help.

BTW, Vegas is set for 'scene detection', as there are other independant shots coming off the tape.

Turn scene detection off. It's buggy and it was never developed to work properly. Dropouts on tape and drive speed also affect if files break during capture.

You could increase your RAM buffer for HDV capture. I'd set that for 50%.

You could also try to capture with HDVSplit, turning scene detection off in it. HDVsplit always seemed to be better than either Vegas or Premiere at capturing for me. Maybe because there is no overhead running other than the capture utility. Then it is entirely possible you Z1 heads are starting to drop out....dirty or just old.