Video in Sony Vegas flickers and is full of black frames

Question

I'm trying to import some clips into a Vegas 13 project, but they "flicker": some frames are all black (even in the preview), even though the files play perfectly in mplayer and VLC.

The clips are recorded from a videogame using fraps, and then reencoded in H.264 with mencoder with the settings: -x264encopts preset=slow:keyint=200:crf=19:level_idc=31:colormatrix=bt709 (I don't have the originals anymore, I deleted them to gain disk space. Stupid mistake, I know).

Gspot tells me this about the files:

I have tried a lot of different options:

• disabling using the GPU for rendering
• setting the switch to "smart resample", "force resample", and "no resample"
• changing the frame rate
• using constant and variable bitrates
• using the "deinterlace" settings "blend" and "interpolate" (pretty sure this does nothing in my case ^^)
• checking/unchecking "adjust source media"

Answer 1

While I wasn't able to fix the problem, I was able to go around it, by converting my input file into xvid.

I don't have any black frames anymore, but the video freezes for a few seconds at some point.

Since I was recording and playing the game on the same PC, I'm guessing that there's been a problem at some point and fraps had to drop the framerate.

In any case, I suspect some other bug in my video editing setup, since Vegas was adding black frames in other parts of the video, that play fine once converted to xvid.