Video is stuck at mesure 01:01:000

Hi I inserted a quicktime in my project. By default it places itself at mesure 1 of the project. Fact is I want it to start at measure 3 because I want 2 mesures of pre count before recording. It is clearely stated in the manual that I can adjust the video start time eather numerically or simply by clicking on the video track header and dragging it left or right. In practice, it doesn't work at all! If I try to set the start time numerically I can't because it is greyed out, and if I try to click the header of the video track, nothing happens... It is as if the video was locked in place at mesure 01:01:000.... Stupidly enough, I can crop and stretch the lenght of the video all I want (which is totally useless), but it always stays butted at the beginning of the project at mesure 01:01:000. I waited for YEARS for Sonar to make their video features to work half decently, it still is not working...  I upgraded to Sonar Platinum in expectation that they would have fixed the video bugs but it is still not working... I think I will ask for my money back... Does anyone have ideas for a work around?

Thank you! I I switched to DirectShow and things seem to work nicely now. Just one question: Why does Sonar default to Media Fondation if it is not working properly? What are the advantages?

Thank you for your reply. Howerver I do not agree with the assomption that users do not need to move the video start point. It is essential to anybody doing serious music to picture work. For example, music doesent always start on a first beat, think a bit and you will find many  movie themes that start with a pick-up (Star Wars main Theme is a good example). How do you imagine one can cue a theme that starts on a forth beat at the beguinning of a video when the video is forced to start on the first beat? Many videos come with a preceding Two Second Beep synch lead in and production will want you to deliver a mix with a Two Beep to aling to picture.. There again, it becomes very difficult to include this in your workflow when you are stuck with the video starting ar mesure 1...  There are many other cases where it is necessary to move the video start... This said, thank God you did not drop the Direct Show format and please do not drop it untill you have resolved the Media Foundation Issues. I think you jumped the gun when making Media Foundation the default video engine and you should have at least warned users about the start point issue, and should have given the user a easier way to switch between the two video engines. You risk havin users that face the same dilema as me and instead of seeking solutions online would have just said F%$& this and switch to another DAW platform.  To finish, I would like to say rhat as much as respect Cakewalks commitment to create a great DAW, it is apparent that there doesn't seem to be any competent post production consutant on the team because anyone that is working regularly in post production would have flagged thease basic flaws right away... Sonar seems to be geared mostly towards musicians that produce music as a hobby or even professionally in the form of songs and electronica and it certainely has the power to deliver. But not catering efficiantly to musicians that work in the real post-production world is disqualifying your product to a certain portion of the artists that are amongnst  the most prolific and talented users..  

An Update: My "lower res" avi file ended up being ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY EIGHT GIGABYTES... Haha. Yea... I'm a music guy, not a film guy... So clearly I have no clue what I'm doing with video codecs... Just let me drag the video a little left or a little right. Please. I'll be over here trying a different preset...

I tried in in X3, and I've tried it in each update of Sonar Platinum. Adding the two lines is not hard but it never actually allows me to slide the video around like I used to be able to in much older versions of Sonar. And like I said in a previous post, some video formats end up making there be a 3-5 second lag when hitting play, which makes working very difficult.
 
HOWEVER, the suggestion to load in a video then export it as wmv and then reimport it... That I haven't tried. Maybe I'll give that a try and see if it helps matters. Thanks. :-)

Hi zblip,
 
You may have misunderstood. We don't assume music to film users don't want to move the video.
We chose MF because many more users wanted to use MPEG4 and other codecs which aren't supported in Dshow out of the box. So we chose MF as a default and documented how to switch in the help. It was more clearly spelled out when we released this in X3 but I agree with you that this could be more clear. We were hoping that Microsoft would address this more quickly at the time. We'll see what we can do for a future update. Thanks for your feedback. And don't worry we won't be dropping DShow until Microsoft does :)
 
 

It has nothing to do with file format. Its the back end API being used that has the limitation. Media foundation has a bug that hangs when we reposition the video. Its a Microsoft Media Foundation limitation that we have reported to them. Since there is no resolution yet, that functionality is disabled. 

I think that musicians working to picture should league up and push Cakewalk to get there act together and give us the video engine that we deserve.. 

So glad this thread got posted. Was going crazy re-rendering my video to AVI, Quicktime, WMV and it simply would not play in Sonar. Changing to DirectShow fixed it.

I don't know why Sonar Platinum defaults to the Media Foundation Engine for video playback and why the INI file variable isn't in "Advanced" options.