Missing Codec SFDB

Basically I am using sony vegas to render out a clip into an uncompressed avi file to then encode with h264/x264.

Basically, evertime i try to watch an avi uncompressed file i can hear the audio, howvever not the video which indicated theres a missing codec from my knowledge..

I used Gspot to find out what video codec i needed and it produced SFDB. So i searched and couldnt find anything and im getting pretty annoyed as i cant encode with h264 because of this!

Please help, King regards, Geroge.

I’ve never seen the fourcc SFDB before.
What is the source of the video? Like what program or camera/capture card/camcorder made it?
Does gspot tell anything else about the video (usually it’s in the metadata on the left side).

Sony Vegas made it, and i dont see any metadata in gspot :S

OK just to make sure I’m not missing anything
You have a clip (if you don’t mind, could you mention its specs? like fourcc, source, container (AVI MPG whatever), and audio), and you fed it into Sony Vegas. Then under the settings for output you chose “uncompressed”, and it gave you an AVI with the fourcc SFDB?
And you can’t play the output at all? (Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic)
Just confirm or correct.
Clarify the exact name of the codec you chose.
And can Sony Vegas read the SFDB file?

Normally uncompressed video should have a fourcc of DIB (the fourth character is a space, 0x020)

This is more for my knowledge than to help you directly.
Are you on Windows? Is it a 32-bit version of Windows? Run the registry editor (start, run, regedit on XP). Navigate to this key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32
Look for an entry named vidc.SFDB
What does it say for the value?

As for your problem
As you probably know, every time you re-encode using a lossy codec (MPEG-2, DivX, Xvid, H.264, whatever), you lose quality, even at top quality settings. If you need to edit a lot, you don’t want to go through many generations of loss like that. So you use lossless codecs. Those are very ineffective (the files are huge), but you don’t lose anything. Then on the final encode, you use the lossy codec to trim size. I suspect SFDB could be such a codec (much like Apple’s “Intermediate codec” (fourcc ICOD, in MOV files)), and one possibility is it’s locked for use only in Vegas, not in other apps like Windows Media Player and such). If that is the problem, and you wish to do your final encode using a third party utility, may I suggest encoding the intermediate (assuming Vegas can open it) into huffyuv?
http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/huffyuv.html
It’s very fast and also lossless. I’m sure once you get it installed, it will be viewable in any app.

a clip of sfdb would be very nice
if you could upload it to rapidshare.com for us to check (create a small 1mb file)