I agree with blink3times. It seems, and I will stress SEEMS to be that a lot of issues that I see on the forums are related to the newer AVCHD format. I capture from tape in m2t and at least for me I haven't encountered some of the distressng problems I;m seeing here on the forum ...thank goodness.

I think VP8 is an incredible piece of software.

The issue is NOT the jerky playback, that was actually much smoother in 8.0b. I'm not complaining about that...

The issue is 8.0c STABILITY - it just now AGAIN died on me by becoming non-responding. It just sits there at about 25% of CPU utilization - and that's it. NO errors no popups, no blue screens. This time I was editing some texts with the protype titler. Before crashing the preview window again went black for a while.

This is not good. I'm not complaining about jerky playback. I'm complaining about lack of stability. A program should be able to handle the formats it supports, at least without dying so often...

I'm seriously thinking of going back to 8.0b...

Anyone else that has unexplained stability issues iwth 8.0c on Vista 64?

Christian

I don't work with avcvhd but I do keep a few test pieces on hand.... grnated it's only a minute long.

On straight playback on the time line (no editing done yet) playback is at full framerate with 80-90 % quad core usage.

Threw in a couple of transition, a title from protitler, a vdub cartooner effect, a wax 3d donut effect (and wax is well known for its instability) and I'm not seeing anything bad happening. Of course frame rate playback goes to hell in a handbasket and I have to rely heavily on dynamic ram playback, but I'm not seeing any instability. Maybe it's a duration thing because the test piece I have is not very big.

Did you turn off all the useless crap in Vista? This includes indexing, filesearching.... etc.

I noticed in your public profile, you have (above)1gig of ram. How much do you actually have?

I recently went to Vista32 (with 3gig of ram) & I noticed a big increase in ram being used by the OS.

Christian,

Assuming you reformatted the disk before re-installing Vista 64.... are you sure that all drivers have been updated... video card, sound card, etc, directx, etc? There are so many it is easy to miss some!

You do not have the exact same platform you had with 8b therefore it's a bit premature to blame 8c just yet. However, others have wisely suggested that AVCHD be transcoded and that is good advice.

I do not do AVCHD but I do HDV to SD and Blu-ray every day and I see absolutely no stability problems.

The obvious question to me is, since you have Vista 64, why didn't you install Vegas 8.1 instead of 8c?

That's too bad about AVCHD, if there are indeed problems that widespread. I'd think it would be better to have some kind of AVC/H.264 compatible thing to work with, since that does seem to be the format predominantly used on commerical Blu-Ray.

Maybe a few years down the road, when this AVC-Intra thing becomes more common, it will be a better solution than the current ones.

I've found 8.0c to be rock solid. To be honest, I don't exactly push Vegas to its limits, but I've found it to perform flawlessly in my recent editing and renderings.

Excuse me Leigh!
But that kind of talk on this forum will get you nowhere!!!
Nowhere, I tell you.

Sebaz,

Probably went with 32 bit due to plugin and VST compatibiliy.

j razz

Hi,

8.1 is not (yet) an option, it lacks the plugins I need (in other projects), and is strangely based more on 8.0b than on 8.0c. Some people consider it more beta than 8.0c..

I would have entered my total amount of memory, if only the already archaic forum system would allow. I have 8GB of DDR3. All humming happily at 1600MHz.

I can assure you that ALL drivers are up to date, I spent more than one day just making sure I have everything checked. The mobo, CPU and memory are all rock solid.

BACK to the PROBLEM. Since I posted last here, Vegas 8.0c has hanged on me now 3 times. I have lost now 1,5 hours of working time, when I have had to always revert to an slightly older version.

I'm now able to somewhat repeat the problem. It always occurs when I'm (or have been) sliding video content on the timeline, with the Ignore grouping active. I use this feature to do j-cuts, very handy, but now I must totally avoid it, it seems...

And it IS related to AVCDH. So in a way Blink, you are right.
BUT -and it's a big BUT - an application that claims that it supports AVCDH editing should be able to handle such a simple task. That is not too much asked. Or am I pushing Vegast to its limits doing this simple edit maneuver??? Hardly. I would say that Vegas is pushing MY limits!!! This problem is NOT elsewhere, it is in Vegas or how it handles or does not handle correctly AVCDH files.

At least what concerns AVCDH, the C release is just beta.

I will try to edit this project also on 8.1 and see how it works..

Christian

PS: AND BEWARE: There lurks a very nasty problem when you have the same combination of OS and harware that I have (that is ASUS P5Exxx motherboard, GeForce 8800GT video card, and Vista 64 bit. The latest video driver from Nvidia causes a starup problem with Vista. The Microsoft banner pops up but then the screen goes blank and the hard drive continues to crunch. There is something in Vista 64 that does not like this hardware combination. I struggled with this problem for a couple of days. It has to do with secondary displays, in this setup Vista somehow decides to switch to another display (you have 3 possibilities with this GPU), and the main screen goes blank. A driver from Nvidia dated at 25th oct 2007 works fine... I have not dared to experiment further, too many projects have deadlines now...

I had to revert back one release on nViidia drivers on my Vista 32 machine (8800gt). The latest drivers caused my monitors to switch to a rotated view after a wake up and eventually caused my system to have some strange problems. Reloaded older drivers and everything is back to normal. You won't see any posts that I made about it because I consider it to be a non event for this forum. Just something you deal with but it might have meaning for this post.

"BUT -and it's a big BUT - an application that claims that it supports AVCDH editing should be able to handle such a simple task."

They ALL claim to support avchd and it works.... so long as you stick to the absolute basics.

Back when I was having massive crashing problems and HAD to get through a project, I wouldn't start rendering over again after a crash. I would simply view the crashed video (a crash will leave what's already been rendered on the hard drive), and do a loop render at a point just before it crashed. If it crashed again then I would simply repeat the process. I would then take all the broken pieces, trim them to the proper places then "JOIN" them in Ulead MF6 and burn to disk. So funny (well.... I can laugh now anyway).... I remember this one project in 7e..... no word of a lie.... In a one hour video I had 78 pieces of broken video to trim and join in MF6. It was a VERY LONG NIGHT.

I suggest to you to do what you can to get through this project and then change you're work flow a bit and stop putting this avchd rubbish directly on the time line. Cineform NEO works well and converts over to an intermediate on the fly. This is similar to what they're doing over in the wonderful world of FCP and the complaints aren't 1/2 as bad.

I agree with blink here, AVC is simply not an editable format at this point in time, not with any of the solutions I have tried. The only real option is to use some sort of intermediary format. Will it change? Who knows, I even use Cineform for HDV editing which has better support than AVCHD. Peace of mind.