A few Vegas thoughts...

Arthur.S wrote on 12/29/2011, 12:19 PM

So, before Vegas, I used Media Studio Pro. I was with it from 2.5 right up to 8:0. It did everything I wanted - and a few features such as 'instant' audio wave forms (No waiting for "building audio peaks") and rubber banding of individual audio clips - better than Vegas. You could also drop DD and .M2V straight onto the timeline. Never understood why Vegas doesn't allow that. Then as the later versions arrived, it became more and more unstable. By 8:0 I had the new auto backup feature set to every 5mins, there were so many crashes.

I jumped ship to Vegas 6:0. Instant stability. I remember working away once, and glancing up at the top corner to see "UNTITLED". I'd been working for around 3hrs without saving! Sloppy working practise, yes. But Vegas was so reliable it had lulled me into a false sense of security. It was a nice feeling. :-)

Fast forward to today. Not only have I got Vegas 11 set to backup every 5mins, it seems half the features are broken in one way or another - which didn't even happen with MSP 8:0! As a professional editor, you simply cannot be stuck with a so called 'Pro' product which behaves like Vegas 11 does.

When my current project is finished, I'll be doing a clean uninstall/install of Vegas 9e and hopefully getting stability back. Vegas 11 will stay on the shelf until maybe the very last build No before 12 or whatever comes next. I might try it again then.

Life after Vegas 11? At the moment, there is no earthly reason to continue with the Vegas family of products. (What a massive disappointment DVDA 5.2 was too) It's extremely buggy, AND unreliable. We all know the alternative products, so no point running through a list of them, but I'll be looking at them all very hard indeed when 9e has run it's useful life and new features are needed.

Sony have lost the plot. There's no other way of describing it :-(

Comments

vtxrocketeer wrote on 12/29/2011, 2:04 PM

Auto save every 5 minutes? Boy, you are optimistic aren't you?

Sarcasm aside, I use Ed Troxel's excellent (and free) script to auto save every 1 minute! I also ctrl-S before I get a drink of water, sneeze, stretch, think, etc. Both have saved me valuable time that I would otherwise spend redoing work.

Arthur.S wrote on 12/29/2011, 3:27 PM

Yes, I used to use Ed's auto save too. I now use Vegasaur's. The point is; we're all walkin' on eggs with Vegas these days....no confidence in the software at all.

Jack S wrote on 12/29/2011, 5:08 PM

Arthur. A few more thoughts.
I, like you, cut the majority of my teeth on Media Studio Pro. I loved the versatility of it. I could very quickly produce a video that was very professional looking. It was, as you say, very unstable. Many a time I would have completed a lengthy editing session, unfortunately forgetting, in my enthusiasm, to save the project regularly, only to be confronted by the dreaded 'hang'. Sometimes the project could be recovered somewhat with the autosaved file but sometimes this wasn't available. I put up with this instability however because I couldn't find software powerful enough to replace it. I then had to buy a new PC. Unavoidably, it had Windows 7 preloaded. Goodbye MSP. It wouldn't run. I was devastated. Where could I find a video editor to replace it. I checked out the alternatives, Pinnacle (ugh), Premiere Elements, etc. Then I discovered Vegas. I gave Movie Studio HD Platinum Trial a try and found it to be just what I wanted. It was relatively cheap (not the PRO version of course) and coped with my DV-AVI source footage very well. Contrary to what I had read, I had no trouble with stability at all. Then I bought a new HDD camcorder and the trouble started. VMS10 persistantly crashed with 'Out of memory' errors when working on mpeg clips. Hang about! How could this be? I had 8G of RAM. Through the forum I found the miracle that is LAA and the '64bit memory fix'. Bingo. Stability again! There where stiil minor problems of course (aren't there with any piece of software? - especially with one as complex as this). I'm thinking of the 'Clip stabiliser' function for instance which was virtually useless and caused a crash under certain circumstances. But wait. Along came version 11. I know we had to pay for it (and we shouldn't have to) to have the bugs taken out but it's a lot better than 10 and it wasn't all that expensive. The latest build allows up to 4G memory to be used so there's no need for the '64bit fix'.
The end result is that I've got a piece of software that I think is amazing. The more I use it the more I am astonished by its power. It's now as stable as any other complex piece of software and well worth the money (£32, I seem to remember). I do all my editing in SD so when I start editing in HD I might change my mind. Until then I will continue to ponder, after reading your post, is Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum really so much superior to Vegas PRO?

Kit wrote on 12/29/2011, 5:09 PM

Hello, do you have a link to this script you could share with us? Thnaks,

Kit

vtxrocketeer wrote on 12/29/2011, 7:45 PM

You talkin' to me? I believe that you can install the full version of Excalibur (http://www.jetdv.com/excalibur/home.php), which includes a ton of stuff including the auto save. When the trial period ends, everything dies except the auto save. It's been so long since I bought Excalibur that I might have forgotten, but I think this is how you get it.

ushere wrote on 12/29/2011, 8:11 PM

heck, buy excalibur, well worth the investment!

cbrillow wrote on 12/30/2011, 6:38 AM

"(What a massive disappointment DVDA 5.2 was too) It's extremely buggy, AND unreliable."

Oh, my! Are you, perhaps, using it for Blu-Ray projects rather than DVDs? From what I've observed here on the forum, more users writing Blu-Ray may be having problems than those who are creating DVDs.

I've been using DVDA since version 2 on several different boxes of relatively pedestrian hardware and have never had anything more serious than an occasional hiccup -- no problems with it failing to recognize a burner, hanging during writing, making coasters, etc. I've created a lot of 'just for us' home-type DVDs and 3 replicated, modest-volume, commercial discs in the past year, using DVD-A 5.0 and 5.2. I've even written about 40 dual-layer discs on media lesser-regarded (Memorex, Sony) and they have played all the way through on every DVD player in which they've been tried.

Not diminishing the problems that you have obviously had, and you have my sympathy. But for me, it just works. In my opinion, software that's legitimately considered to be extremely buggy produces repeatable problems across a wide range of hardware and affects the majority of users of the product.

Arthur.S wrote on 12/30/2011, 8:59 AM

I must learn to write in English grammar. :-) I actually meant Vegas 511 when I said "It's extremely buggy, AND unreliable". DVDA is very robust...never falls over. I was disappointed with 5.2 because there's no nod whatsoever to changing menu systems for Blu-ray. Pop-up menus for instance. It's stuck around 2005.

jetdv wrote on 12/30/2011, 10:02 AM

When Excalibur expires, both Auto Save and Project Inspector will continue to work fine.

Kit wrote on 12/31/2011, 3:02 AM

Thanks for the suggestion. How much overlap is there with Production Assistant 2 and UltimateS Pro 4?

Kit

cbrillow wrote on 12/31/2011, 10:27 AM

@Arthur.S,

Ah, NOW I understand... Not having yet done anything with Blu-Ray, so I have no basis for comment on that.

Alf Hanna wrote on 12/31/2011, 11:49 AM

Kit, they seem to do separate things. The most useful part of Ultimate is that they have a menu of editing tools they built that allows you to instantly select to move all clips right or left, and above/below/on the timeline, which is really a timesaver. They have a lot of screens worth of information, check out their web site.
http://vasst.com/store/vasst-software/ultimate-s-pro.aspx
Their other screens/tabs include montage (which is great but is available standalone by other companies), and many other areas where they have written scripts that some of us *could* write, but for the price, why bother.
It's a great time saver for me. It's been well worth the price, and John Rolfano of Vasst is on the Creative Cow boards almost constantly, he's a leader of the Sony Vegas board over there. He's immensely knowledgeable on Vegas and answers any issues on Ultimate, not that I've seen many. Five star product in my view.