I work with AVCHD every day - and I can not remember when I had the last problem - must be more than 6 months ago.

It is too easy to blame everything on Vegas - and not recocnize how many possibly erroneous codecs, plugins etc. you use on the machine under Vegas.

OT: The last problem I had with my machine was that the Explorer became irritating unstable - Blame on MS, I thought, of course - but suddenly a window from Microsoft popped up telling me that it had found an erroneous plugin under Explorer (avisplitter or something like that) and that it could remove that plugin....
I was not aware that I had installed such a plugin and let it be removed.
Since my Explorer is rockstable again.
So errors are not always what one believes.

Thanks for the responses, I do appreciate them, but it appears to be Vegas. Now one thing I did fail to mention is that I am working with Canon 5D Mark II files. Whether it makes a difference or not I'm unsure, but can say that the program renders fine with no transitions or audio fades. Add those in and it crashes every time on render. Tried all of the tricks on the internet. I can also recall that working with files from my old Sony HDR-11 AVCHD camcorder was a little more reliable though still far from perfect. Again, crashes. I read where a few people batch convert the files over to .avi and Vegas works fine then, but come on, I surely did not spend good coin on a program that requires another program to make it work.

I have 6 computers in the house and have tried Vegas on my top 3 and neither running it under XP or Vista made a difference. Issues from crashing due to memory errors, rendering, or simply playback would rear itself often. Again, perhaps Vegas does not work well with Mark II files.

Now, onto my search, I read in many areas that Corel Video Studio is pretty darn good and downloaded the trial program this evening, and in short...WOW. The preview is actually a real preview with no jumping or jerkiness-pure smooth, something Vegas lacked regardless of my source file. Everything is alive in real time and rendering is flawless. No issues and there are many things such as 11 overlays,etc and I am missing in Platinum. Now I'm sure Vegas does a few things that VS lacks but I have yet to find them. I have only played with it for a few hours but so far am very very impressed and if this continues it appears Corel will get my $100.00 and Vegas will get shelved. Plus it burns directly to Blu-Ray.

So far not a single crash and I have rendered 5 video files from my Mark II from my son's birth. Transitions, etc, nothing has slowed this down, yet...... Keeping fingers crossed, just want something that will work, care less about the name on the box.

Thank you,
Lee

If Corel serves your needs then use it. It appears that you have something on your computers (hardware or software) that Vegas does not play nice with. After you get tired of Corel and want to pr0ogress, try Vegas agaiin.

Terry, your comment suggest that you are experienced with Corel VideoStudio X2, I'm curious as to why you feel Vegas Plat is a higher end product? Thoughts on your experience?
So far I am impressed with the product and the simplicity of the interface vs Vegas in items such as overlay placement, etc is far better IMO. I have read in many forums where excuses such as AVCHD preview will always be jumpy, well, not in this software, it is buttery smooth and not a single crash in about 9 hours of usage.

"After you get tired of Corel and want to pr0ogress, try Vegas agaiin"

Lee please note that AVCHD is not just AVCHD.

Obviously your problems are codec-related.

Every time I buy a new camera - and this is a couple of times every year - I have to return some of them because - despite of very similiar specifications - they simply do not work with the codecs on my machine.

It is nice, that you could render 5 videos in Corel in one evening.
When I do videos I use 2-5 hours editing for 1 single minute of the finished video - and therefore I have chosen a High End editor like Vegas (have both VMS 9 Plat Pro and the Full Vegas 8 Pro).
Only there I find all the professional possibilities that I need.
- and as I said in my former post: have not had a problem with Vegas for at least 6 months now.

- just my 2 cents.

Yes, in spite of what some people here are claiming, Vegas Movie Studio Platinum DOES have serious bugs rendering 1080i (or p) AVCHD files. many people, including myself can only get so far before the render freezes or crashes. I have heard some people having success rendering the video separately from the audio and then merging them together in 3rd party software. The problems I have heard regarding Corel Videostudio is that the rendered file at transitions seems to either jump a frame or repeat one frame. The AVCHD rendering is very frustrating.