The roadmap is as follows:

Up to release 10.0f, Vegas will be tested and certified by beta-testers (ooops, sorry, I mean SCS customers) ...

</rant>

"Up to release 10.0f, Vegas will be tested and certified by beta-testers (ooops, sorry, I mean SCS customers)"

That's a really quite unfair and unrealistic statement. All complex software has bugs, Premiere, Avid and FCP aren't immune to them any more than Vegas.

Here is the way it has worked for as long as I can remember:

Vegas has a group of beta testers, they are not allowed to identify themselves due to a non-disclosure agreement. This group usually finds most of the serious bugs.

The new version of Vegas is released and more bugs are identified because no matter how large the beta testing group, they can't possibly test every configuration and editing scenario.

Several weeks after the initial release, there is a "x.0a" release which squashes the major bugs which have been discovered and reported* by the Vegas users. At this point, it is generally safe to use in a production environment.

(* By "reported," I mean filling out a tech support incident, not just bitching on the forum.)

I would have been glad that SCS support acknowledges issues and provide feedback about remediation instead of the usual canned answer. I am not alone reporting this.

My experience has just proven that SCS support is of no help at all.

A review of bug threads archived in this forum should do a good job of illustrating what to expect with v10. I wouldn't expect v10 stability to be any different than what we experienced in all the past versions.

I almost always upgrade as soon as a new version is released, and I always regret it. Usually the software is relatively stable by the "b" sub-version which typically is released about 6 months after the initial release.

SCS should REALLY broaden the scope of the beta program A LOT. I wouldn't be surprised if they have less than fifty beta testers.

Additionally SCS should regularly PARTICIPATE IN THIS FORUM. I mean, go to sonycreativesoftware.com and you'll see a link to these Forums in the main Support menu.

You are free to purchase Premiere, Avid, Edius or FCP and see if their technical support is any better.

This is not a mean post or a slam to the poster. It is just fact. I just bought Lightroom 3 that had hundreds of beta testers (open to the public) and it still had bugs when I bought it. I now have version 3.2 and I still have the exact same problems in that version as I did v3.0. I work with Oracle products everyday that cost millions of dollars, and I am always dealing with bugs and patches, so this is the world we live in. I would bet a lot of money against everyone who has ever suggested they would be a better beta tester because problems will slip right by them and they won't even notice them. I have done this for 38 years and I know how sloppy most testers are. They half a$$ test only those things they know or think they know. Sometimes they don't even know they are looking at an error. Testing needs to be scripted, expected results clearly defined and scenarios followed that orchestrate all the various functions, modules and other software products that provide input and expect output. This isn't about just starting the app and start trying stuff out.

[i]My experience has just proven that SCS support is of no help at all.[/I]

That's your experience? Not been mine.

Grazie

Fully agree with you Harold.

Working as a system enginner in large scale IT companies for decades I think I do know what coding means, I also believe I have some good knowledge of software management cycles. I understand that a NLE is a complex piece of code which may become really tricky to maintain especially on the top of a funky operating system.

Looking at VP9 bugs history I wonder if SCS should review their Q&A process and provide strong guidelines to the beta testers. If any of them just play if what they like, use or are interested in this is a no go. Each beta-tester shall perform tests on specific areas of the software, something close to black box testing with low level code for embedded systems.

Following such method how bugs like the pan/crop issue with stills, the loooong media file opening or MM memory leaks would have reached customers ? I really wonder.

So, making it short I can understand that there are bugs, coding errors, and unsuspected contexts that end in crashes or abnormal behaviour. This is inherent to the techology produced by humans. But when support doesn't play his role it becomes really frustrating. I would have accepted answers like "it's low priority or this won't be fixed" but providing them a full description of some easy to reproduce bug with the method to crash Vegas in a deterministic way, with screen captures, logs, kernel table and just understand that they don't care about it is not a good customer experience.


John,

I have no idea about Adobe, Grass Valley or whatever else support...

Grazie,

I'm glad that you (and many others) are statisfied with SCS support. On my side I gave up submitting tickets. That's all.


I wish to Vegas users that 10 will be stable as 7e is.

from the issues being found since Vegas 5, the issue isn't the # of beta testers imho, it's what they're doing with it. IE if all the beta testers do independent films they'll never catch the bugs that the person doing soccer games will catch.

etc.

"My experience has just proven that SCS support is of no help at all. "

It depends on what you mean by "help".
The help desk is not there to fix bugs, the best they can do is attempt to reproduce them and escalate them. Once escalated the ticket is closed and all external traceability is lost i.e. there's no mechanism for you to be notified that the issue has been resolved or for you to confirm that it has been resolved or to even get an action by date.

The more fundamental problem is that SCS is not a quality assured company. The internationally accepted standard for a quality assured company is ISO 9001. One thing to be very much aware of is that ISO 9001 says nothing about the quality of the product, only that it meets functional specification and that there's procedures in place to handle instances of the product failing to meet specification. You'll find many companies producing 10 cent widgets designed to break in five minutes that are ISO 9001 certified. A valid complaint would be that the 10 cent widget didn't break in five minutes, so be aware. You need to know what if any standards the product you buy is claimed to conform to.
Still ISO 9001 does mean a company has written procedures in place so it is a valuable certification process that can be painful to go through but can improve a companies performance.

There's also ISO standards and methods for software quality assurance, there's an overview of them here. This is where SCS falls down. As others have noted the beta testers are long term users and I doubt any of them are trained in software testing methods, even if they were I cannot see how they could afford the time to do formal testing. Instead the beta test program is more of a functionality test not a hard core, not a "lets see how quickly I can break this" kind of test.
In all fairness to SCS none of the other NLE vendors fare very well either. Pay enough money for an Avid system and yes, if it sneezes you can have a man at the door pronto. Adobe seem to have a faster bug response mechanism with live patching. None of them have what I would call a solid quality assurance or testing program.

Bob.

we don't know about all the beta testers. It's an assumption that they're all long time users who do big projects.

Mine either. The few times that I have asked SCS support a question, I received a prompt and sufficient reply. Always less than 24-hours, and frequently within a few hours.

Since I ran a tech support department in the past, here's a tip. Those questions that we couldn't answer quickly and correctly were *usually* poorly phrased, and/or we simply could not recreate the problem.

People seem to be confusing formal in-house testing with beta testing. Beta testers should not be given specific tasks to perform nor should they be trained in formal software testing. Ensuring complete code coverage and regression testing is the job of the in-house test team. If you buy a new version of software and something that use to work is now broken you can blame the regression testing team. That's their job not the best testers. The beta testers might find the bug but they might not. The final responsibility that new functions don't break existing functions rests with the regression test team.

Beta testing is used to determine how the software reacts in the "real world". Beta testers should use the software the way they normally would. Beta testers should also try new features that they think they might use. Installing on their particular computer with their other software that might affect it. It is the beat testers job to report any bugs they may find while using the software. It is the job of the Beta Test Manager to make sure that they have beta testers from all walks of life so that they get the functional coverage that they need.

If a company relies on their beta testers to do the job of their in-house testing then shame on them.

~jr

I agree with you JR , Just want to add few more points to it.

It is shame Even if company relies on in-house testing for doing beta testing of there product.
Generally Beta testing happens before the product release. Since beta testers get access to cutting edge products before they are released to the public. Generally big companies like Sony will have all kind of testers . Even though end users have been getting the product with many bugs. It is something to do with project and product management team and who make the decisions to release such product to public.

If company involves public beta users then there is more commitment from project/product management team. with that it is possible to get the high quality product at the end.
-Chethu

Chethu,

To provide you with an alternative point of view:

A "company" has no obligation or inferred interest in offering a beta version of a focused product to casual users.

Vegas is a focused product. The "focus" in this case is professional users with a verifiable history of use and non-casual interaction with the developers. Opening pandora's box in this kind of instance would quickly become a dysfunctional field testing environment for the developers, simply because Vegas Pro is not, and does not pretend to be a "one size fits all" solution.

This is not Internet Explorer. Don't despair though, I wasn't chosen as a beta tester, either . . .

;?(

"Working as a system

Well, that certainly establishes your credentials.

whatever, i'll wait and read here the results of 10, and by the noise (or lack of) consider what steps to take next.

for the moment, after my experiences with 8 and 9, and with what 10 has to offer i'm happy to wait till the second round of special offers turns up, or even skip 10 entirely since i have no use for 3d, and though the audio and steady features look interesting, having shelled out for sf10 and mercalli in the last year or so i don't see any great benefits in my particular field (long form doco).

that said, i still maintain vegas is as good as it gets, but i just don't want to keep getting it ;-)

btw. i've found scs support adequate, not brilliant, but then again i've not found ANY software manufacturer who actually shines in this area. however, edward (excalibur) has been a model of support for his software (albeit a plug-in).
come to think of it, i don't think i've experienced any shining examples of after sales service for ANYTHING in recent years*. it's more of; throw away if it breaks ($5>50), use till it fails or is recalled by manufacturer, or just never buy the brand again.

*an exception was the Hoover vacuum cleaner we bought (helix). a piece of unbelievably badly designed, inefficient crap. so annoyed was i that i wrote and told them so. next thing i know they sent me a very upmarket cleaner along with an very nice letter of apology.

[i]I'm glad that you (and many others) are statisfied with SCS support. On my side I gave up submitting tickets. That's all.[/I]

Did I say I was satisfied? I said my experience was not yours. And like many things in this complex pursuit, there are many levels of complexity too, requiring many levels of response and the application of the appropriate remedy. Now, mix into this just where SCS are in the product cycle; add a dash of some recent advances in hardware; then overlay this with the latest advances in audiences experiences and then throw in a radical change in say an OS (WinVista/7), I've learnt to include a large serving of patience - and THAT can be truly frustrating.

And that has been my experience. A mixed bag of fixes "set" against a backdrop of market-led innovation. Yeah, it's tough. But you need to keep pushing and pursuing your quarry.

About 4>5 years back I had a major issue with Media Manager not working in Vegas. It worked in ACID, but then not in Vegas. I kept politely returning to SCS with my quest and finally, finally, after 6 months I got a solution, or rather they got to the kernel of the issue, which was cured by a rework of MM. But it took time.

What I would advise is to see if other users are getting a similar problem and then try to see if there is a sense of convergence of issue. And that would be very helpful to SCS and ultimately your good self.

Cheers

Grazie

I started typing some huge post.....

Put simply my biggest concern with V10 is that it does as anticipated and attracts a lot of new users. This will be great if V10 launches like V6 and tragic if it's like V9.
Like most here I've still got V6 to fall back on for paying audio work, much of my paying work is still vanilla DV / DVCAM. Someone new to Vegas with V10 does not have that luxury and if they get burned they will not wait around for V10.1e, trust me. They'll have bought it for the new features e.g. 3D and they will need it working, now.

Bob.

Eh? And your point is Bob?

Grazie

<quote>

Musicvid:

"Working as a system

Well, that certainly establishes your credentials."

</quote>

Very interesting and smart answer :D
Ok I made a typo, and English is not my mother tongue...

Amen !

Anything else ?

ps: Le jour ou tu iras déblatérer dans un forum étranger, préviens moi pour que je puisse rire un peu moi aussi.

It seems there are quite a few here that either live a very shallow, boring life.... or just simply happen to be naturally angry people. Those are the only things I can think of that would explain complaints on a product that doesn't even exist yet.