Ahh yes - me being the negative person in these parts. VV has crashed on me before, but only a few times. Last night however it was a whole new ballgame. I decide I wanted to try out a few simple things. First crash had nothing to do with Boris, just the 'light ray' and 'glow' plugs in VV. Trting to cut and paste key frames and it crashed. Not a big deal - I think that had to do with trying to do too much at once keyframe wise, and if I remember there is some issue with cutting and pasting keyframes in VV. But the *real* fun came when I loaded up the RedGL demo on a short clip. And this is very repeatable.
The clip was about 5 seconds. I dropped the Boris RedGL plug-in onto the clip. The window opens. I click on the "launch" button. Boris opens. I drop the "fire" plug onto the clip. I go around and set some keyframes and set color and so forth. Now I hit "exit" and it asks if I want to save the effect changes and I click yes. Now back out to VV. I preview the clip and the fire starts off ok but than feeze frames about 1 second into it. I can't figure out what that is about. So I re-open the plug-in chainer and I notice there is a keyframe on the timeline. "Ahhh" sez me. See with RedGL you need to have the cursor over a location so there is a frame showing. Boris uses only this frame in it's timeline, so it isn't really "real time" until you get back out in VV. So I guess VV felt this effect only needed to happen until that frame. So I click on the first frame/keyframe on the clip and re-enter Boris. I do whatever I do and exit again. Now the preview in VV works ok...sort of. It goes until that same location and than the fire "jumps" at the location of the keyframe and than continues on until the end of the clip. So I re-open the VV plug-in chain as click on the problem keyframe and hit "delete" and now the real fun starts. I get the crash pop up saying there has been a problem and the application will now close. I hit the details button and I see that there is a violation in the "RED3 DemoVVFL.dll" along with the usual information. I hit ok and VV shuts down. I reopen it and go to that clip, putting the cursor on it to see a preview but before anything happens...litterally "before anything happens...the error pops up again with the "RED3 DemoVVFL.dll" problem . And VV shuts down. So I reopen VV again and this time I find the clip but do not place the cursor over it - I just open the plug-in chainer and delete the plug-in. (thus far 3 crashes in a 30 minute time frame maybe)
being a glutton for punishment I load the plug onto another clip, about the same run time, 5 seconds. This time before I enter the RedGL interface I make sure the keyframe is on the first frame. I launch RedGL and do the same thing...load up the fire plug, set my sizes and all of that. Exit, save, back to VV and preview. Fire looks good. No crashes. So now I try to add another fliter - trying to be clever and add a liitle "flicker" on the face of someone. Now I do this and suddenly the fire is gone. So I think maybe the order needs to be reversed so I move the RedGL plug after the "Flicker" effect. Still no fire. So I just remove the VV plug and now have only the RedGL plug. And still no fire. ???? So I launch RedGL again and the clip is just a clip - no filters!!! (this too is repetable) so i try this again - do the same thing and add another plug in VV - and it "erases" whatever you do in Boris. (In other words it seems that anything you do in RedGL has to be the only thing on that clip) Ok - so back to the crashes - on the third try I do not add any extra VV plug-in, only the Boris RedGL one. I am readjusting the effect in Boris when and when I exit the crash box pops up again - details shows it is the same thing - "RED3 DemoVVFL.dll" has caused the error. But this time VV does not shut down when I hit the "ok" button. "Weird...it all seems to be working"...as I think that another crash box...now this is a bit of a loop...this happens 5 times. FiInally I have to ctrl-alt-del out of VV. When I re-open I go to the clip and this time another weird thing shappens - the system slows down to a crawl....I get the crash pop up but VV will not close - the timeline just vanishes but the media pool and preivew windows are fine. The timeline flickers on the screen and than vanishes again. I can't do anything. I ctrl-alt-del again and look at the resources and see "Vegas.exe" is eating up 98% of the system resources. Than is pops back down to 1% and than climbs back up - 60%, 70% 80%, 90%, 98% - poof - back down to 3% - and than back up. I just shut down the program.
At this point I reboot. When it is back I go back into VV and try it all again - again - crash. "RED3 DemoVVFL.dll" causes some sort of crash. So the end result, and workaround, is to place the cursor on the first frame, make sure there are no keyframes anywhere in VV for that pulg-in other than the first frame, don't mess with keyframes at all and don't use any other plug-in on the same clip. Now this may only happen when you use the fire plug-in. I really don't feel like trying out each and every plug-in. The sad thing is that from VV you only get one frame on the timeline when you are in Boris RedGL so if you wanted to do rotoscoping or something it really really wouldn't work. And I was just trying to put a start and end "frame" for fire. I would hate to think abiut this if I was doing something really hard. all in all - about 8 crashes.
The clip was about 5 seconds. I dropped the Boris RedGL plug-in onto the clip. The window opens. I click on the "launch" button. Boris opens. I drop the "fire" plug onto the clip. I go around and set some keyframes and set color and so forth. Now I hit "exit" and it asks if I want to save the effect changes and I click yes. Now back out to VV. I preview the clip and the fire starts off ok but than feeze frames about 1 second into it. I can't figure out what that is about. So I re-open the plug-in chainer and I notice there is a keyframe on the timeline. "Ahhh" sez me. See with RedGL you need to have the cursor over a location so there is a frame showing. Boris uses only this frame in it's timeline, so it isn't really "real time" until you get back out in VV. So I guess VV felt this effect only needed to happen until that frame. So I click on the first frame/keyframe on the clip and re-enter Boris. I do whatever I do and exit again. Now the preview in VV works ok...sort of. It goes until that same location and than the fire "jumps" at the location of the keyframe and than continues on until the end of the clip. So I re-open the VV plug-in chain as click on the problem keyframe and hit "delete" and now the real fun starts. I get the crash pop up saying there has been a problem and the application will now close. I hit the details button and I see that there is a violation in the "RED3 DemoVVFL.dll" along with the usual information. I hit ok and VV shuts down. I reopen it and go to that clip, putting the cursor on it to see a preview but before anything happens...litterally "before anything happens...the error pops up again with the "RED3 DemoVVFL.dll" problem . And VV shuts down. So I reopen VV again and this time I find the clip but do not place the cursor over it - I just open the plug-in chainer and delete the plug-in. (thus far 3 crashes in a 30 minute time frame maybe)
being a glutton for punishment I load the plug onto another clip, about the same run time, 5 seconds. This time before I enter the RedGL interface I make sure the keyframe is on the first frame. I launch RedGL and do the same thing...load up the fire plug, set my sizes and all of that. Exit, save, back to VV and preview. Fire looks good. No crashes. So now I try to add another fliter - trying to be clever and add a liitle "flicker" on the face of someone. Now I do this and suddenly the fire is gone. So I think maybe the order needs to be reversed so I move the RedGL plug after the "Flicker" effect. Still no fire. So I just remove the VV plug and now have only the RedGL plug. And still no fire. ???? So I launch RedGL again and the clip is just a clip - no filters!!! (this too is repetable) so i try this again - do the same thing and add another plug in VV - and it "erases" whatever you do in Boris. (In other words it seems that anything you do in RedGL has to be the only thing on that clip) Ok - so back to the crashes - on the third try I do not add any extra VV plug-in, only the Boris RedGL one. I am readjusting the effect in Boris when and when I exit the crash box pops up again - details shows it is the same thing - "RED3 DemoVVFL.dll" has caused the error. But this time VV does not shut down when I hit the "ok" button. "Weird...it all seems to be working"...as I think that another crash box...now this is a bit of a loop...this happens 5 times. FiInally I have to ctrl-alt-del out of VV. When I re-open I go to the clip and this time another weird thing shappens - the system slows down to a crawl....I get the crash pop up but VV will not close - the timeline just vanishes but the media pool and preivew windows are fine. The timeline flickers on the screen and than vanishes again. I can't do anything. I ctrl-alt-del again and look at the resources and see "Vegas.exe" is eating up 98% of the system resources. Than is pops back down to 1% and than climbs back up - 60%, 70% 80%, 90%, 98% - poof - back down to 3% - and than back up. I just shut down the program.
At this point I reboot. When it is back I go back into VV and try it all again - again - crash. "RED3 DemoVVFL.dll" causes some sort of crash. So the end result, and workaround, is to place the cursor on the first frame, make sure there are no keyframes anywhere in VV for that pulg-in other than the first frame, don't mess with keyframes at all and don't use any other plug-in on the same clip. Now this may only happen when you use the fire plug-in. I really don't feel like trying out each and every plug-in. The sad thing is that from VV you only get one frame on the timeline when you are in Boris RedGL so if you wanted to do rotoscoping or something it really really wouldn't work. And I was just trying to put a start and end "frame" for fire. I would hate to think abiut this if I was doing something really hard. all in all - about 8 crashes.