OK... what else can I tell you? I'm rendering it now. Different results than realtime preview, but just as bad. When it hits the video clip for the 2nd PiP, the first PiP disappears and the second PiP never shows up. Right now, it's rendering background only where there should be 2 PiP's.

I checked for updates and saw there was a 5.0a. Downloaded that. No difference.

I'm a software architect with 30 years in the business. I can help debug if necessary.

Any other info I can give you?

I guess I can do the PiP tracks as separate projects and chroma key them. Not a fun thought. Hopefully not what Sony had in mind when they added this feature.

Let me know what I can do assist investigation.

Thanks.

2G

Sorry 2G . .I meant, I am interested to hear if anybody ELSE has a solution . .. hence the "I'm listening" - not necessarily for what you might add . . BUT in hindsight, thanks for the additional info .. Grazie

I guess my primary question is whether this is 'working as designed' or if it's reasonable to expect to be able to do more than one track in 3D.

I'll try to recreate the symptom in a new project using only generated media so it'll be easier to send if Sony is willing to look at it.

2G

I've tried to recreate what I think you are describing:

First four tracks have a different vid source on, each using track motion to move them into their own quarter of the screen.

track 5 has generated media noise texture.

when 1 or two of the vid tracks are in 3D Alpha mode, fine.

when 3 or more are in 3D mode track 5 is hidden by blackness.

Ok, this should work:

(based on my example above) change tracks 2, 3 & 4 (vid tracks) to child tracks, with vid track 1 being the parent.

leave the Gen Media noise texture as a normal track.

I've created a veg file that demonstrates this, download by right clicking THIS LINK and choosing 'save as'

Mike

ps still note quite understanding the behaviour shown in the first place with more than two tracks causing the background to be masked, but hopefully someone else has the answer. In any case you should be able to get your project done :-)

ibliss... thanks so much. I'm about to try the workaround you described.

This has got to be a bug. My rendering failed with out of memory error. When it was rendering, only the background was showing in preview. But the part of the AVI that rendered before failure was back to the disappearing background.

Even if this is "working as designed", I believe there is a bug since they should prevent me from doing what I did. Under no circumstances should I be allowed to do something that would cause this kind of behavior, whether I'm "supposed" to do it or not.

I've been spoiled by Vegas. Never had to report a bug since I started with it early last summer. What is the bug reporting procedure (and do they listen/care?) I moved to Vegas due to spending more than half my time figuring out workarounds for bugs and trying to get support to care in my previous product. (I'm getting the shakes already from flashbacks....)

Thanks again.

2G

There's a link to email customer support at the top of the page. Yes they do seem to care a lot, probably a lot more than most. They seem to have someone monitoring this forum 24/7 for the first few days after go live with 5 (sorry didn't intend that).
Problem seems to be the length of the update cycle and not having an accessible bug database / knowledge base. You can waste a lot of time trying to work out if your doing it wrong or if you've hit a bug.

This is indeed a bug. Sorry for the confusion that it has caused.

The simplest workaround is to child your 3D tracks to a dummy 2D track to force composite order.

This will be fixed in the next point release.

chaboud, are you speaking officially from Sony support that Sony has officially logged and responded to the bug, or do I still need to open a formal bug report with them?

The parent/child trick fixed it for me. But I haven't a clue what led you to assume that doing that would fix the problem (or was it just trial and error stumbling upon the fix??)

Thanks so much to everyone for helping me past this. You may have saved my relationship with a customer.

2G