From what I heard here years ago, it is Sony's position that you (we) not mess with them.

I doubt they will document stuff that they don't want us messing with.

No question about it though, it is certainly a lot of settings.

Thank you.

A very few of the settings are outlined in a couple tutorials and the Vegas books I've written.
The *best* method of understanding these settings is to play to your heart's content, and get used to SHIFT+CTRL while launching Vegas after you've messed it up.
There are a few sweet optimizations in there, but they're mostly machine-specific, and workflow specific.
You can really blow Vegas up quite quickly if you don't know what you're doing, but a reinstall isn't that slow.

I can't say this enough.... DISK IMAGE

Play until your heart is content. Once you've blown Vegas to hell and back (and hopefully found your answers in the process).... recall your image.

Restarting Vegas with Ctrl+Shift is a whole lot faster than restoring the image. It also won't affect anything else that you may have changed and want to keep since your last image backup.

Normally I would agree but then most of the internal settings are anybodies guess. If you start playing with them you had better be prepared to do a complete reinstall and not rely too heavily on Ctrl+Shift..... and in this case a disk image is the safest and fastest bet.

Not withstanding... Cntrl+shift will reset Vegas to default settings which of course means you will lose any settings that you had previously customized.

Well, for starters I was able to find there the way to set the RAM preview size to over 1 GB, although it really can't go much higher. I have 4 GB of RAM, the max allowed by my motherboard and Vista 32 bit (which as I understand doesn't even use all of it) and it lets me go up to 1664, even though I set 2048 in the internal preferences.

Now, what I really would like to know, if anybody knows better and can tell me, is to find a way to have smooth playback from the timeline for AVCHD. I had a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 and I was getting between 15 and 18 fps. Now I installed a 2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Quad and it's better, I get up to 28 fps, but it's still not 29.97, but that in itself is not a big deal, what is is that when the cursor goes over event cuts it still skips the first few frames of the new event, so if I want to see the cut properly I do have to do either a RAM preview or a Pre-render.

And then, I would like to know if there's some setting in the internal prefs that would prevent Vegas from updating event thumbnails while playing back the timeline, since that causes stutter when it goes to the next section/page/whatever you call it. There really should be a setting for that.

This will probably be a bit controversial, but I think that apart from the internal documents escaping from Sony, the best chance of getting an intelligible secret menu is if a cracking group decide to sit down and work out what each procedure does.

I personally think they should release the documentation they hold for these menus. If they really want Vegas to be a Pro product they need to recognise that professional organisations are much more likely to have computer engineers in business who have the talent and skill to tailor the product to company's requirement.

However I would say, I think the fact that secret menus are required is another sign of the short sightedness of Sony's approach to developing this software. A lot of the features that are locked into this menu are not sensitive mission critical ones. It would be very useful it to move the event's stickiness to the normal preferences menus?

And why are people having to fiddle around in these menus trying to get the software to work correctly on their platform? Every processor that Intel and AMD release is well documented and can identify it's core capabilities. How hard is it to write the software to automatically allocate the correct number of threads etc? If it was a matter of the menu being handy for unusual or less than obvious needs of a user, it would make more sense. Say for instance the user only wanted one core of an 8 thread processor to be used by the application. But that is not the case. It is the other way around. Many have to try and remove a daft and unjustifiable bottleneck by wandering aimlessly through the cryptic menu system.

It is silly. I would really be suprised if we see a version 9 of Vegas before next May. I think revision C is going to have to be a major overhaul of old code. Maybe they will finally trap these memory handling bugs.

i've never needed to use the internal preferences to use vegas. my dad has never needed them & he's been using vegas for a few years. It's no different with all software: games have "hidden" settings, so does Windows, etc. It's because, just like said, you can REALLY mess things up & there's no reason support should have to trouble shoot a slow render because someone was stupid & took their 4 core system & told vegas to use 1 core.

MS doesn't sit there & explain every registry for Windows & id doesn't explain every graphics setting for doom 3. The users figure all that out by breaking computers. if someone wants to donate lots of time they could do it too, but nobody does & nobody cares THAT much, or they would of done it by now.

Ok, you and your dad don't need to use internal settings. Sorry i was completely wrong about the whole thing...

As I said the menu system should be there for diagnostic purposes and to do things which hare non-standard. However, there are a bunch of useful things in there, such as event stickiness which should have been in the normal menus. There are things such as the need to use the menus to get all threads used which should have been autoconfigured into the software. It just goes to show again how short sighted and backwards the software is becoming., The fact is when you progress to the next major release, you loose all your preferences and project presets and you have to start all over again.

I really think whatever they issue next in the ways of an update should be completely consolitary. They need to restore reliability, get the code core able to exploit the processors they are running on, finish off the half baked features such as AVCHD support and the pro titler, and they need to put the architecture in place to ensure there is a smooth transition to the next major release.

I don't want to start from scratch every time I transition to a new release. I should have just the same working environment, just with new features. If this is not going to be the state of play with the next numbered release then we shall be abandoning the platform and looking for practical alternatives.

This is a great piece of software and a great concept being run into the ground by poor management. If that was not there case, then there would be representatives here right now responding to these type of claims and explaining why or why not they are going to do anything about it. I mean they spend lots of money researching what people want, and here is the perfect resource and development guide right here. They are quite happy for people like me criticise them on their own corporate site, yet do they once respond? That just goes to show how their objectives have absolutely nothing to do with real world use or the people that have paid for the software. They are just interested in putting together software that fits certain marketing concepts so they can sell new units, a sod the existing userbase.

"It just goes to show again how short sighted and backwards the software is becoming.,"

Give an inch.... and they want a mile.

The simple fact that you can even GET INTO the internal settings is a leg up compared to other nle's. I have Liquid, Ulead, Pinnacle, PP.... and a few others and there IS NO internal settings menu on any one of those.

We should feel lucky, but instead.....

But do they need internal settings menus?

We need this menu because the software does not auto-configure or offer certain basic preference options from the gui. Simple as that. If it was not the internal menu, we would be accessing these options through the registry (which the support team has tried to get me to do in the past).