Indeed it is frustrating. On the one hand I see people saying that their life is troublefree with Vegas on Vista, and then on the other hand I see people with unsolvable problems.

Personally, I think Sony should offer to temporarily trade systems with you and give you a working one from their QA lab.

Rob Mack

So would the EDLs you saved from Vegas Pro 8 open correctly in Avid?
Last time I looked the Vegas EDL export script almost got it right, it's a worry that it's taken ever so long for such a basic requirement to be made to almost work correctly.

As for getting Vegas to read an industry standard EDL, best response I got to that requirement from around here was along the lines of "Why would you want to do that, only professional systems need that capability". Still gives me a good chuckle.

Never been that keen on Mojo but there's a lot using it, the largest Sony dealer down here sells and supports it. Certainly attractive if you need to edit BetacamSP.

Bob.

Just what is an industry standard EDL? My impression is that it's an A/B track of video and two tracks of audio. I'm probably pretty far off but I've always thought it was pretty limited.

Rob Mack

"Vegas Pro 8 and Vista have serious problems."
==========================================
Mmmm... sounds to me that there are serious problems at your end! I would start by checking the experience of the operator first.... because i run BOTH Vegas 7 and 8 on vista ultimate 64 with no problems.

What's more... I don't think Avid Mojo runs on Vista AT ALL.
I can get my Avid Liquid to work.... ALMOST.

There's several variants of "CMX" EDLs that are pretty much bog standards that go back to the days when edit systems ran on PDP 11s and paper tape. I've printed out ones from PPro and old hands can read them off the page and tell me straight away they're correct, Vegas just made a total hash of them.

Bob.

Coonass....

Could it be?

BillyBoy! Oh how we've missed you.

Or not.

Not me. Blocked him a couple of years ago and never looked back.

Rob Mack

Sure. I'm just wondering if people expect more from an EDL than it was ever designed to give. If an EDL is supposed to just handle an A and B track, that's just one track of a Vegas project file.

But I'm making an assumption about what an EDL can do.

Rob

There's several variants of "CMX" EDLs that are pretty much bog standards that go back to the days when edit systems ran on PDP 11s and paper tape.

Ho-hoo-hooo!

The PDP-11s were great for their day. Better than PDP-8s maxed out with 4K of RAM (4 K words) and two Linc tapes for swapping in and out of memory.... The glorious days of programming in octal... I hated octal, couldn't understand how people could stand it. Hex, now that's the good stuff! Twice as good (no pun intended :O).

Sony oughta take a look at what Automatic Duck does for After Effects<->FCP<->Avid, not to mention Motion, Combustion, Colorista, Pro Tools, Premiere Pro, etc., etc.

Beautiful work...

Just in getting Pro Import for AE, I feel like I died and went to heaven. Amazing!

Fortunately in the case where I had to read these EDLs from PPro I managed to write some VBA code that read them and wrote a Vegas EDL which could be read. These were only 1,000s of stills supplied on CDs, thankfully I didn't have to worry about 'conforming' from tapes or I think I would have been up the creek without a paddle.

Unfortuntately the path names to the original stills were too long and got truncated in the EDL or simply the files had been moved. I managed to use Windows search to go hunt them down and if that failed it'd spit me back into a file browser for me to manually find them as some times even the file names had changed.

Getting back off topic, I played my first computer game on a PDP-11 that was meant to be driving a Grass Valley system. It was a drag racing game that you loaded off paper tape. Answer all these questions about your dragster, put in whacko values and you'd get smug replies like "lawnmowers not permitted to race" and then the race would start. Line printer would printout "Vroom, Vroom, Screech, 9.50 seconds". We were easily amused back then.

Bob.

>>That's why the pros use Avid<<

Yes, they do use avid, Hollywood is 90%+ avid, but NONE ( read it one more time: "NONE" ) of those pros use avid EXPRESS which is what you say you got ( doubtful ).

If you don't know the difference, you can't really claim to be a pro.

And it's beyond absurd to bitch about having to downgrade to XP to use Vegas ( if you have to ), when at the same time avid, more often than not, forces you to buy a whole new pc in addition to downgrading to XP.

Hey, people, wake up here:

--- Those who trash Vegas the way
In this case, it's been barely 24-48 hours since this person's first posting -- and has only posted in this thread so far.
Though "Coonass" certainly is a befittingly swampy troll name.

So have a cup of coffee, wise up and Vegas on :)

----------------------------

PS: As to Vista, I'm still going to postpone that change as long as I can, but not because of Vegas.
.

I want my Vista!


Just kidding, but you knew that.

Why would I say that, when you haven't heard anybody ever saying it? :O)

Corporate customers are rejecting Vista big time, they don't want the hassle and don't see any worthwhile benefits.

It could even be that Vista stays in a coma before being taken out in the back and shot (together with Ballmer, who seems to be responsible for Jim Allchin not being given the power to make Vista great as it could have been), to make room for its successor, Windows 7.

My biggest dislike of Vista is it looks too much like OSX, from the reports I've read it's nearly as unreliable too and that's really saying something.

Bob.

"My biggest dislike of Vista is it looks too much like OSX, from the reports I've read it's nearly as unreliable too and that's really saying something."

Now, now, now... I've been running OSX 10.4 solidly since a year ago June (maybe it was 10.3 then... ) - running two machines - Mac Pro / MacBook Pro and it's running like a champ (Final Cut Pro / CS3), as good or better than XP SP2 - so it's in the eye of the beholder :) My biggest dislike of Vista is that it looks like a bad knock-off of OSX, not even as slick or cool -

At least Apple waited to release Leopard instead of releasing an interim to Longhorn ;)

I love the mac / pc wars :)

[B]Sony couldn't even tell me when the 64 bit beta was being released after they announced it.
[/B]

Sony couldn't/wouldn't tell you the release date of Vegas 8 after they'd announced it. Do you know when Adobe Production Suite CS 4 is being released? Or when the upgrade to FCS is being released? Neither Apple nor Adobe will tell you.

I've been running OS X 10.4 since April 2006, side by side with two Windows XP SP2 systems.

In 18 months, the XP systems each crashed a few times and the OS X system crashed once, I would call that comparable.

On the OS X system, my work is never interrupted by virus scans, worm scans, Microsoft WGA scans, signature downloads, etc.

I don't have to worry about web surfing on OS X as much, because any attempt to surreptitiously install skunky software will be met with a "No, I don't want to authorize the installation of diskdoom.exe."

I help other Mac owners when their usual gurus are stumped, and I have found that in every case so far it has been crappy 3rd party hardware or a totally incorrect software installation.

And I'm looking forward to receiving my $109.00 Leopard disk from Amazon. Free 2-day shipping should give me enough time to check other people's experience, but the word so far is that it is extremely stable.

Gotta love that OS X comes in one $109.00 version that covers new install as well as upgrades, containing $439 worth of software according to one conservative reviewer. Contrast that with what, five(?) versions of Vista, each in a Full Install or Upgrade version....

Gotta love that OS X comes in one $109.00 version that covers new install as well as upgrades, containing $439 worth of software according to one conservative reviewer. Contrast that with what, five(?) versions of Vista, each in a Full Install or Upgrade version....

No argument here that Vista's an insane rip-off. Microsoft always seems to be trying to get away with charging more and more for each subsequent version of their operating system; even though there really shouldn't be any real price difference between them. Fortunately when I do want to get Vista, I can get it from my school for around $80, but for the moment I'm quite happy with the fairly compatible XP.

i'm sitting on two copies of vista - home and premium from clients who took it off and went back to xp. i still haven't gotten around to installing either on a machine, and my only incentive (and obviously not a terribly important one) is to help out all the locals, and a few clients who keep calling me to figure out what's happening with their vista installations. so far i've simply replied, 'don't do vista', but i suppose i'll have to give in sometime.

as for all the talk of leopard, am running a a couple of imacs with 10.3 and they're doing ok. but they're really only test machines for websites, video etc., so i can say they get the hammering my pc's get. but i did read today that there's a bit of consternation about upgrades going awry, maybe apple's learning from vista, seeing as the latter ripped off the formers look...

leslie

>>>Gotta love that OS X comes in one $109.00 version that covers new install as well as upgrades, containing $439 worth of software according to one conservative reviewer<<<

Another case of Apple's customers actually being happy to be charged for service packs that should be free.

Ahhh, come on, OSX software is worthless, just as any that comes with windows. All any OS needs to do is be stable. Nobody in their right mind will actually use any app that gets installed along with the OS. That's all bloatware, they throw in to justify charging us. And traditionally OSX has been much more expensive than Windows.
MS charges you once in about 3-5 years to upgrade. Apple had one year where they charged over $100 three times in a single year, because they couldn't get it straight, had to release updates, and they charged for each one. So upgrade from OS9 to OSX cost almost $350 in in three easy payments over 12 - 18 months.

This upgrade to another lame cat name, is what MS would release as a free service pack. How much has OSX cost you guys so far ( per machine )? $400, $500, $600????? I've ( and just about everybody else ) had to pay less than $200 ( per machine ) for windows since 1998 ( upgrade to Win2kpro, and then XP pro ).

Even Vista Ultimate 64 bit is about $180 to upgrade. By the time you have to pay again to upgrade to the next version of Windows, OSX users will have spent another $500 on upgrades.

Apple is always more expensive, and ridiculously so.

As for stability, one crash since 2005 between 3 machines that get used daily., so nobody can tell me windows is unstable.

So in your next Windows Service Pack, you expect to get Time Machine (backup functionality and simplicity at a level not available for Windows machines at any price afaik), Spaces, new iChat (with functionality that blows the doors off any software for Windows), a built-in PDF viewer that is faster, better & more capable than Acrobat Reader, a new Finder ("Windows Explorer") with Cover Flow like in the latest iTunes but for cruising through disk folders to find what you are looking for visually in 1/10th of the time it would take on a PC, Quick Look that allows you to view the content of just about any file without opening its application, and a built-in VPN that lets even the most non-technical person securely access their home or work computer from a laptop on the road, or from anybody else's Mac without installing special software, and Sandboxing of key OS Helper Applications to prevent them from being used as attack points through currently unknown hacking techniques of the future?

And you expect this new Service Pack to provide also Apple's absence of Activation hassles, removing Microsoft's covert downloads and installations of system programs when you have explicitly checked the option to not do that, and effective prevention of even one single virus outbreak or spyware infestation over six years (per today's New York Times)?

I won't mention the other 300 new features in Leopard, including full SUSv3 and POSIX 1103.1 UNIX, Kerberos authentication, Ruby 1.8.6 and Python 2.5, IOVideo APIs for professional-level video cards, Self-Tuning TCP which boosts performance anytime, but is vital for connecting to high bandwidth/high latency fiber optic networks such as Verizon FIOS etc. without using specialized Broadband Tuner tools, and full 64-bit and 32-bit application support including all graphics libraries, etc., so there aren't separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the OS, just one that handles both.

What new functionality has Microsoft provided in six years of glorious Windows XP Service Packs? Ummm, a firewire update that corked most PCs, a new browser that is a feeble copy of Firefox only incredibly clumsy, and... help me out here... What else has MS offered in Features?

Perhaps you think of the 186,532 security bug fixes, for a long time served nearly daily, as being a kind of Features?

Many people are running their original OS X 10.1 OS and are happy with it, especially since it doesn't suffer from the "Windows Rot" problem that makes PCs just about unusable after a few years at most (fixable only with a reformat and reinstall, which takes me 2-3 days full time because of the stinkin' registry which Apple wisely chose not to implement).

And numerous reviewers have found that since Apple switched to Intel CPUs, they have also been very cost competitive with brand name PCs (not white boxes where you do the assembly and support yourself). For professional workstations, Mac Pro seems to easily beat the competition every time.

And the above are only some of the reasons why Apple is now twice as big as Dell (in market capitalization).

Apple is bigger than Intel, and bigger than IBM. It now trails only Cisco, Google, and Microsoft.

And their customer satisfaction is ahead of any other computer manufacturer.

Enough to give them the benefit of the doubt, I think.

At least until Microsoft brings us Windows 7, which is scheduled to be released in three years time (OSNews summarised it thus after talking to Microsoft's Kernel and Virtualization honcho, Eric Traut, "Use the proven NT kernel as the base, discard the Vista userland and build a completely new one (discarding backwards compatibility, reusing code where it makes sense), and solve the backwards compatibility problem by incorporating virtualization technology"

See http://www.osnews.com/story.php/18804/Thoughts-on-MinWin-Windows-7-and-Virtualisation.

Three years go by quickly. Windows XPSP3 would definitely do the job for nearly all of those who must run Windows until then.

>>>What new functionality has Microsoft provided in six years of glorious Windows XP Service Packs? <<

That's an easy one to answer. While you list iTunes, and the new PDF reader. Windows XP has given me the functionality to use Vegas, XSI and Fusion ( among other things ). And apps that are both OSX and XP compatible run better on XP ( Flash for example )

Windows XP cost you $90 in 6 years

OSX cost $600 in those same 6 years.

That's the bottom line.

iTunes vs. Fusion, hmmmmmm..........( doing that scale thingy with my hands )