"Not owing it doesn't mean I haven't tried it, and also doesn't mean that I haven't read the dozens of posts since 9 came out stating what a gigantic catastrophe it is."

Forgiving for saying so, but you must live a pretty boring life if you have this much time to complain about something you don't even own?!? It all seems a little hypocritical to me.... but then you strike me as the kind of person who goes out of the way LOOKING for things to complain about.... very bitter existence indeed!

would the best workaround be to create titles in Photoshop as 24 bit PNG's with transparency and just leave the titler alone until SCS figures this issue out?

Cliff, that's what I've been telling everyone to do.

Mike

Forgiving for saying so, but you must live a pretty boring life if you have this much time to complain about something you don't even own?!? It all seems a little hypocritical to me.... but then you strike me as the kind of person who goes out of the way LOOKING for things to complain about.... very bitter existence indeed!

HA HA HA HA HA!!! Look who's talking!!! If I'm bitter then you are like what came out of the teleporter in "The Fly" if they would have merged Rush Limbaugh with Bill O'Reilly and Dick Cheney! And you tell me about how much time I spend complaining? Well, it's about as much time as you spend sucking up to SCS, although by now it really seems like you are in their paid staff...

"although by now it really seems like you are in their paid staff... "

And I promise you I get paid better than you.

Hey Sebaz... when you get a minute why don't you stop flapping the gums and be of some actual use.... give Xberk a hand testing this problem out;

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=668515&Replies=1

Oh yes... that's right you don't even have 9a. Lan'sakes!... why are you even here!?! ;)

>>...create titles in Photoshop as 24 bit PNG's with transparency...

Depending on what you're making, leaving things as a native PSD file works excellent, especially if you need to make adjustments.

Mike, Cliff, ----- the PS 24bit PNG's is a good solution, unless you have non-Sony titler apps.

I have found Sony's text app lacking in smooth user interface, vs. Vegas FX controls.

Sebastian,

We have 3 PPro2/Axio systems where I work and they're terribly unstable. We did a bit of beta testing with them, talked directly to groups of Adobe folks, but based on people's accounts of CS3 and CS4 we've never once been tempted to go back to the well. We also have an FCP system and that seems to be stable so we'll probably sunset the three PPro systems eventually and migrate to FCP.

It's an open-plan office and the grumbling about edit systems gets pretty loud. I've not heard much from the FCP end of the room, which is a good sign. The biggest complaint so far has been that it's hard to move and relink media files with FCP.

Vegas is actually something I've never been able to recommend to them but this is mostly because it's not a good fit for their expectations. Even as it is now, Vegas is more stable than our PPro systems. The generated text bug is a show stopper and we'd be moving back to V9 from V9a if this was our problem.

Rob Mack

...Rush Limbaugh with Bill O'Reilly and Dick Cheney!

Ouch! Let's not be insulting now...

[i]And for the people who will flame me by saying I can't compare a company the size of Microsoft to a much smaller company like SCS...[i]

I don't think the size of a QA team scales in proportion to the size of the company. SCS probably needs a handful of people to do the testing as well as people to plan and manage the testing program. Most likely the testers come from an agency like Manpower and get rotated around the company to keep them from becoming "employees". The key link should be the QA program manager.

Rob Mack

well ive been watching the forum for the last few weeks and it seems all people do is complain which i do understand due to the bugs in 9a,ok its got problems as do all the other nle do,ive come across the text one as i do not use them in any of my productions,as with most pros do,but not everyone can afford to go out and spend like that,but i did try and use the pro titler and it was very buggy to the point of crashing or should i say it just displayed a white screen,very poor i seem to remember it working in 8c,as with anyone else if i was using it for my everyday work i would be angry,but the comments of rendering your your work is a good one and good practice i would never leave work ive spent hours on down to the software to rebuild everytime i reload and not just vegas but all the ones i use,prime example is autodesk combustion 9 times out of 10 the project will have a problem with it when reloading so rendering down is a must,even in adobe i do the same,
but one thing vegas has is speed for genral editing which is a good thing its much better than everything else i use this includes, prem pro,autodesk,after fxs,avid got say this ones rubbish spends more time down than running,i dont use fcp but friends of mine do and at the moment alot are saying there is a problem with colour correction,so everyone has bugs this will never go away,so helping scs is the best way forward if they can get it right then this will be the best nle on the market and we will all be happy bunnys

Ubuntu is great... superb package of tools...
If Cinelerra is your recommendation, I'll go give it a peek.
Evidently, it isn't good enough to pull you away from Vegas... so that might say a lot for it before I even go there... and as you imply, open-source always entails a bit of tweaking and tinkering inside the code itself... not something I'm looking forward to... but learning something new always has... so perhaps. . . (grin)
Thanks for the feedback. . .

Until that time... Earl J.

The title bug has never, and probably will never bit me because ProType and Vegas' built-in text isn't the answer for the type of projects I'm doing. For most text I use After Effects.

On the issue of SCS' silence, it's a long-standing habit of any software developer not to talk about bugs until releases come out (for those who think this is the end of the world...have you SEEN some of the bugs/workarounds in FCP? The answer is often, "um, just don't do that and your project will be fine." (I'm not making this up).

Everyone has to make their own decisions about why and what software they use, but I've found patience and common sense during migration to a new version saves me a lot of hassle. The latest and greatest is fun, but in the 15 years I've been using NLE's (I cut my teeth way back when on Corel Lumiere, if anyone remembers that) I've never found a new version of anything that was perfect the first couple times out of the box. I don't think 42 is old (even though it is the answer to life, the universe, and everything), but it's old enough to know that a new edition of anything isn't a working version until the second bug fix. This is almost a universal truth in software for some reason (see: Vista, Sonar, Office, Adobe - don't get me started on Adobe CS4 - it's a joke...I just moved to CS3 when CS4 was released - CS4 is riddled with weirdness).

Let's transpose this to a client's perspective: they don't care how you do your job...they just want their project done. You show them version 1, and they sit in the online suite saying, "Um, that's cool, but I want the graphics blue, the credits to do something different, and the music should be louder." On to version 2. Version 2 gets a positive review, but can the shot with the girl face the other way, change the way the lower 1/3 comes in, and can we make the whole video a little longer. It seems a bit short...maybe only 3 or 4 minutes (7 minute project so far). After a conversation about "if it's saying everything it needs to, it doesn't need to be longer" all is well (they just want to feel like they're getting value). Version 3 is mostly good. A few name changes and title changes in the lower 1/3s and credits, and version 4 is ready to go.

Now, I KNOW this isn't a fair analogy with bugs in software, but I think we lose sight that we're working with highly sophisticated software that does a very particular task. Everyone here is a specialist, but isn't a code monkey...so whatever their unique challenges are on this release, I'm sure SCS is working on it.

In the meantime, if it's mission critical, why are you using it? I have version 9a, and it's installed, but I mostly noodle with the new functions between projects and track the nightmare everyone else is having while I'm swamped with work and churning it out in 8c. Vegas is, in my humble opinion, the best and fastest NLE if you are a productive and working editor. That said, caution is the key. You're not going to get more clients because you use version 9 and not version 8...your clients don't care...you could be using Corel Lumiere...if your project is brilliant and they're happy, they'll sign the cheque with a smile and you'll get all the canapes and brownies you can eat at the video release party.

The nub: long term vs. short term thinking.

"Adobe - don't get me started on Adobe CS4 - it's a joke...I just moved to CS3 when CS4 was released - CS4 is riddled with weirdness)."

Tel me about it!!

I did a motion menu project in DVDa in about 20 minutes. The same project in Encore.... 3 days and counting... crash, crash, crash. I sure can't speak about FCP but I've crashed various parts of CS4 more times in a week than I have Vegas/DVDa in a year. The odd time I crash Vegas I just simply restart the program... with PP you have to do an entire reboot with every crash.... what a pain!

Amen on staying away from the latest app [and OS!] upgrades in the middle of a project... Goes for any vendor, they all bite.

...it's hard to move and relink media files with FCP.

There's a one-click plug-in that does this automatically, I can look for it if you're interested (I never had the need myself). This kind of plug-in is easy to develop thanks to the NLE's use of XML, which makes many things possible.

Adobe's financial results have been considerably hampered by CS4. Not enough there to make many people think it is a "must-have" upgrade, and veeery slow 3rd party vendor support.

The only thing that interested me in CS4 was how After Effects is now a bit quicker and easier to work with thanks to a number of user interface improvements. But not enough to make me want to spend the money on upgrading, I'll wait for CS5.

"The only thing that interested me in CS4 was how After Effects is now a bit quicker and easier to work with thanks to a number of user interface improvements"

After Effects is about the only nice thing out of the entire CS4 package...... and not that it doesn't crash either. Between crashes however I've created some pretty interesting stuff.

Boy howdy...if you ever need crash SFX, just start up any part of CS4...you could do a Bruckheimer film with all the thumping and banging and crashing.

AE is nice, and once you get past the interface (or through it). Still, for it to really shine you need to pick up some of the Trapcode Plugins (particular is a must).

More in line with this thread (and everyone's complaint that SCS doesn't listen/communicate): Adobe releases fixes, but they just magically happen. You really have to hunt to find out what they're updating. I've always thought SCS did a good job of continuing the Sonic Foundry tradition of explaining their patches.

I think upgrade fever is some kind of weird disease. Everyone KNOWS early versions are going to be flakey, and everyone KNOWS a couple of patches in things will be better. But everyone still migrates because they believe they have to.

It's just the way the industry works. If you alter your behaviour accordingly, you'll lead a remarkably happy and peaceful worklife. It just requires patience (eg: it's easier for me to just work with VP8c until VP9 is in a good position, than it is for me to waste a lot of energy howling and screaming about millions of lines of code I can do nothing about).

I think the majority of AE crashes are related to RAM settings. Have you tweaked the RAM per core?

The relinking could have a bit to do with our FCP situation. It's a husband and wife working on the the FCP project and one of the parties places files anywhere that FCP suggests, and that turns out to be everywhere. Bad file management on that person's part and so some of the files are on local drives while others are out on the fiberchannel arrays. When the other party tries to consolidate everything FCP tends to choke on the relinking. I think FCP just needs to relink a little at a time.

Other than that there hasn't been much grumbling, but they're still ingesting, logging, cataloging, and planning. When the real edit starts I may hear more. The main reason for adopting an FCP system (after swearing we'd never get chained to a MAC again) is that PPro wasn't remotely capable of a long form project.

Rob

It's been a few years (2001?) since I played with Cinelerra but the author's comments about it really scared me off. I was fairly sure he was going to slit his wrists, he was so negative.

Rob Mack

PPro wasn't remotely capable of a long form project.

I think FCP and Avid Media Composer are the only affordable NLEs capable of serious long form work (with teams).

Avid MC runs on either OS X or Windows Vista, and the new V3.5 works a charm, especially with XDCAM footage thanks to the new AMA (Avid Media Access) feature.

It's $1995, but that includes Avid FX (aka the $1,000 Boris RED) and Avid DVD (aka the $500+ Sonic DVDit Pro HD), and more.

Avid MC doesn't have a fraction of the ecosystem that's built up around FCP, so plug-ins are fewer and more expensive. Excellent to work with though, after a week of full-time professional training.

coursedesign...

I'm actually using AE CS4, it's everything else in the package that's flaky. I've had endless lockups, video weirdness (there's something with the way Adobe is either addressing video memory or flushing cache when using the GPU), let alone the Acrobat security holes. I'm sure in some part it has to do with all the item's interoperability...it's nice that all the programs talk to each other, but one bug tends to cascade to other members of the suite. (and what is Adobe Bridge all about? It's a nice idea, but they really need to clean it up and make it usable (and less bloated))

Even Dreamweaver is buggy and crashes (even though I'm on CS3; reviewers say CS4 crashes less, how nice).

Acrobat is frightening security-wise, and has given me a lot of bug grief over the last year+.

I never even touched PPro in my Collection, seems clunky. It could still have been a winner if Axio had actually worked.

Adobe Bridge is actually more useful than people give it credit for. You just have to spend some time figuring out what it does well. I think Lynda has some good online training for this.

Bloated code comes from bloated teams. Adobe has truly great people inside, but they seem to have let the paper pushers take over.

Somewhat similar to how Microsoft gradually installed 5,000 middle managers to approve each step taken by really top class programmers and analysts... The result: Windows Vista.

Read Joel Spolsky's writings about the early days of Microsoft before the suits took over. It's depressing and refreshing at the same time.

I really hope that MS finds its way after Ballmer leaves (I don't think MS can really make it happen with this suited paper shuffler at the helm, but I could be wrong).

We need a counterbalance to Google, to delay the moment when Google says, "OK, the first fix was free, but from now on you'll empty your wallets, or else... If you don't like it, you can go somewhere else, huh-huh-ha-ha-huh! 8>[~["