Sorry Steve but which part of the following quote from you did I misunderstand?

'Vegas has never given me a problem and I upgrade mid-project with confidence.'

Malcolm

steve is correct, not all crashes are bugs, as is his definition that it has to be reproducible for any fix to be found.

however, i disagree in that i'd be in line for ver 12.

11 has wasted a great deal of my time and money - scs has failed to clearly explain and implement gpu usage, and the forum is still filled with problems.

true, they might appear to less vociferous than they were, but that could be down to the fact that people simply don't expect anything anymore, that scs isn't listening, or, as in my case, i have invested in an alternative nle.

there is nothing i want more than vegas to be what it was; reliable, robust, and totally dependable. over the last few years we've seen a great many innovations that, if implemented properly would have been of great benefit to a range of users, unfortunately most seem to have been either rushed to market or simply tacked on whilst underlying problems were left to fester and interact unfavorably with these new options.

i live in hope there is another point release to clear up gpu implementation and media swapping, along with other documented 'bugs'.

i would also expect 12 to finally do away with vfw and move into the 21st century. fortunately i rarely work with avchd, but my other nle certainly outperforms vegas when it comes to playback of it.

I hope it's not the last build. I was told by Sony that my specific problem was a "known bug" and it will be addressed in a future patch. I'm still patiently waiting...with some hope.

Hopefully this isn't the last build....
I am not using Vegas 11 while I have tried many times on small and not so complicated projects. Vegas 11 crashes unexpectedly and I have tight deadlines to meet. So I had to copy/paste projects back into V10e in order to complete them. I also wasted to much time with V11 which will go unused if this build doesn't get updated.
While V10 is solid for me, V11 just isn't, both existing on the same computer.
And V12 is just not on my radar.

After I put in my Quadro pro 4000 video card and updated my RAM to 32gb in my 64bit dual quad workstation, I figured it was time to finally start giving V11 more of a chance. Maybe now it would work especially since it was being used on a clean install of Win7 Pro with just the bare minimum of software installed.

A good friend is having a bday party this week and I wanted to string together some video clips from people around the world saying happy bday. In between would be some Google Earth moves to different locations. Add some music and that's the whole video. Now surely that wouldn't be too much to ask?

The sad fact is that it only took about 2 hours of editing for me to have to bail and to finish the job in V9. V11 became very sluggish very quickly and God help me if I had to use an undo operation. That was usually all it took for V11 to crash or hang for at least 60 seconds.

Okay, yes there was a lot of crappy video formats from everybody but isn't it interesting how V9 just gets the job done. Isn't it also very interesting that ALL of the same clips playback in Premiere Pro CS5.5 without any sluggishness at all. Looks like I am going to have to go through the curve of trying to figure that software out which I dread but with Vegas at a dead end, I have to do something.

I don't know if this is the last build of V11 or not but I for one believe that the reason things have become quiet here is simply because of lost hope. No V12 for me and I predict that V12 will be the last release of Sony Vegas.

Erik

I don't know if this is the last build of V11 or not but I for one believe that the reason things have become quiet here is simply because of lost hope. No V12 for me and I predict that V12 will be the last release of Sony Vegas.

Vegas 11 is still as unstable for me as it was when it first came out. I just purchased Magic Bullet Looks 2, and it's completely worthless. Everytime I add it to a clip, it just completely freezes Vegas.

I have stopped reporting crashes here for several reasons: There seems to be absolutely no support for the basic problem of instability. After the 5th patch, we're no closer to the BUG fix then we were a year ago. I'm tired of the condescending and hostile replies. People are STILL implying that the people having crashes must be doing something wrong. And yes, after the 5th patch I have indeed lost hope that this will ever get fixed.

I've spent way too much time, energy and money it trying to accommodate buggy software, while at the same time dealing with various attitudes ranging from indifference to hostility to holier-than-thou attitudes. If SCS fixes the problem, I'll be pleasantly surprised, but otherwise I've pretty much given up in hoping that it'll be fixed.

It's been many 4-5 years since I last used Vegas, so I'm surprised to hear major crashes are still happening for some users/installs. Maybe vegas's crash reporting tools could be improved, so dev can establish more precisely what's happening for users with crashes.

Saying that, when Vegas works nice, I still think it's the nicest piece of NLE software around. So intuitive to use. I always find Adobe stuff back to front for my thinking. I was using LR4 recently, & it was typical Adobe functionality - to move a crop area to the right - I actually had to move the image to the left (so that the crop moved relatively to the right). Must have moved it the wrong way to begin with a 100 or more times.

I do not think this will be the last build for V11.. However, I do not think the next build will be released within 4-6 weeks like earlier builds. It will be released well before V12 so that SCS can prove that they are committed to their products & convince us to upgrade to V12 which I and many others will do since $140 is a very small price for a tool we use everyday. It's actually a LOT cheaper than buying all of the 3rd party FX that are available...

I like that I have purchased all of the upgrades from 3.0 to 11.0 since I always have all at my disposal. When V11 was not ready for prime-time, I just went back to V9 for editing and V10 for adding 3rd party FX & rendering. I NEVER felt my $140 was wasted for upgrading to V11 - I just wish the fixes in 682/683 were released earlier...

IMO SCS should guarantee that Vegas V12+ will work flawlessly on their Sony-brand computers like the VAIO. When VAIO owners reported early problems with V11 then it was clear that V11 was released before it was fully tested. IMO if the software does not work on the company's own brand of hardware then there are serious issues within the design team. Although they cannot possibly test it on all available hardware for PCs, you would think it would work on their own... Only makes sense to me!

"should guarantee that Vegas V12+ will work flawlessly on their Sony-brand computers like the VAIO."

What makes you think that VAIO and CreativeSoftware come from the same company or have any relationship whatsoever?

RE: "What makes you think that VAIO and CreativeSoftware come from the same company or have any relationship whatsoever?"

Because you would think that their parent company, Sony, would have supplied them with company PCs (VAIOs) for checking their email at home, etc. If Vegas 11 didn't work on these, then they should have held-off the release date... I can't imagine the SCS running around with Dell or Gateway notebooks... Just sayin'...

"Sorry Steve but which part of the following quote from you did I misunderstand?
'Vegas has never given me a problem and I upgrade mid-project with confidence.'
Malcolm"

Malcolm, I've designed computer programs for almost forty years. I was a Senior Software Design Engineer for the past 20 years before I retired this year. So I have some credibility when I say that I've seen some really illogical claims being made in these forums regarding the stability of SVP 11.

If any of the countless programs and hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code I've written, suddenly experienced problems in a new release of a program for customers who had been using previous releases of the same program without problems, my first reaction would not be to blame the customers equipment. That simply makes no sense. The reasons why programs don't work reliably on some computers is almost always problems with the software interacting with the PC's hardware. But this isn't necessarily the fault of the PC. If the PC hardware or software drivers are themselves not adhering to established equipment specifications, then yes, this can be the computers fault. Video cards and drivers most certainly fit in this category. But the breadth of complaints I've seen posted here (and experienced personally) would mean that large numbers of PC motherboards are non-standard, and that is at best a stretch of the imagination.

Also, why is it that all of those bad computers suddenly start working again when Sony releases an update to SVP 11 that fixes specific problems. When I installed SVP 11 last October I was plagued by numerous crashes, freezes, broken features etc. Since then, each update to Vegas 11 has shortened that list of problems. They still have a ways to go, but it is getting better. This clearly debunks the notion that Vegas' problems are with the users PC. The bugs in Vegas, stay in Vegas, until Sony squashes them.

Gary

Gary James,

You write software and it works fine. Then you rewrite the entire underlying code to accommodate a specific hardware for a specific task. How long does it take for you to work out the bugs for various systems?

Thing is, "Sony" isn't really the company. Sony Creative Software is under Sony Pictures Digital, which is very much a separate and independent entity from Sony Consumer Electronics, which makes the PCs.

And why would software engineers use consumer VAIOs when they can get much more gutsy, powerful machines cheaper elsewhere?

Vidmus

"You write software and it works fine. Then you rewrite the entire underlying code to accommodate a specific hardware for a specific task. How long does it take for you to work out the bugs for various systems?"

I never said anything like that. I can see you have little understanding how software design works.

Microsoft, and all of the hardware venders write the drivers and interface code for Windows and their particular products. But each of these companies must adhere to interface specifications that provide application software with a unified method of access to low level functionality. Applications talk to device type X though the standard device type X interface protocol. If the code inside the device type X driver has bugs ( i.e. a buggy video driver, or buggy 3D titler FX ) the problem is not in the application software (i.e. Sony Vegas).

However, if the application software (i.e. Sony Vegas) has bugs such as presenting a new user interface to access a Color Corrector FX, then that problem is not in the hardware, the driver, or any other PC resource. It's in Vegas itself.

It's only recently that application software development has become much easier for the software engineers. In the good old days, much of the hardware abstraction that's provided by the operating system (i.e. Microsoft Windows) had to be coded by the application programmer. And that was the source of many software bugs. Today, Microsoft created something called .Net programming. Almost everything you can think of that a program needs to do to talk to hardware, exists as a resource that's made available to the application. Sony Vegas has been written using the .Net foundation for many years now. The .Net foundation has become so stable that it's being used for the development of many critical commercial and military applications. So when a program misbehaves today, chances are very good it's the program itself. Not anything the program uses; especially if those resources work fine for other versions of the same program. So, a buggy program is just that, a buggy program; not a bad computer.

Of course if your PC is underpowered, doesn't have enough disk space or memory, that will cause problems. But this isn't the case for many of the complaints I've seen. These walk, quack, and smell like a duck. A Sony Vegas software bug duck.

And why would software engineers use consumer VAIOs when they can get much more gutsy, powerful machines cheaper elsewhere?

The answer is that they'd use Sony consumer PCs because they are a Sony company, just as HP divisions use HP laptops. You do it to avoid the raised eyebrows when higher-ups come to your cube.

I suppose there might be a dividing line if Sony doesn't have a business product line, in which case they might be using a product line from a vendor they don't feel like they're competing with. But there's usually a lot of rawness and sensitivity to using competing products.

The underlying proposition here is that SCS makes sure their software works on a benchmark product line. Since Vegas is a consumer product, test on Sony's consumer PCs.

Rob

When I have gone to tradeshows where SCS promoted Vegas Video as a prosumer NLE they demonstrated it on Sony VAIOs and all of the reps were carrying around VAIOs. They were even demonstrating how easy it was to make a Blu-ray Disc on a laptop which was something FCP could not do at the time...

Obviously they do not use VAIOs to engineer the software, but if they are demonstrating the software on VAIOs then it is REASONABLE to expect the latest V11 product to work relatively bug-free on the VAIO. The fact that even the VAIOs were crashing with early releases meant that V11 was not ready for prime-time. I hope SCS has learned their lesson and V12 will work when released vs. all of us having to wait 6 months for a working version...

I've been with Vegas since 3.0. I also introduce FCP & PPro (CS) in my technology classes (but not Vegas because the school/curriculum does not support it...) I choose to use Vegas for the majority of my editing because I get jobs out the door faster.

Quote LEEE;

" I'm tired of the condescending and hostile replies. People are STILL implying that the people having crashes must be doing something wrong. And yes, after the 5th patch I have indeed lost hope that this will ever get fixed."


Ditto.

'Also, why is it that all of those bad computers suddenly start working again when Sony releases an update to SVP 11 that fixes specific problems. When I installed SVP 11 last October I was plagued by numerous crashes, freezes, broken features etc. Since then, each update to Vegas 11 has shortened that list of problems. They still have a ways to go, but it is getting better. This clearly debunks the notion that Vegas' problems are with the users PC. The bugs in Vegas, stay in Vegas, until Sony squashes them.'

Thank you Gary for a reasoned perspective on the issue.
I agree with your comments above entirely.
Many of the complaints are from users for whom versions 9 and 10 did and still work fine on the same PC's.
Constant sniping at these users by those who claim to have no problems helps no-one.

I have just had a thought that others more knowledgeable might be able to comment on.
The common wisdom here seems to be to turn off GPU processing which might make things more stable but defeats one of the main points of the upgrade.
No-one has ever suggested it is now safe to turn it back on and it would be interesting to know how many are still using the GPU successfully.
Could it be that in a few cases the increased load on the power supply caused by using GPU processing is a step too far for the power supply.
That the power supply copes for normal graphics which are not very demanding for an NLE but not when the GPU kicks in.
I am assuming the load increases and I am astounded by the power supply requirements of modern graphics cards especially of the type required for GPU processing in Vegas.
This is not to suggest that the problems are all PC related but if my reasoning is correct may point to a solution for a few.

I feel we are again in the same zone I was in after purchasing SVP10 and upgrading to 'e' where the there were still known, demonstrated, acknowledged and repeatable bugs but fearing rightly that SCS had moved on and would not fix them. Replaced media being an example.

Malcolm

"Microsoft, and all of the hardware venders write the drivers and interface code for Windows and their particular products. But each of these companies must adhere to interface specifications that provide application software with a unified method of access to low level functionality. Applications talk to device type X though the standard device type X interface protocol. If the code inside the device type X driver has bugs ( i.e. a buggy video driver, or buggy 3D titler FX ) the problem is not in the application software (i.e. Sony Vegas)."

Oh that it were all that simple.
Software today isn't an application having a quiet chat to device X through type X interface. It's an angry mob all screaming at once vieing for the attention of device X and device X shouting back answers all at random.
Worse Vegas uses a host of 3rd party code that has nothing to do with uSoft and some of it that has no real active support e.g. OpenCL. At the same time both Vegas and other code modules are trying to use the GPU to do other tasks.

Even worse, Vegas uses VFW, an interface that uSoft abandoned over 10 years ago that was left in a state with known bugs, at least one of which has caused me grief with Vegas for years. Whose fault is this?

Put simply there is a considerable chasm between how the "stuff" is meant to work and how in reality it does work in computers. Not many applications really push the stuff to the limit, it seems only video games and NLEs really stress it to the edge of its limits. Good coding involves more than writing good, clean code, the choices made about which road to go down have a profound effect on how well the application will run.

Vegas seems to me to provide a good example of this. It tries to do a lot of things others don't, it tries to do it using different interfaces, arguably it all should work. As we can see it doesn't. We also see that in part the problem is dependant on video card drivers. So who is at fault here, SCS or the video card vendors and their drivers?
Two questions arise in this scenario.
1) How was the code ever tested if it required driver versions that didn't exist at release time to work reliably. Was the release a shot in the dark, a hope that things would get better dependant on a 3rd parties doing work that SCS had no control over?
2) Why was OpenCL chosen over CUDA? The answer is it was a political decision. If CUDA was used AMD got locked out. This despite CUDA having been used for years by many other software vendors and the hardware vendor therefore having good reasons to address bugs and get it working correctly.

My experience is it is not as simple as a line in the sand that delineates areas of responsibility. There is also a responsibility for developers to know what pitfalls exist when you cross that line. Ultimately the decisions made are the responsibility of the company that the developers work for. This can go very wrong not because of incompetant coding but also because of poor architecture, poor project management and poor decision processes driven by policy.



Bob.

How much of the hardware in a Sony-branded computer is even genuinely manufactured by Sony? Like most PCs sold by other companies like HP, Dell and the like, Sony computers are a hodgepodge of components made by other companies and selected by Sony to use in their systems, the external ones (such as optical drives in desktops) rebranded. Sony even sells standalone optical drives that are simply rebranded drives manufactured by Lite-On, or other companies.

Whether they can guarantee Vegas Pro will work on a "Sony" computer is of little value to me; and I doubt it would mean much to most others, either. If VP11 were totally stable on a Sony PC, it's entirely likely it'd be totally stable and glitch-free on almost *any* PC built with decent-to-good components. By and large, standard Windows PCs vary little in terms of stability and compatibility with software. If you live on the cutting edge of graphics cards, or frequently use beta or non-WHQL drivers, you may experience more instability than most other people in certain cases; but otherwise I can't say that any of the numerous systems I've put together myself have ever exhibited inherent instability that was the fault of the hardware (unless a component was actually defective, such as a bad stick of RAM causing major errors/etc.) or drivers.

Bob, I think we both may have gone a bit off topic here. I'm well aware that Sony software is much more complex than what I described in a paragraph. I didn't want to make my answer into a technical dissertation on the software design techniques of the various sub systems that make up the Sony Vegas software architecture. My intent was to provide enough information to demonstrate that a separation of functionality exists between Vegas and it's hardware resources to be able to make a logical informed determination where a problem may exist.

As you pointed out, Vegas 11 is doing things that earlier versions could not. And the fact that Vegas is now squeezing more performance out of system hardware, has uncovered some hardware resource flaws. I've updated my nVidia drivers three times since October, and a couple of times a specific problem went away. This is clearly a case where Vegas was not the problem. It's more the case of Vegas having uncovered a problem that no one knew existed because a feature only used by SVP v11 had never been used before.

Also, as you point out, the "angry mob" of abstracted hardware services and data streams is handled in the Vegas code itself. Vegas is trying to be the traffic cop and arbitrator of what gets priority over what and where things flow and when. This is another case of hardware resources clashing for attention causing problems. But unlike the nVidia driver example, Vegas is the conductor of how things get played. And if the orchestra doesn't play the right notes together, it's the conductors fault, not the tuba playing video driver. ( i.e. Vegas not the PC ).

When Vegas 11 was first released, I said that it was released to market 6 months too soon. I retract that. It was released One Year too soon. Sony has achieved much towards a more stable Vegas release. But it has a long road ahead.

Gary,
I think we're both on the same page.
Now I have to get back to writing some more VBA :)
Many times I've been told I could be a much richer man writing way more challenging applications but I still have some hair left and just like the videos I produce I get a bit of a buzz out of what I do writing simple code that (just) meets the needs of our 80 or so clients. I'll leave the world of bleeding edge coding for the younger guys. I've stared into the belly of that beast and I've also seen first hand what it can do to people, thanks but no thanks.

Bob.