Is Vegas 8 more unstable than previous versions?

gerbow46 wrote on 1/18/2009, 2:06 PM
Apologies if I am asking silly questions, but I have used Vegas for various projects (mainly Vegas 6 and 7). It was great - rock solid and ultra reliable and brilliant for editing sound and creating DVDs with DVD Architect.
I upgraded to Vegas 8 when it was released but have not used it until recently. I am using Vegas 8.0c on Vista 32 under bootcamp. (I have a Mac Pro 2.0GHz Intel Xeon (x2) with 5GB of ram, although not all the ram shows up in Vista 32; Vista 64 is not an option because I have a pre2008 MacPro!).
Vegas has not been always been my main NLE (I used to use Liquid), although I am now considering using it as my main nle because I have recently moved from a Canon MVX45i DV camera to a Canon HF100 AVCHD camera. I am really happy with the camera. Vegas loads the .mts files and plays them back smoothly. There does not seem to be an avchd preset so I am using the blu-ray 1920x1080 50i preset (which is mpeg2). Is that the one I should be using? However - every now and then everything disappears and I am left staring at an empty desktop. Is it just the avchd which is stressing the program? Or is Vegas 8 less stable generally? I have adorage vitascene plugin for transitions, but if I go near that the program always crashes. Could that be the issue? How do I remove the plugin without uninstalling Vitascene?
Also, does Vegas have any issues creating an sd-dvd from HD footage? Do I simply render to dv and import into DVD Architect? At the moment, I do not have a Blu-ray burner. I intend to get one soon, but will produce DVDs (and bluray dics images) in the interim. Thanks in advance for any advice.

Comments

blink3times wrote on 1/18/2009, 2:27 PM
Vegas for me is just as solid as ever with HDV. I can throw just about anything at it without any issues. Avchd however is a different ball game. Many people are in the same boat as you and have found 8.1 (64 bit) more stable than 8c for avchd. If you haven't got a 64bit machine then your best bet for render is AVC with a separate audio file as opposed to a m2ts file.
gerbow46 wrote on 1/18/2009, 3:12 PM
Great. Thanks. I figured it was avchd that was causing the problems. Wanted to use Vegas because it handles avchd natively, rather than transcoding to another format (pro-res, cineform, etc.)
cliff_622 wrote on 1/19/2009, 11:04 AM

Question: Is Vegas 8 more unstable than previous versions?

Answer: Yes
kentwolf wrote on 1/19/2009, 11:36 AM
>>...Question: Is Vegas 8 more unstable than previous versions?...

For me...

Answer: No.

but...I am working exclusively SD material.
gerbow46 wrote on 1/19/2009, 3:28 PM
Are you using avchd?
JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/19/2009, 3:35 PM
> Question: Is Vegas 8 more unstable than previous versions?

I would say that I'm a lot more unstable than I was 6 years ago when I started using Vegas 3 so it's hard to tell who's really to blame here. ;-D

Overall Vegas Pro 8.0 is very stable for me. It does seem like Vegas 6 had less problems but Vegas 6 didn't have HDV. (well it did but it wasn't very good at it). True I never saw a RED frames on the timeline when working with DV (...that was a much simpler time) so HDV has brought along it's complexity and with that a few new glitches. But overall, I find it to be very stable.

~jr
michaelshive wrote on 1/19/2009, 4:29 PM
In my experience, yes. Use it for SD all you want but I would not recommend using it for any HD project with a deadline.