Sorry for the sensationalist headline...but here goes:
Since I've been on windows 10 pro, with a second fresh install, things have been going much better. Renders were faster, Vegas ran smoother, all seemed just more fluent and easy. V15 ran pretty well and was stable. I even dared to render a few projects with GPU on, which repeatedly produced totally messy results in Win 7. All went OK until I finished my rather complex compositing project with the kids workshop I had posted about a while ago.
Things started to get messy again. Renders showed injected random frames of some event somewhere in the project, like for 6-8 frames long, in between 2 adjacent clips, and always on a different spot of the timeline / final clip. There was no guessing where ( and why) it would occur next. A try to render with V16 was a catastrophe. Composited tracks messed up, masks suddenly didn't work or showed thick borders, carefully dialed in luma keys with FX chains before them suddenly spilled all over the place. And that's with the exact same project, settings, GPU, safety measures like RAM to zero, show progress while render OFF etc.
OK back to V15 in no time. Render with GPU off. Now, all of a sudden, a mask goes haywire that's been rendering just fine before, another key suddenly pixelated heavily and showed saw tooth borders.
Turns out that with the mask issue, something in the FX chain was "wrong", pan/crop had to be at the end of the FX chain to make the mask actually mask. Strange tho that it worked OK in all the renders before that.
As I write, I'm rendering - again - with GPU off on V15, praying it turns out OK. The amount of hours I lost rendering, watching the result ( luckily only 7 minutes), re-rendering, error hunting, trying, is just insane. with GPU on, the render for this project takes 36 minutes, GPU off about 80. A good reason to try and leave GPU on.
Now, I really try and avoid joining the complaining choir here, and I've mostly been fervently on Vegas' side among colleagues and in discussions and I've repeatedly expressed y lot of enthusiasm for Vegas and also magix, but seriously, guys, I'm losing my good will and patience here. The random issues, capricious behavior, the many workarounds, then time lost because of rather indeterminable issues and messed up renders is just becoming disheartening ( and that's a diplomatic way to put it). Not to mention the cash I just parted with for V16.
I have no idea to what degree other NLEs suffer from similar dysfunctions, but I'm starting to look around for alternatives, as much as I hate to. why is it that Vegas is so hard to get right? Is it the hardware chaos among users, is it some voodoo in the coding, is built on old and messy code? I just don't quite get it.
Ok rant over, time to get away from the screens.