On customer care - or just caring in general

Terje wrote on 6/23/2008, 1:21 PM

I have posted before that I feel I see a negative tendency with SCS and that this trend makes me worried about investing further in SCS software. Previously I have talked about how glaring quality issues typically is a reflection on rot in management and therefore a serious sign of problems, and other issues that makes me worry, not so much about the quality of the software as such, but of the quality of the organization.

A few weeks back SCS announced that they were releasing DVD-A 5 in mid-June, now your definition of mid may vary a lot, but by most definitions, it is no longer mid. Now, I have absolutely no problem at all with SCS delaying a release for a short while if they have run into some quality issues they need to fix, that is a Good Thing <sup>(TM)</sup>. Quality is more important than releasing exactly on time.

Obviously we all know about the announcements around Vegas 64 that never materialized to some peoples chagrin. Again, if there are quality issues, fine, hold back the release and fix the issues.

Finally, these fora. SCS owned and operated, but there literally no SCS presence here. There used to be as far as I can remember, but not so any more.

What kind of trend am I seeing here? I see a trend where there is nobody in the organization that cares about their customers. Not a single person.

If there were customer-centric people in SCS, they would communicate with their customers. If a release was, in any way announced and then delayed, they would immediately inform their customers, preferably with a new projected release date or information of some kind. If there were people in SCS that were customer focused at all they would have the overall responsibility of managing the SCS fora, making sure that important discussions had SCS personnel contributing if needed. There is no such presence.

I love Vegas, it is a great editor in my opinion. I do not have a particularly high opinion of Adobe traditionally but they have been doing some good stuff lately. I have watched a lot of good companies die due to lack of customer focus and lack of management who cares.

From the outside, SCS is currently showing a lot of bad signs, and that worries me. There is a good chance that I will not be upgrading to Vegas 9, not because Vegas isn't an excellent tool, it is, but because I am losing faith in the company that delivers it. If I am to invest any of my time and money in anything that I like to do, I have to have faith in the company I am handing over my cash to.

I don't use Premiere, but I do use Flex and Photoshop from Adobe, and I have to admit, the user experience and my experience with Adobe in general, is significantly better than was the case some 10 years ago when I was struggling with Photoshop at an Advertising Agency. Adobe also seems to have an overall strategy for their business while SCS seems to have no clue what they want to do with their future.

Is it time to forget about Vegas and go for CS3?

Sadly, since SCS is not monitoring these fora, they will never know that such concerns are aired among their loyal customer base.

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Comments

baysidebas wrote on 6/24/2008, 11:18 AM

"Summer just started a couple of days ago." Let's not forget that for our friends in Oz, summer will not start for another six months... ;>)

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/24/2008, 12:28 PM

I'm actually considering the the new AMD Opteron 1352 Barcelona 2.1GHz quad core over the phenom cpu - it uses only 75watts as compared to 125 watts for the phenoms. Found out my Corsair PC6400 XMS RAM will work with the processor and am looking at getting a Gigabyte Mobo that supports the processor - if I knew my current mobo supported this CPU, I'd just go with that.

But does seem that for whatever reason, Vegas Pro does seem to work better with the AMD instruction set versus Intel - but I'm only speculating on this idea.

Maybe there's a reason why AMD was involved at this years NAB event with SONY.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

farss wrote on 6/24/2008, 2:00 PM

"There are about 15-20 people, at most, on this forum, having serious problems, so unless there are only about 100 people on this entire planet using Vegas, I'd say majority are doing fine."

Some time ago, when there was far more activity than now, someone had a thread doing a head count of how many users visit this site, the thread petered out at under 400 users. Obviously there's more than 400 Vegas users on this planet but to suggest that of the total userbase only 25 or so are having this problem or that there isn't a problem is plainly daft as:

a) SCS have admitted there's a problem.
b) It only affects HDV, how many users are editing HDV?
c) Users are more likely to suffer in silence or just switch.
d) Come here and see the problem is already noted so why add to the noise.
e) I do agree, the worst incarnation of the problem does seem to afflict only those editing HDV from tape on Intel Quad core systems.
f) At least one of the vocal complainers was until recerntly one of the "I'm OK, don't know what you're all complaining about" guys.

Factor in all the above and 25 people here complaining about the problem is statistically a very high percentage.
I have a HDV project that I could get to render OK on a very lowly Core Duo. T/L playback where there were correctable errors in the m2t file was painfully slow (minutes per frame) but it didn't crash. I've now upgraded to a Q4 system. It'll be interesting to see if it will still render.

Bob.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/24/2008, 2:47 PM

Bob said:

I have a HDV project that I could get to render OK on a very lowly Core Duo. T/L playback where there were correctable errors in the m2t file was painfully slow (minutes per frame) but it didn't crash.

So I wonder if this is something that can be resolved with Cineform Neo or using the Veggie Toolkit to convert these clips to SONY YUV.

I wonder if all this doesn't boil down to Vegas puking with editing Long GOP m2t files instead of frame based AVI files - either Cineform or converted to SONY YUV - which seems to occur the most with Intel Quad Core Processors.

Media Composer works with their Avid DNxHD36 codec, Apple uses their ProRes, Adobe PPro and Aspect/Prospect provide the same thing. Seems as though these Intermediate solutions remove many of the challenges of working with m2t files - and the associated challenges that appear to arise editing the long GOP file format.

If editing the native m2t files is replaced with an equivalent frame based AVI file - does this resolve the issues surrounding Vegas Pro?

Any thoughts?

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

farss wrote on 6/24/2008, 5:14 PM

I believe so. It should at the least cure one of the possible sources of problems. And the big plus is you get the overhead of decoding the mpeg-2 stream done in one hit. The down side is clearly you need more disk space and your disk I/O datarate increases. You don't need the Veggie Toolkit to do the conversion, it's only a tool for batching Vegas but a damn fine one because you can easily set it up to take all or selected files in one folder are render them to something else in another folder using Vegas. It creates the Vegas project to do this on the fly as it were. For us it's paid for itself 100 times over. And even better so far ALL updates have been free.
/end plug/.

The other thing is IF you convert to another codec before editing and something does go awry you can easily isolate the problem. I know, I know, Vegas should just WORK. but as you've said, look around at how others have approached the HDV problem and you see a lot in common. Realistically HDV is difficult to edit, the overhead in correcting errors must be considerable and the errors can be in more than one GOP if caused by minor head clogs.

Bob.

rmack350 wrote on 6/24/2008, 5:49 PM

I think maybe you're having conflicts on your "duel" cores. "Dual" cores might not duel each other so much.

Couldn't resist. And now back to grumbling...

Rob Mack

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/24/2008, 5:49 PM

Did a test convert of a single clip using a template I created for Gearshift and rendered out the clip.

For a 1440x1080 SONY 10-bit YUV - the clip went from a 25.3mb m2t file to a 1280x720 543mb AVI file. Tried the same thing with the SONY 8-bit YUV and the file reduced to 423mb. That's a pretty big increase in file size. So went ahead and installed the Cineform Neo Trial and converted the same file to the same 1280x720 - Neo created a 54.3mb Cineform AVI file.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 6/27/2008, 5:25 AM

To return to the original topic:

Direct Quote from the forum header: "...[the] forum is a peer support area where you can share tips and advice with other Sony Creative Software product users. We monitor these boards periodically
..."

Frankly speaking, this periodic monitoring could be more frequent, or if it is, it should be more visible. Well, the kind of monitoring is not revealed in the above statement, but hopefully it concentrates on technical issues, not only on abuse of the forum rules...

This video forum IS monitored (at least periodically), I have personal experience about it. I got an immediate response after presenting my problem, together with enough details - and without unnecessary rage. At that time I was ripping hair from my head with my problem, but decided to count to 100 000 before writing my post ;) The ForumAdmin gave me a workaround and admitted that this was an acknowledged problem. That kind of honesty is appreciated, by most people. I remember how good I felt, and 5 minutes earlier I was ready to flush the application down the toilet...

There is always a reason and often a workaround for every problem. A respectible company also issues fixes for commong problems within an accetable time frame. It goes for software as well as for hardware. It is important for the customers to know that the issue is acknowledged, and that there is a fix coming. Meanwhile the customer should be presented with a workaround (if existing). That is how you guarantee happy returning customers, even if there IS problems in the product. Here SCS must improve a lot - I hope that the policy to keep quiet comes is not coming all the way from Japan...

It is so much easier to communicate with customers that are able to calmly give a good explanation of the problem.. I have been responsible for the aftersales service in a high-tech company for a couple of years, so I know what I'm talking about. It's very frustrating to listen to all the rage and dirty words. It does not help the case, but might help the customer to feel better, for the moment. At the same time it makes the support person to feel quite bad. It's not an easy situation. You (probably) understand the customers anger. But the customer should also understand that no-one caused the problem deliberately. The only way to tackle the problem is co-operation. And sarcasm is not a good building ground.

There have been studies that tell that customers that have had problems are happier and more satisfied than customers without problems, But only AS LONG AS the aftersales service is pristine, or at least at an acceptable level. Such customers feel that they just did not get ordinary service, they feel that they got extra-ordinary service.

SCS - dropping a line or two, now or then, would surely do the trick. Do not keep us in the dark!!!

You could start with letting us know a more precise (intended) release date(s) for DVDA 5 and VP 8.0c. Summer 2008 is a little vague...come on - there is now winter on the other hemisphere..

Christian

je@on wrote on 6/27/2008, 8:26 AM

http://www.videobeach.com/media/crickets_10sec.mp3And from SCS we hear...[/link]