They are much more likely to send you a snotty little email for complaining about it, saying you are bad mouthing their product, that this is for a place for people who like Vegas, and to take your "beefs" elsewhere. And then they might send you a groveling apology from the Vice-President of marketing, that is if they suddenly realise your film is making the popular press and that you might actually slag them off in public for their conduct.

And then they may ignore you subsequent emails, I guess waiting for the phone call. Oh well we shall see what they turn out. I personally do not think we should be paying for a Version 9 release. It should be a free upgrade on account of the 8.0 series never actually working properly.

By the way, is it me, or are the preview window size options broken in 8.0c?

Well, I do think they're working on it. My guess is that it is a more substantial problem than a small bug. I just want to make sure they're paying attention.

And our film, Ready? OK!, has gotten popular press attention, with reviews by KPBS, ABC, a recent mention in the March 25 OK! magazine, a recent interview with our star Carrie Preston on the TV Guide channel (in relation to her parts in Duplicity and HBOs True Blood) and many others.

We also have one of the stars of ABC's Lost, Michael Emerson, with a large role in the film.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ready_ok/

So there are at least two of us here that have had the same issues hampering our successful commercial releases. Any others?

I thought this wasn't an issue specific to vegas but because of 32-bit memory limits & the same HD projects that cause vegas to puke in xp/vista 32 worked fine in vista 64.

I hit this last year in the 48 hour film project. Shot & edited everything in 1440x1080i but couldn't render out @ the end. I watched my memory & noticed it's maxing out on memory. My solution was to save several projects in chunks & render out that way, then make a "master" project with all the rendered chunks & render that.

It's an annoying work around but it's dooable with multiple instances of vegas open. Which you can't do with FCP.

So I'm sure it's not something that they haven't tried to fix but it may be impossible. Just like using 1024x1024 textures for everything in video games: memory limits start to show their ugly heads.

"Any others?"

Not me but someone I know fairly well. Around $1M budget.
He's now looking at a Quantel iQ system.

Same story really, lots of apologies, 8.0c made it 'better' but SCS had to admit they were having the same problem getting it to render. Then silence.

As for paying for upgrades. I don't think anyone really cares what an upgrade to an NLE costs, it's all small change when you're spending serious dollars on a production. It's when stuff doesn't work and you're loosing credibility and can't meet release deadlines, that's when people spit the dummy and the fanboys here who turn on them aggrevate the situation.

Bob.

An iQ will crash too...

(But yes, I do agree that bugs are bad and that this should be fixed!)

TheHappyFriar: I do not know where to begin with what you have said, but seriously, think it over. Is it really not Vegas's problem? Is it really the 32bit limits of Windows? So all my other programs that have high memory demands should be expected to plop out randomly when they are finding it they do not have enough memory?

A core part of developing software is reaching solutions within the limits of the capabilities of the platforms you are developing for. These days with the vast on-disk storage incorporated into every serious platform, there really should not be anything that can not be done on any machine (albeit with a performance overhead). However, in the circumstances where you run into the increasing rare 'low memory' scenario, you should have a thorough set of procedures to handle memory problems, and at least deliver a dialog to the user to explain what has happened and allow safe shut down and saving of work-in-progress.

However, this is clearly not a matter of the software just running out of memory due to the 32bit restrictions, as there are people running heavy projects on the 32bit platform that have no problem at all. There are a whole bunch of us that are getting GUI crashes errors, low processor usage on renders, and other random crash. A lot of the error reports I have seen suggest memory access violations, which as far as I am aware indicates that Vegas is trying to access memory outside of its own program area. That indicates something is wrong with the way Vegas keeps track of the memory it is using. Hence we are suggesting that it has memory handling problems.

In regards to 64bit, the Sony UK marketing man told me himself just a few weeks ago that 8.1 should not be considered ready for serious use yet. I get the impression that 8.1 came from a depreciated branch of the codebase, and that it was only released for the PR of being the "first" to make it to 64bit.

"8.1 should not be considered ready for serious use yet."

I've been using v8.1 quite a bit on HD projects that I can do using only those tools built into Vegas itself. Some of these projects have been quite large and relatively complex and I haven't had any problems at all. In fact, there is one project that will quickly cause v8.0c to run out of memory, but 8.1 just races right through it. I guess I should stop using it because a Sony marketing guy said it isn't ready.

No, if it serves your requirement in its current state, then of course, it makes sense to use it. However, I was suprised how dismissive my contact was of the software. I was just reporting an official Sony position. He more or less said himself it was all about being the first one out there with 64bit.

It is undeniable that 8.1 64bit is missing features that exist in 8.0c, and that it does not meet essential transitional requirements to allow users of the 32bit platform to smoothly move across (namely 32bit codec and plugin support).

But, the stability and memory problems of the 8.0 series have nothing to do with it being running under the limits of the 32bit platform. It is not a unstable piece of software because it is not 64bit.

I solved that problem about 3 years ago by going to 4 gig of ram. The other problem was putting 5 meg jpegs on the timeline that didn't need to be 5 megs when 500k was just fine. But if you did do the 5 meg bit you could get around it by multiple renderings to avi then inserting the avi in place of the jpegs on the timeline then delete the jpegs. Since going to Vista 64 bit with 8 gig ram have had no problem at all but I have not tried going the 32 bit route yet.
JJK

"In regards to 64bit, the Sony UK marketing man told me himself just a few weeks ago that 8.1 should not be considered ready for serious use yet."

Let me guess... this was the same guy that told you Vegas is dead, right? ;)
I don't think "marketing people" tell you anything at all.... I think you just make it up as you go along.

As for crashing.... I don't.
Vista 64, quad core, 8 gig ram with no page file. Memory usage climbs maybe 500meg from start to finish of a 2 hour HDV timeline

TheHappyFriar: I do not know where to begin with what you have said, but seriously, think it over. Is it really not Vegas's problem? Is it really the 32bit limits of Windows? So all my other programs that have high memory demands should be expected to plop out randomly when they are finding it they do not have enough memory?

I can't open 32,000x32,000 pixel images w/o having a problem in a photo app, that's not a photoshop problem. I can't load up several 300,000 poly models w/ 2048x2048 textures w/o having problems (even 1 300,000 poly model will bring nearly anything to it's knees), that's not a maya problem. There's a very good reason anything in 3d uses texture compression & tricks on low poly models. There's also a very good reason 3d guys don't do who movies in 1 scene, the composite several different scenes. Maybe we're at that stage with memory usage now where we need start thinking that way (you also don't see 3d guys complain the software sucks when they can't work optimally, they change the way they work)

Considering I have autosave turned on & I still save manually all the time (CTRL+S can be run @ any time w/o disrupting anything, except during renders), out of memory errors (not calling them bugs because it doesn't look like they are) aren't a killer for me. And they've only popped up in HD, and I can track my memory to see when they'll happen so I can avoid them.

All systems have limits. Hard drive space won't help with ram no matter what. The system still required ram. i've never gotten memory access violations, GUI crashes, random crashes, etc. Everything that happens I am always able to track down to a cause that can be eliminated/avoided. OS's can use a swap file but it's not the same as RAM. How useful would a video editor be that read off your hard drive, wrote to ANOTHER space on your drive, then read that data, then wrote the changes to ANOTHER space on the hard drive? Just to edit? It would take longer then rendering, and when one frame takes a minute to render, you're talking 60 minutes just to PREVIEW a 30 minute clip so you can edit it.

I think I've said it before: maybe it's my rig just works really really well. If you don't have a rig like mine, try building a duplicate & see if you get the same issues. Or post up some stuff that's causing issues on your end for others to check & see. If you're spending big $$ or losing big $$ with issues & want to stick with the software then it's worth the few hundred to test it out. If my comp did nothing but crash I wouldn't still be using it, I'd be trying something different if I couldn't figure out what it was (when I got it it did crash: ends up the clip for the CPU heatsink came loose & my CPU had a very loose heat sink)

"I think I've said it before: maybe it's my rig just works really really well. If you don't have a rig like mine, try building a duplicate & see if you get the same issues."

This is exactly why I'm convinced this is not a Vegas issue but rather a 'hardware/software conflicting with Vegas' issue. There are enough people claiming no issues so that it can't be a generalized bug in Vegas.

I at one time had terrible crashing issues and access violations. In a 2 hour render I would crash at least 30 times. It was so bad that I didn't even bother re rendering... just took the 30 rendered bits from all the crashing into another program and stitched them all together.

Then I completely redid my machine... and now it's solid as a rock.

"This is exactly why I'm convinced this is not a Vegas issue but rather a 'hardware/software conflicting with Vegas' issue"

Weather this statement is true or not, SCS will eventually fix the "conflict" problem IN Vegas. lol

As a general rule of thumb,...with all software. For every person that reports a problem, there are typically many more that have the same problem but don't report it.

The people on this board are only a cross section of all the Vegas people around the world.

CT

Go SCS!,...I know you will nail this thing!

"As a general rule of thumb,...with all software. For every person that reports a problem, there are typically many more that have the same problem but don't report it."

The EXACT same can be said the other way around... As a general rule of thumb,...with all software. For every person that reports all is well, there are typically many more that claim all is well but don't report it.

In fact you'll rarely EVER hear from those who AREN'T having issues

"In fact you'll rarely EVER hear from those who AREN'T having issues."

In the spirit of someone from the Silent Majority speaking up about this, let me just say that so far I'm not having any Vegas issues.

Well....except for one thing. A few days ago I added the Neat Video demo plugin and since then on two occasions when I started up Vegas I got the message "Sony Vegas has encountered a problem and must close". I clicked OK and started it up again and it ran fine.

So let me revise that to say I'm not seeing any serious problems.

I think that even if Vegas is doing a reasonable and predictable thing by crashing when it runs out of memory, it could and should do something else. I don't care if it's real bug fixing or just social engineering (like nag screens telling you that your project is too big and you need to "do something")

The problem with discovering this in a feature film is that you're likely to have way too much work into the project by the time Vegas becomes unusable.

I have a similar problem in DreamWeaver. Huge static site designed by others and there's no budget now to convert it to better technology. We probably have 16k pages in it by now and DreamWeaver lumbers along. Painfully. Slowly. But it tracks all our crosslinks, warns us if files are affected by a deletion, does all sorts of useful things that just wouldn't happen in Notepad.

I could back out of DreamWeaver much more easily than Vegas. In DW, it's just a web site. In Vegas, it's a proprietary project file.

I kind of think that even if SCS fixed memory problems that a major part of the fix is social engineering. Customers (us) are always going to outstrip Vegas's capabilities Unless Vegas actually starts to say "No. You have to start a new project file now."

Rob Mack

I've used a number of video editors and I can't imagine ever leaving Vegas - it's toooo good.

However, as I've mentioned numerous times, my projects tend to be long with lots of special effects (I regularly use numerous feathered masks, which seem to be especially difficult for Vegas to render). My reliable work-around is to cut up the projects into 2-min. (or even 1-min.) segments. Even so, Vegas will rarely render more than a half-dozen before a crash; sometimes even the first segment will bring it to its knees (hence the 1-min segments). No problem - I just restart the rendering.

I sometimes get a little further into a project without a crash if I take my project off my Q6600/AsusP5B and put it on my old Intel P4/Intel D875PBZ.....But still the same pattern repeats itself: Render, crash, restart, crash, restart, crash, . . . .

It eats into my productive time, and I'm praying for a fix. But ya gotta take the world you get, not the world you want, and I'm not leaving the wonderful Vegas world.

"I sometimes get a little further into a project without a crash if I take my project off my Q6600/AsusP5B and put it on my old Intel P4/Intel D875PBZ.....But still the same pattern repeats itself: Render, crash, restart, crash, restart, crash, . . . ."

Now what is that I see off in the distance? Oh yes... now I see it... it's the "quad core" theory being blown out of the water. :)

Thanks all for your input on this problem. It will be fixed soon, I'm sure. Sony is just too professional of a company to let something like this go on too long.

And I think it says a lot about how great a product Vegas is that despite these problems, we're all working on solutions and workarounds rather than talking about jumping ship.

Vegas is just too good.

Good post Mark.

*irony* You see, this is just like what happened with the bankers. All we hear about is the people mad with them for squirting all our money up the wall, and we don't hear about all the people that are happy about it. */irony*

Blink that was the Sony man that told me it was not dead and that 8.1 was not for serious use yet.