Production Assistant in Vegas :(

LarsHD wrote on 6/2/2010, 2:36 AM

When starting Production Assistant from within Vegas:

"Your License has expired" and offers me the option to click "OK"
"Cannot find any installed BackPacks"
Etc etc etc.

I purchased this PA from Sony Creative Software hoping it would at least launch reliably.

QUESTION: Is this a known bug? Is there an easy fix / workaround? If not, I'll spend a couple of hours moving this old little vegas-project over to the new editing instead.

I'm really so tired of Vegas and this patchwork feeling I get when opening it up.

I haven't started any new projects in Vegas for a long time now. But now and then I have to use Vegas to take care of older productions for clients, updating and changing stuff etc.

Every time now I feel like I'm opening up Vegas is like going back in time and perfomance.

What I said about Vegas earlier: the fast and easy to use interface etc. I really have to take that back now after having done several productions in other NLE's. Vegas is slower, unpredictable, messy and old. I can't see any good reasons at all to start new editing sessions in the app. Sorry.

And it's not just a question about performance. It's about the whole concept of how you edit etc.

If anyone has a solution to that Production Assistant bug I'd be greateful to know. Otherwise I'll just spend the time it takes to free this project too from Vegas.

Best
Lars

Back to post

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 6/3/2010, 11:55 AM

This is the same type of behavior that drove me crazy seven years ago, but it was relatively easy to deal with. This seems much more serious. What exactly are the parameters of Lars test case? Can you post a VEG?

LarsHD wrote on 6/3/2010, 1:04 PM

Render to uncompr AVI = never had skipped/double frames.
Render footage with lots of noise / detail / where every frame is entirely different from the preceeding fram = encoding to MXF gets upset and double/skipped frames may occur.

I discovered this back when I was comparing Cineform vs MXF.

On normal footage it rarely happens or isn't a problem I think. But it can happen has happened. If this happens once in the middle of some nature program it may not be the end of the world. If it happens on a graphics/animation/corporate logo it really is very bad.

You can observe Vegas struggling with the encoding process when trying to render out a sequence with lots of noise. It takes ages for it to caclulate and encode compared to footage with "simple" content where the frames are similar or identical.

It simply seems it is missing or failing sometimes.

Another problem is that Vegas video preview is so bad that that itself may skip/double a frame resulting in situations where it *looks* like there was a skipped /doubles frame when it really wasn't.

So if you know it can REALLY happen and it can also only look AS IF it happened it is easy to understand how much I enjoy the reliable preview other NLE's are providing. Iti's wonderful to have a preview that's smooth and looks like the final thing.

Still this isn't the biggest drawback with Vegas.

Lars

Udi wrote on 6/3/2010, 1:43 PM

Is the source file interlaced, 25p or 24p ?
Does Vegas see it correctly?
If you render to a different frame rate - still have the same problem?
Rendering to other format - wmv or mpeg2 ?