Yes I have also received correspondence from Paddy Cassidy and am delighted at SCS response to help us.

Much appreciated guys. From our side we will give you as much support/feedback as we possibly can. Big thumbs up.

Obviously, SCS wants Vegas to be the best it can be and this has always been the case. SCS is made up of people that have names and lives and they take pride in their work just like we all take pride in our work.

Well, my hat's off to SCS for this.

Paul.

Maybe all the moaning here has done some good that'll produce outcomes of benefit to SCS and it's users.
Well done to those who've persisted and well done SCS for listening and acting.

Bob.

What an excellent response. It's gotta make you feel good to be heard. And, Van, does this mean we can pile on you when V12 comes out? ;-) Just joshing of course.

Larry

Anthony J C wrote:
" All too often this forum is a deluge of people whining that Pro 11 won't run on their Sinclair ZX81 "

Hey, watch your mouth. I have a Timex Sinclair 1000. It has twice the memory.

So I'm going to talking with a SCS engineer at 12:30 PST today. I sent them my list of issues, which I've detailed below:

Current Vegas Pro 11 Build 521 64 bit Problems

Bugs
1) Crashes, garbled previews, and garbled renders when rendering Cineform clips. I do not know if this is a Cineform only problem. David Newman from Cineform provided new DLLs that were supposed to solve the problem, and it did solve some of them, but not all of them. He stated that Vegas currently has problems with high bitrate file formats and that Sony was aware and fixing this problem. I have a few screenshots proving that the problem still exists in Build 521 (see all jpgs starting with 'Bug 1'). This bug is currently the most frustrating and has caused me countless hours of wasted time.

2) Rendering to WMV crashes Vegas. I can render to some WMV templates, but I have one that causes Vegas to crash everytime. See screenshot 'Bug 2'.

3) Vegas sometimes says it can't find media while loading a project when it has the correct path! See attached screenshot 'Bug 3'. The file did exist in that location. It seems to have the correct path, but says it can't locate the file for some reason....And it asks you to locate every single piece of media in the project! Interestingly, if you tell it to ignore these errors, the project loads all the media fine. This is hard to recreate but does happen more often when loading old projects that have moved locations.

4) Keyframing within the OFX interface is terribly glitchy! Keyframes can be added on non-frame boundaries, and when I try to move those keyframes, they stay shifted slightly from frame boundries. Also, when I shrink the size of an event, keyframes that exist beyond it's new boundaries get pulled to the end of the clip and still exist, but are invisible and cannot be visually selected!

5) The new 'Text Media' has glitches and is much slower. Previews and renders take much longer than the old Text Media from Vegas 10 and earlier. In early versions of Vegas 11, I was able to get Vegas to crash when using it, but this seems to have been fixed in the latest version (build 521). One glitch that still exists: the on-preview bounding box shrinks to nothing when the scale of the text is too big or too small. MINOR NOTE: The lag between the bounding box and text it surrounds when repositioning the bounding box in the preview window also gives the interface a shoddy feel.

6) Something is broken with crossfades when a track has a 'Sony Levels' VFX applied to it. Instead of a video clip fading, I get some kind of over saturation effect. See 'Bug 6' screenshot. Note the cursor position and preview window.

NOTE: It was easier for me to crash Vegas 11 in earlier builds compared to build 521. I believe most of the problems involving third-party plugins like NewBlue and Boris have been fixed (although people are still reporting issues in build 521). I fiddled with some of the those plug-ins and was unable to crash Vegas. These problems made Vegas crash at a least a few times every day for me when Vegas 11 first came out.

Annoyances
1) Vegas can't find project media when you move a project from one drive to another. Even though the directory structure stays exactly the same, Vegas can't find media within that structure as it hard codes the drive letter into all paths for files. This makes it very hard to share projects with others! Paths should be relative to the VEG file, not absolute. If there is an option to change this, please let me know.

2) When switching away from Vegas to another application and then back to Vegas with a medium sized project, it can take as much as 10 seconds for Vegas to become responsive. Is there any way to eliminate this delay? Doesn't matter if I have the Media Manager enabled or not.

3) No word wrap in either the new nor old 'Text Media' generator... makes for time consuming manual formatting when changing font size.

4) The interface for Pro Titler.... the dictionary definition for unintuitive should have a picture of the Pro Titler interface screen beside it. :) Trying to load one of the collections (at least in Vegas 10) and then modify it is an exercise in frustration.

5) The fact that many options within codec setting screens before a render (particularly the Mainconcept MP4 format) do absolutely nothing. I spent many hours with a SCS support ticket over a year ago trying to explain this. Never was resolved, except to say: "contact Mainconcept". Options that do nothing should not be present, or at least greyed out.

6) Colorspace... it's complicated in Vegas. www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/v8color/vegas-9-levels.htm Why should I have to look up data in a graph to see if I need to apply a Sony Levels VFX (computer RGB to studio RGB) to my output before rendering? Other NLE's have automated methods to manage this. Vegas should too.
-----------------------------
I'll let you know how the call goes.

Not to throw cold water on this thread, but I had a chance to talk to SCS last week. They gave me a lot of time, and listened very attentively. They encouraged me to report bugs through the tech support mechanism at the top of this page and stated that they are only set up to receive bugs through that process (i.e., they don't have a mechanism to translate the chatter in these forums into formal bug reports that get submitted to engineering).

I was very encouraged, but ...

I have received no response to any of the numerous bug reports I have been submitting. I just sent a frustrated email to them, but the bottom line is that I'm not going to waste my time doing any more testing because all my reports are apparently just going into a black hole.

So, while I was temporarily encouraged by what seemed like a genuine desire to listen to the problems, I have gotten 0.0% response rate to my bug submissions, many of them quite serious, and most of them easily repeatable.

I'm also discourage about Prodad. They at least respond right away, but they also can't seem to understand how Vegas works, and they won't acknowledge that a show-stopper bug (all stabilization is lost when you render from 60p material to DVD) even exits.

I've wasted way too much time on this stuff, and I have to place some value on my time.

So, I have asked to be removed from any future testing, and will no longer bother to submit bug reports to their tech support or to this forum. It is a waste of my time. Hopefully, the rest of you will have better luck.

John - investigation and troubleshooting is in your blood. You do it for the challenge. When you discover something and share it with the forum community, it's very much appreciated even if it feels like Sony isn't listening. Your friends are.

Steve

"... even if it feels like Sony isn't listening. Your friends are."

To what end?

And (hopefully) Sony actually is too. Just maybe they don't respond to the hundreds of bug-reports because they are busy try to fix the bugs !

geoff

PS Do those who complain about no response actually get the automated acknowledgement email ? If you don't, then possibly the report has not beed received correctly.

Well, I just got off the phone with about 4 guys at SCS. One of them being the project lead for Vegas and another the QA lead. It surprised me that I was talking with this group to be honest. We talked for an hour about the issues that I had listed. They are aware of most of them, but for some of the issues I will be providing further information in an effort to help them solve the problem. They genuinely seemed concerned. I made sure to let them know that stability was really important for myself (and many others), and that I felt stability has gone downhill since Vegas 8. They pointed out that Vegas 11 has had many updates already and this is a new strategy in an effort to combat this instability.

The QA lead wants me to join their beta program, which I will. This will take more of my time, but if I can have a direct line to the engineers, I think it will be well worth the time. I hope that my experience in the coming weeks will not be similar to John Meyer's, who says that SCS has not been responsive since his interaction with them some time ago.

I'll keep you posted.

Van - thank you for having done the effort and used the time to obtain a link into SCS.

SCS has been nearly impossible to "reach" in the past - like john meyer i also have given up submitting some support tickets - feeling that feeding a black hole was to no help - or from getting answers back that indicated that nobody had bothered to read them - (but I am back to 10.0e anyway - and feeling lucky that this fairly new version is so rock stable and faithfull for my normal work)

So - it also surprises me positively and gives new hope to see that even more departments now seem to be working together to get Vegas back to track again.

>> SCS has been nearly impossible to "reach" in the past

Seems like SCS have had some sort of shake-up somewhere. A new product manager or something. Things appear to have changed rather dramatically. This is such a new way of working for SCS that I am highly encouraged, and may even upgrade to 11. Perhaps. I will at least continue to follow this closely.

Good job whoever did the rear-end-kicking at SCS. It was badly needed.

Okay - it's 4-13 - I sure haven't seen any progress. Has anyone else gotten any real help?
Thanks!

I hoped VanLazarus got some headway, because with the release of Adobe CS6 Premiere Pro. They are focusing on what's under the hood and the workflow. An the new SpeedGrade!

I've been very active as a beta tester and have gotten lots of feedback and assistance. Haven't really helped solve any of the real major bugs that are plaguing Vegas yet.... but I guess that's why they are still there.... they are hard to find and fix.

I have said this before, but I think SCS would solve 90% of the problems by going back to a non-GPU dependent platform. It would be a bold step, but I bet it would work. So maybe they would have to scale back a few "features" we don't really need in favor of what we rally need - stability!

John

I agree with what John has said

From my experience when using GPU acceleration, I've had many crashes. I decided to turn-off GPU acceleration and can edit for hours without any crashes.

Robert.

Not sure if I agree. From what the PP users have posted (runs crash-free) GPU acceleration is doable without introducing headaches for the users.

If Adobe can do it the coders at SCS can't?

Steve

I'm sure the softeare engineers at SCS can develop GPU acceleration to perform without problems. I think more development and testing is needed and in time they will deliever GPU acceleration that is stable.

Robert.

"If Adobe can do it the coders at SCS can't?"

It *might* have something to do with Vegas still using the VFW interface whereas Adobe has used DirectShow and don't support OFX.
Also Adobe use CUDA and seem to have their own code. SCS use OpenCL.
Seems to me then that Adobe have a far greater degree of control over the code than SCS who are reliant on 3rd party code and the long obsolete VFW.

Bob.