So, that's a yes pelase from Bob - then?

We have it SF10, would be nice to see some X-platform howdy-dooodies?

Grazie

"So, that's a yes pelase from Bob - then?"

Yes, but I should add one caveat.
Please, please, fix Vegas BEFORE adding anything else to it. The camel is struggling, don't make this the straw that breaks it's back completely.

Bob.

Amen Grazie, I'm definitely with ya on this. You too Bob. Doesn't make too much sense to move forward only for the sake of moving forward.

Sab

Unhappily, it does make sense. In the standard PC mass market software business model, revenue is tied to new version release. A new version implies new features. While there have probably been such cases, I'm not aware of any vendor who advertised a new release as "the brand new Version X.X has no pesky new features, just tons of bug fixes". Thus, the short term financial incentive for someone like SCS is to establish a version release schedule (at least internally, if not shared with its customers) and strive mightily to meet it with release-ready software. When development falls short, they're left with the trade-off between deferring revenue until the product is ready, or releasing the product (possibly in late-beta status), hopefully realizing the revenue and cleaning things up late. It takes a great deal of self-discipline to choose the former, and in my opinion most companies (including SCS, at least lately) choose the later.

I know that Waves, the audio plug-in guys, switched from the standard PC software business model to an annual fee-based model several years ago. It seems to have cost them many disgruntled customers and many non-participants. I also know they recently scaled back their annual fee structure very substantially.

Even if they focused on bug fixing and stability, you'd want them to be planning ahead for new features so that the current fixes support those future features.

Tabbed veg files in Vegas reminds me most of Flash. You can open up multiple FLA files and have them tabbed, but they still aren't necessarily related. To make them related you'd create a "Project" and include the FLA files you want in it. Later on you can open the project and all the related FLA files get loaded.

Something similar (but not exactly the same) could be useful for Vegas, even if only as a place to gather all your related veg files together.

Rob

Bumping this . .again . .

I'm doing a complex Project with loads of ideas. Having an Excel-like Tabbed sets of T/Ls would be amazing for this job.

. . oh yes . . . and like any good SS I could THEN drag a Tab as a Nested Veg in amongst the PARENT veg.

We have PSD Layers as Tracks . . c'mon Sony, tabbed T/Ls . . pretty please?

Grazie

I know that Waves, the audio plug-in guys, switched from the standard PC software business model to an annual fee-based model several years ago. It seems to have cost them many disgruntled customers and many non-participants.

What Waves did amounted to theft: charging customers for the right to continue using a product they had already paid for. I may feel occasionally bitter toward SCS, but they're nowhere near in the league of Waves' scumminess.

Well, while i agree that yearly usage models are dislikeable, i can't agree that they are theft.

If you sign a contract for a year's use then you know you're getting a year's use. You get what you've paid for. At the end of that year you can either pay for another year, or stop using it. That's your choice. It's certainly not having your legal use taken away from you since the use you've paid for has expired.

Remember, in software licensing, you pretty much never purchase the software. What you're purchasing is a right to install and use it. The physical bits on the disk that make up the software are given to you freely so that you can make use of the license you paid for. If the license is for a year then that's what you get. At the end of the year you've no longer paid for continued use until you pay again.

Yearly licenses...

The bottom line is - there's very little difference for those of us who buy the upgrade as soon as "next.0" is available. They are going to get my money with each release anyway. This does, however, leave people who wish to stay behind with few options.

The irony is that before the PC, this is EXACTLY how almost all software was "sold". Usually through a lease or annual license.

Steve Mann

"The irony is that before the PC, this is EXACTLY how almost all software was "sold". Usually through a lease or annual license."

If memory serves me well the same applied to the hardware as well. at least that's how Big Blue used to do it and that's how they made so much money. That was also an age when stuff just worked and when it didn't it got fixed pronto.

Bob.

I'e been thinking about this for the past six months, pretty much every time I use AE. Your concept works beautifully there and I'm using it more and more to break the complex down into simple, human manageable levels, kind of like Inception's dreams within dreams. One thing that helps keep it manageable is having a flowchart to show me how things connect, brilliant.
On the other hand there's so much that we take for granted in Vegas that's not in AE, no thumbnails, no envelopes. I want to crossfade two tracks/layers and I'm having to keyframe opacity, even finding the opacity control is something you need to learn and remember. So at one level this application is very powerful and easy to use but from the Vegas world view a nightmare.

Now, a few days ago I needed to do something moderately complex in Vegas and I thought rather than bust my brain trying to fathom the sequence of operations in Vegas I'd just nest the original project into a new one. The child was only a couple of tracks of HD though it was over 60 minutes long. So I had to wait for quite some time while Vegas built that sfap0 file. Finally I'm up and running and started to render and it was sooo slow. Yeah, silly me, I'd set the child to Full Resolution = Best when Good is all it needed. Open child and change to Good. Darn, wait ages again while Vegas rebuilds that sfap0 file. Can you imagine the screams and howls here if users have to wait 20 minutes to click between tabs?
The good news is I found I could cancel the sfap0 build and nothing broke. The track for the nested project simply showed as Media Offline and no waveforms or thumbnails, no preview either. I kicked off the render and it just worked. So actually no need at all for that time consumming sfap0 file, sort of.

So, I'm left with a question. How would this tabbed nested projects thing work in practice with Vegas, what limitations would you accept to make it workable, how speedy should it be and what features of Vegas would you give up to have it?
At the moment opening a HD project can take minutes and it can use quite a bit of RAM. Given the way Vegas works at the moment and that it attempts to handle native long GOP HD media on the timeline I can see some very serious issues trying to fit more than one project inside another project let alone having many of them.

Bob.