OK, I'll take a look at the other threads. Thanks.

It's just a shame to not have Vegas use my full 8 GB since it's useless for almost everything else EXCEPT video editing, heh.

I'm still curious if the renderer is 64-bit though or just the editor, etc.

I'll do some research. Thanks!

I'd say the main problem with 8.1 is getting the right 64 bit codec for your media. If you don't have the right codec all kinds of weird behaviors will arise. 32 bit codec is not going to work. Rendering is faster. Worthwhile faster for most things. I believe it is 64 bit all the way, including the rendering. It will not run on 32 bit systems.

Try this 64 bit codec. It helped me some.

64 bit codec

Vegas 8.1 is not full 64 bit. Most of the built-in media I/O plug-ins are 32 bit and are accessed through an intermediate program that is spawned by Vegas 8.1. In addition, certain 3rd party 32 bit plug-ins like Cineform don't work at all.

Vegas 8.1 is a noble experiment. It's free for 8.0c users and SCS should be congratulated for making it available. It's worth trying and if it meets your needs, use it. If you experience crashes and other problems, stick with 8.0c. I wouldn't even call 8.1 a beta, just because in a beta program, the software's author is asking for formal feedback and documentation of bugs.

I wouldn't even call 8.1 a beta, just because in a beta program, the software's author is asking for formal feedback and documentation of bugs.

True. Nobody's been asking for feedback. If this were a Linux world it'd fit in as a work in progress.

Running 8.0c under vista-64 isn't such a bad thing since it at least gets you access to your 8 GB. In addition, if you're following Blink's current thread you'll see that it's possible to get many of the parts of 8.0c to use 3GB instead of 2GB. That's very helpful for AVCHD, which seems to be a memory pig in Vegas.

Rob Mack

Thanks for all of the information. I'm a little disappointed to hear that Vegas 8.1 is in such bad shape...

I understand that Vegas 8.0c will work, but won't it only have access to 3 GB of RAM (instead of my 8 GB?) If it supports 32-bit PAE than I think I can use 4 GB of RAM but it's still only half of my RAM.

I'd love to use Vegas over Adobe Premiere (is that a curse word over here?), but 64-bit using 8 GB of RAM (espicially for my 1080i AVCHD content) seems like a big deal... :(

We installed several PPro/Axio systems a few years ago. We stopped at CS2 because the program's memory management was so buggy and reports from CS3 and 4 users didn't show enough improvement to justify upgrades. Take that for what it's worth, but PPro may not be a solution for you.

It may be that new versions of Vegas will be announced at NAB this month but the only sign I've seen is a couple of posts here from people who say they've got an inside track to rumors.

As far as 8.1 goes, you might follow a few of John Cline's posts. He's using 8.1 pretty constantly but I think his workflow is pretty well defined to things that can be done with 8.1

8.0c will only have access to 2GB of virtual address space. This is the way almost all 32-bit applications work. You could have 8 or 10 applications running and all of them could have access to 2 GB of virtual address space. Windows well let them have a little bit of RAM as past of that virtual space but the rest will be on disk.

You can do a few tweaks to get programs to use up to 3GB but if all your OS can address is 3 GB then a program like Vegas never has a chance to use 3GB of *RAM*. Lots of other things in the system also need RAM so tweaking Vegas executables to be Large Address Aware and then running it under 32-bit windows would just result in Vegas using more page file.

Taking this into account, you still get a huge advantage with 64-bit windows and 8 GB of RAM because more RAM is available overall.32-bit Vegas on 64-bit windows gets to run more in RAM and less from the page file. You win.

You win more if you use 64-bit Vegas but you lose access to some codecs and filters. You could conceivably plan a workflow where you dump a bunch of AVC clips and stills into 8.1, do cuts and transitions, pans and crops, all the basic stuff, then render out a video clip (to something good-not more AVC) and do your finishing in in 8.0c. The problem with this is that it's not as easy as falling off a log. You have to think it through, do tests, write down the plan, and follow it. That's very hard. It's hard to resist the temptation to try out filters and effects while you cut, or to do color correction. You have to treat the process more like a film edit where some things get done at the lab after the edit.

I'm sure this is temporary. 64-bit Vegas is here to stay and I'm sure that more of it will be functional at the next release, whether that happens this spring or this fall.

Rob Mack

There's a couple of huge bugs in 8.1 that you might want to take into account when deciding. One, if you prepare a MPEG2 render module just to use as pre-render for fast preview purposes with a dimension smaller than that of the project, after you use it the first time, it will change the project properties to the dimensions of the render module. So for example if you are editing AVCHD at 1920x1080 and you want pre-render to MPEG2 at 1280x720 to have a fast preview of a filter you applied or whatever, after the pre-render is done, your project will become a 1280x720 one, and you will have to go into the project properties and set it back to 1920x1080.

The other colossal bug is that half the times (I'm not exaggerating) that you open Vegas and it tries to load the project you've been working on, it will tell you that it can find the source file and give you the option to look for it someplace else, except that the source files are still in the same place and because of this bug Vegas 8.1 can't see them. You have to close Vegas, re-open it and then open the project again, and this time it will load.

These two bugs are simply inexcusable and shows that SCS doesn't have almost any quality control in their software.

As for 8.0c, the thing is full of nasty bugs. Your best choice would be to find 8.0b, which has some bugs but is far more reliable than the other two.