No, let's not let the bashing begin. There is absolutely nothing constructive to be realized from this type of activity.

turn off net notify in preferences

What Bashing?......
In no time at all, all the little quirks and bugs will soon start to
disappear as the updates happen....starting with version 9.0a

I have had net notify turned off for a long time. that was the point of my post, Sony turned it back on to try to upsell me at the expense of a crash. like when Microsoft does it and forces a reboot.

Are you sure you have it turned off? I have it turned off in VP8 and I don't get any upsell messages. You should doublecheck that.

Maybe ZoneAlarm is blocking it for me. Love ZA for that.

Rob Mack

Just buy Vegas Pro 9, you know you want too. There is no point in waiting and all you will end up doing is losing the promotion pricing and extras. Just do it. Do it now!!

This is the first time I've ever really weighed it.

If I actually needed to upgrade because I had a project that would benefit then the $50.00 discount wouldn't matter. This release is seeming way too much like a release candidate than a finished product and I don't think $50 bucks is enough money to be doing QA for Sony.

I don't know I want it and I think I'll just wait until a release comes out that's a little more confidence inspiring. Hopefully 9.0a will come along before the end of June and it'll seem more like a proper release, but if it doesn't...the extra $50 bucks might not be enough to make me bite.

Why doesn't SCS just offer the discount to people who want to sign an NDA and do some beta testing? It'd be a lot more straightforward than dumping a product on people when it's not been tested enough. They could have a huge test group, give people 10 random tasks to complete for the 50 bucks, and accept feedback on those and anything else the tester wants to talk about.

Rob Mack

This release is seeming way too much like a release candidate than a finished product and I don't think $50 bucks is enough money to be doing QA for Sony.

Well put. They're not gonna suck me in with a $50 discount if when editing AVCHD I have to wait four seconds from the moment I press play until I finally get full speed. I like slow motion when I apply it to specific footage, not every time I press play. And I can still edit in Vegas 8 without this terrible bug, so why would I waste $184 in a beta release?

Besides, chances are before long other stores are going to start selling the upgrade at discounts even better than $50.

Well, I am using Vegas Pro 9 on most of my stuff. So I am in both 8 and 9 right now. I figure if all goes well I will be exclusively in 9a when it comes out. You buy to take advantage of the price offered. If you don't mind paying the extra dollars once 9a comes out then wait and see. They will be focused on resolving the slugish time line and other critical factors so what the heck. I know the product and I know the company so I don't feel I am being ripped off or taking some big risk.

You buy to take advantage of the price offered. If you don't mind paying the extra dollars once 9a comes out then wait and see.

That's my point. Sony's discount is to suck people in, to have them think that it's either buy now or lose the discount. Were they not doing the same thing when 8 came out? Well, in December of 2007 B&H was selling the boxed upgrade for $99, which is what I bought. At the time Sony was selling it for $250.

They will be focused on resolving the slugish time line and other critical factors so what the heck.

Yea, right, like they resolved all of the bugs in the different versions of 8 and 8.1. Are you kidding me??

>> In no time at all, all the little quirks and bugs will soon
>> start to disappear as the updates happen

And you base this optimism on what? The behavior we have seen since 7c seem to contradict what you are saying.

There is no contradiction here....
Vegas isnt perfect and SCS updates are for the purposes
of having a problem free and feature rich version...so what would be the
purpose of the many updates and upgrades they have put out?
Many of the issues comes from individually user base configurations also.

Personally, i have never had an issue with Vegas over the 9 years in this
profession (along with many pros and home users i know).....there will
always be issues, but compare them with the issues of the other NLE"s
out there.

Vegas isnt perfect and SCS updates are for the purposes

Well, that's the problem. If you have a version of Vegas that plays AVCHD relatively well on a fast computer, but then in the next major version you screw that up with a bug like the one introduced in v9 (four seconds of slow and choppy playback whenever you hit play or when a new take starts), then the argument of updates to have a problem free version is not valid. Each version should at minimum not present any new major bugs like this one, and should have older problems fixed. In the case of 9, they didn't fix old bugs and they introduced one that is terribly annoying, so Sony will not get any money from me.

Also, where are those many updates that you mention? They release an update every several months, which might fix a new bugs but introduces new ones, such as 8.0c. The OP compares Sony to Microsoft, in that I have to disagree because while Windows may not be perfect, at least Microsoft releases updates to bugs every week, and it's not even bugs that affect a majority of people, but some that affect just a reduced number. Even Windows 7 in its current pre-release state is a great OS that has little flaws. Compare that to any version of Vegas.

All I have to say is Who wants cheese with their Whine...

I've had some performance issues with VP9, went back to 8.0c, I'm back to work.

Cliff Etzel
Videographer : Producer : Web Designer
bluprojekt

"All I have to say is Who wants cheese with their Whine...
I've had some performance issues with VP9, went back to 8.0c, I'm back to work."

Did Sony refund the cost of the V9 upgrade in the meantime?

Well Sebaz...
You have many issues and endless complaints regarding Vegas softwares
for a long time, so debating the issue is absolutely pointless and non-productive.
Im just here puzzled why then are you continuing to use it.

Well Sebaz...

Because I love the interface and the way it makes editing in the timeline much more dynamic than the other NLEs. But then it really disappoints me that the company behind it does such a mediocre job with it.

Just exactly what is mediocre about Vegas? I use it all day, virtually seven days a week for a variety of commercial, industrial and broadcast projects, mostly in HD. There is no bug that has ever prevented me from getting my work done and this includes v9. Yes, occasionally I have to do some workarounds but this is usually because I'm trying to do something that Vegas was simply not designed to do. In these cases, I use Vegas in conjunction with some third party applications.

Vegas v9 has had a few birthing issues, mainly the slow Cineform performance, but Sony and Cineform are working to resolve this. Another problem I've had with Vegas v9 is that the eyedropper no longer draws a box when you click-drag. It still works as it always has, it just doesn't draw the box. I also noticed that when using some of my old render templates that the audio interleave is set incorrectly to "0.000" instead of "0.250." None of these problems are show-stoppers and I'm certain they will be fixed in the 9.0a release. Otherwise, v9 is working great and it generally feels faster. Also v9-64 is a monumental improvement over v8.1.

Life isn't perfect and there is no such thing as perfect software. The sooner everyone accepts these two things, the happier they will be.

By the way, I know for an absolute certainty that Vegas will have been used in some way for every taped feature piece on this Sunday's "Indianapolis 500" broadcast on ABC. It has also been used on all the Versus broadcasts of the Indy time trials and qualifying and will be used for the rest of the IndyCar season. It had previously been used on seven years worth of NASCAR Cup series NBC broadcasts as well.

Totally agree with you on that one John....the only other bug i notice
in version 9 along with the ones you highlighted: is that after you customize
the colors of the timer beside the timeline it defaults to its original at a restart.
(no biggy).
A 9.0a update will clear up most of these.

Excellent Rebuttal to the incessant whining, John.

Cliff Etzel
Videographer : Producer : Web Designer
bluprojekt

"Excellent Rebuttal to the incessant whining, John." second that! ;-) No doubt, there are some issues and seeking answers is the right thing to do but preaching that Sony is evil or run by marketing idiots is over the top, really. ;-( Sony built a massive company doing a lot of things and did not have exclusive monopolies like MS, iTunes, etc....

Just exactly what is mediocre about Vegas?

Well, once again, I'm going to detail here the major bugs I remember:

1) In Vegas 9, editing an AVCHD timeline is not something any editor -amateur or pro- would enjoy, simply because 99% of the times you press play the playback starts at stuttery slow motion and it takes 4 seconds to speed up to full fps. This also happens every time the cursor reaches the beginning of a new take. This did not happen in either Vegas 8 or 8.1, so instead of seeing improvements in the new version, we are seeing a huge step backwards. Now, if you only edit HDV then you won't care about this.

2) in both 8.1 and 9 64 bit, if you are working on a 1920x1080 project but just to preview something quick you setup a pre-render module at half the size or any other size than that of the project, after you used that module, the project dimensions change to that of the pre-render module without any warning. This bug isn't present in 8.0c or previous 32 versions, and I haven't checked the 32 bit version of 9.

3) In 8.1, using the trimmer is pointless, because rather sooner than later, it's going to crash Vegas. I haven't played enough with the trimmer in 9 64 bit to see if the bug is still present. While many people here tried to defend 8.1 as a pre-release version, it wasn't presented as that by Sony, in fact I received an e-mail saying how great it was and how much time it saved because of being 64 bit, and blah blah blah.

4) 8.0c has HDV smart-render. 8.1 does not. It renders all the HDV footage regardless of whether it's been touched or not. At least they seemed to have fixed this in 9 64 bit.

5) In 64 bit Vegas, both 8.1 and 9, about half the times you launch the program and it tries to load the project you were working on a small dialog will pop up saying that it can't find the source footage, which would make sense if you would have moved it anywhere, but you didn't. So you have to click on Ignore all the files, close Vegas, open it again, open the project, and this time the files are there. After several dozen times you do this, it gets really annoying and it's a waste of time.

6) 8.0c is just pathetic. I was doing render times comparisons between all three versions, 8.0c, 8.1 and 9 64 bit to both MPEG2 and Sony AVC. Rendering to AVC works fine in 8.1 and 9, but the same exact timeline in 8.0c crashes after a few minutes. And the same happened on many different projects. 8.0c rendering to AVC simply doesn't work.

7) In 8.0c and 9 you can export to 1920x1080 AVC to use in a BD, but nothing higher than 16 Mbps, which is good enough for AVCHD camcorders getting a live picture though its lens, but when you edit that and you recompress it to 16 mbps, you can tell the difference. DVD Architect, on the other hand, can encode AVC to higher bitrates, except that you would first need to render from Vegas to a lossless codec which would cause you to take up a huge amount of hard drive space. Also, DVD Architect only uses about 40% of the processor power of your computer, who knows why, while Vegas uses 100%.

8) I haven't tested this in 9 yet, but in both 8.0 and 8.1, pre-render is buggy. After doing a few pre-renders, it doesn't work anymore until you close Vegas, delete all the files in the pre-render folder and open Vegas again. It will show that it's pre-rendering, but it won't update the timeline to reflect it, so if you wasted several minutes doing a pre-render, at the end you still cannot preview filters, transitions, or whatever you wanted.

There are others but those are the main reasons why to me Vegas is mediocre, or rather the company behind it is, because obviously they don't use their own software enough to find these bugs and fix them. What's sad is that if they took the time to fix such obvious bugs, it would be an excellent NLE. I don't expect perfect software, but I expect a software company to at least test their own, to do quality control, and Sony just doesn't do that.